And we're back!

Hello and good August to ya. It has been too long, but we're finally geared up again and ready to go. The script for the next Podcast is written and hopefully tomorrow I'll have it posted and up on iTunes for you all. We'll be picking up where we left off and leaving the Stone Age behind and moving into the transitionary period of the Chalcolithic. From there we should have a straight shot into Bronze Age Europe.

From now on, I'll be trying to post new Episodes on Sundays. Tell your friends! Click over here to Facebook to like the blog and/or the podcast. As things are starting to settle for me the next few weeks should see new podcasts every week so you won't be forced to wait for two months for a new cast. That's just poor performance on my part. Sorry about that folks. But, I look forward to hearing from you or at least pretending that you are listening. Thanks again and I'll see you tomorrow.

p.s. In anticipation for the Chalcolithic podcast here are three posts on some of the copper mining that defines the Chalcolithic or as it is more commonly referred to, Copper Age Europe.

On this day in history: allusions to sex, religion and the trappings of power.

We're again a little behind on the podcast. The conclusion of the Neolithic is written, but I was sick last week during the only time I could have recorded it. My head cold made it sound like I was speaking in a vacuum. Couple that with my already shoddy recording equipment and we're looking at some of the worst sounding podcasts in the history of bad sounding podcast. Thankfully I know my seven listeners love the content and not the technology behind the podcast. But, there could be the sinful Amish guy out there getting his tech-ication on with my podcast. For a technologically deprived human being, my magic speaking box about long long ago might seem downright magical. Hopefully that magic can come out fairly early in the week on iTunes. I will do my best.

Yesterday, had we been faithful to this day in history we would have focused on the execution of Anne Boleyn and all of the scintillating sexual details that went a long way into making her HBO worthy. We would have asked then today, what could have possibly topped such sensationalism? What could ever burn the loins more than love triangles and beheadings? Is there anything that can arouse in man such a fervor as illicit copulation and political intrigue? There is but one thing, religious and political intrigue!

So today on this day in History we'll celebrate the consummation of Church and State in its most modern, Western form, before their estrangement and untimely divorce in the unfortunate aftermath of the Enlightenment. Having over exhausted this innuendo though, we'll move on to the beginning of the 1st Council of Nicea, that began on May 20, 325 AD.  The Council was called Constantine the Great in order to bring a single voice to Christianity in attempt to unify a splintering Empire. Constantine had just won a succession of civil wars and looked to the Cross as a political tool to reunify his disparate peoples. But the problem was as Constantine soon found out, his unifying tool was not very uniform. Basically there were two major veins of Christianity at the time. One that would become a template for future Christological thought within the Church and one that would be labeled a heresy.

The controversy came up when Arius, a Christian thinker and teacher from Alexandria decided that Jesus the Son was essentially different from God the Father. Arius basically taught that Jesus was God the Father's first creation and perfect, but still a creation. Arius and the Arians (his followers) were vehemently opposed by Athanasius, a younger contemporary of Arius and a fellow Alexandria native. Athanasius taught that God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit were all of the same essence. This line was followed and proclaimed by the Council of Nicea. It's this decision that led to the Church following a strict Trinitarian view of the nature of God, three persons, but one essence. Arian teachers fled the council in quite a huff and even though their belief was declare a heresy and thus, not part of the orthodoxy, the belief didn't immediately die out. In fact Arianism would linger on long enough for some of the barbarians who would eventually rip the Empire apart to become practitioners of this heretical branch of Christianity. The fact that the Orthodox, Catholic view was held by the Roman establishment and the Arian view held by many Germanic invaders gave the debate renewed political trappings. But, when Clovis became the first barbarian king to become a Catholic and thus, a Trinitarian, ruler, his power would wipe much of Arian theology from the West, leaving the remaining Arians in North Africa. They would linger there until the Muslims swept across the continent and effectively destroyed Arius' teachings.

The 1st Council of Nicea had some other outcomes as well. In addition to declaring Trinitarian views as the only acceptable understanding of the Christian God, it also put together the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed would serve as statement of faith to be repeated by the faithful to express the most fundamental tenants of Christianity. The council also established Constantine's role in the history of the Church. It also helped establish Canon Law. It gave Rome and her bishop an exalted place in the Church. And it led to Christianity becoming fundamentally declared separate from its parent religion, Judaism. Basically the 1st Council of Nicea was a huge step in the long process of formalizing the Christian church. It is for this reason that the Council get's this day in history status.

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Ten bucks says I'll get more clicks on this Neolithic post than any other

Modern Descendants of the Uralic Language groups mentioned
at the bottom. This is a blatant attempt at a bait-and-switch
marketing scheme.

For the ten-thirteen podcast listeners eagerly awaiting the next installment of the The History of Europe podcast allow me to ensure you that the Neolithic part one podcast will be coming soon. I had planned on recording it today and sending it out, but there is a party beneath my apartment and I can't get good quality sound at the moment. I'll try again tomorrow, but plan on getting both parts of the Neolithic podcast within the week. As I am unable to release a podcast today, I plan on unleashing a slew of prehistoric cultures that didn't make the cut onto the blog. Here is one such unleashed item (actually its two rolled into one)

The Pitted-Ware Culture and the Comb Ceramic Culture were precursors to the Chalcolithic Corded Ware Culture. This culture will get a whole lotta love on the Chalcolithic podcast, which may or may not be a multi-part podcast. But, for now we'll focus on the Neolithic Pitted-Ware and Comb Ceramic cultures that preceded it.

Pitted-Ware Sculpture example

The Pitted-Ware Culture lasted from roughly 3200 BC - 2300 BC in areas of Northeast Denmark, Southern Norway, Sweden and on the Åland Islands, a Swedish archipelago under the rule of the Finnish government. The culture is named "Pitted-Ware" because the pottery that they created had horizontal rows of pits or circles pressed into the pottery. Other than that this widespread Scandinavian Neolithic culture was tied together by their use of nets and propensity for hunting marine animals like seals, whales and porpoises. They used basically the same structure of tools, though their composition varied on what materials were readily available. 

The Comb Ceramic Culture was a bit more far-flung than the Pitted-Ware Culture. It stretched across the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway and the islands of around these countries down into the Baltic Region of Poland and other Baltic states. The Narva Culture of Estonia was under the umbrella of this overarching culture status. We talked about the Narva in the Neolithic podcasts. It was a bit older than the Pitted-Ware culture and lasted a bit longer, ranging from around 4200 BC - 2000 BC before being taken over by the Corded Ware culture we'll spend some time on in the Chalcolithic podcast. 

This silly looking bike rack is located in Poland as a cultural
nod to the Comb-Ceramic Culture that existed there around
4000 BC. While this modern shaped comb probably wasn't
the exact prototype to the Comb Ceramic Culture, it was a
comb similar to this (on a smaller scale) that was used to
create the distinctive markings on this culture's pottery.

Like the Pitted-Ware Culture, the Comb Ceramic Culture was a hunter-gather group that made pottery. Its distinctive trait was lines made by what appear to be combs rather than the horizontal pits in the Pitted-Ware Culture. Other than that these two cultures were similar in their economical makeup. When the Comb Ceramic Culture was located near the sea they were maritime. When they were further inland they hunted. But, like the Pitted-Ware Culture they were nomadic and chased down their meals. They traveled around and built semi-nomadic settlements and stayed in oversized teepees. They made stone tools out of the locally abundant slate and quartz. When there was spare time they liked to paint in caves and make figurines. These figurines were similar to the Pitted-Ware culture in construction techniques but often depicted land animals like moose and deer, whereas the Pitted-Ware Culture depicted maritime animals like seals and porpoises in their statuary art.

These two scandinavian cultures get little to no play in the coming Neolithic podcasts, but shouldn't be written off in importance. They served as the basis for the far reaching and influential Corded Ware culture of the Chalcolithic. For this reason they are getting some love here on the blog.

Both the Pitted-Ware and Comb Ceramic culture likely spoke an early version of Uralic languages. Uralic languages have an incredibly large breadth of territory where their modern offshoots are spoken, including parts of Finland and Estonia (Finnic branch), Hungary (Hungarian branch) and places in Norway, Sweden and Finland that speak a local Sami language (Sami branch). There are a number of branches of the Uralic languages in Russia as well, including the Khanty, Mansi, Mari, Mordvinic and Samoyedic languages. In conclusion, the Pitted-Ware and Comb Ceramic Cultures have achieved boss status long after being taken into the wider Corded Ware Culture. But, not everyone has realized this boss status until now..

I realized that in my exuberance I forgot to post the podcast hosting website, so here it is:

http://thehistoryofeuropepodcast.podomatic.com/

Keep checking the blog for more updates and tell your friends and repost them somewhere!

Thanks for your support.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Christopher Linehan and this is the The History of Europe Podcast Blog. What we'll be doing here is posting about the Podcast and putting on some supplemental materials for you to look with. You can currently find the podcast here to listen to where I'll continue to post the podcasts. We'll also hopefully be on iTunes soon and we'll let you know when that happens! Thanks and keep checking back for more updates!