542 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



there has been noted an agricultural complex, apparently of great 

 age, including along with many magical practices the use of the 

 ox-drawn plow, regarded as sacred.*^ Agriculture in North Africa 

 must have received a great stimulus from the planting of the Phoeni- 

 cian and Greek colonies along the httoral. The Carthaginians in 

 particular developed it to a very high pitch, as we are told by more 

 than one ancient writer; Columella, for example, in tlie first century 

 A. D., even calls Mago "the father of husbandry. "^^ 



It was most probably diu-ing the Late Bronze Age that the ox-drawn 

 plow reached western Em'ope— say somewhere around the beginning 

 of the first millennium B. C. During the same period or very early 

 in the Iron Age it seems to have appeared in Britain ;^^ although some 

 have doubted its arrival there before the Roman conquest in the first 

 centur}'^ A. D.** That the carUest British plow resembled those shown 

 in the Ligurian petroglyphs seems Hkely, while its ultimate derivation 

 from the Danube basin hardly admits of a doubt. After the Saxon 

 conquest the older and lighter Celtic plow was in a measure displaced 

 by a heavier one, drawn by as many as four yoke of oxen — a type 

 perhaps devised in South Germany during the early centuries of our 

 era.^° 



The same form of plow as that first found in northern Italy and 

 in all hkelihood in western Eurojie also reached the Baltic area. An 

 article has recently appeared undertaking to prove, through a resort 

 to pollen analysis, that a traction plow found in a peat-bog at Walle, 

 in East Fricsland, belongs to NeoUthic times — according to this 

 author, as long ago as 3500 B. C.®^ This would carry us back as far 

 as the first recorded appearance of the plow in ancient Sumer, and 

 something like a round millennium before the earliest probable date of 

 its arrival in Central Europe. The writer of the above paper further 

 points out that the Walle plow is similar to those shown on the Certosa 

 situla and on certain Greek vases — the imi)lication, of course, being 

 that the type persisted practically unchanged for some 3,000 3'ears, 

 diu-ing which it diffused itself slowly southward from the Baltic to the 

 Mediterranean. 



Any such dating as that claimed for the Walle plow is, on a priori 

 grounds alone, most improbable — unless we are prepared to admit 

 for the prehistoric Germans a wholly independent focus of culture 

 development of their owti, somewhere in the Baltic area. Moreover, 

 valuable as is poUen analysis for some purposes, any effort to estab- 



*> Coons, C. 8., Tribes of the Rif. Harvard African Studies, vol. 9, pp. 49 fl., 1931. 



" De re rustica, vol. 1, No. 1, p. 13. 



<' Curwon, E. Cecil, Prehistoric agriculture in Britain, Antiquity, vol. 1, p. 287, 1927. 



*' Peake, Harold J., Early steps in human progress, p. 122. 



M Cf. Curwen, loc. cit., Antiquity, vol. 1, pp. 2S0 fl., 1927. 



« Jacob-Friesen, Dr., Die iilteste Pflug der Welt, Natur und Volk, vol. 64, pp. 83-91, 1934. See also 

 Jirlow, Ragner, Plogkroken fr&n Svarvarbo och n&gra forhistoriske plogar (with summary in Gorman), 

 Upplands Fornminnesforenings Tidskrift, vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 1-19. For calling my attention to the latter 

 paper, I am indebted to the editor of Antiquity. 



