The LBK Way of Life in the Balkans

A frontier group along the upper Danube, straddling what's now the border between Austria and Hungary, much later became the source for LBK farmers who spread into central and western Europe after about 5500 BC. Big timber longhouses set on islands of fertile loose soil where they intensively cultivated small plots of land with a limited set of crops and livestock. Their settlements weren't particularly organized. Whatever social group, like a family or clan, lived in a long house pretty much operated as its own unit. This was the archaeological culture that spread out extensively through much of Europe, and eventually reached all the way from the Netherlands and Northern France to Poland and the western Ukraine.