 The same phenomenon, roughly about the same time, around 4,000 calibrated BC at the western fringe of this mega-side world, the Michel's Berg culture, and I will not be focusing on the French evidence, but on the western central European evidence. It's an outcome of a project we've had together for several years, the Michel's Berg project, which we're by now finalizing its final publication, I believe. It's also my fault that it hasn't come up. All right, this is, for those who don't know, this is Michel's Berg. It's the period of 4,000, 300, 4,000, 400 to 3,500 calibrated BC. It's the blue bubble there in France and Germany. It might have slightly outdated, but it's still okay for this purpose. We think, or many people think, not all, but many people think that Michel's Berg emerged somewhere in the Paris Basin, maybe with early outliers in the Neuville Basin. One incident or one archaeological site is the site of Kuban-Gondorf in Neuville on the Rhine River, which has also a surprisingly early date, and I'm being told that the pottery there is like the early pottery from the Paris Basin region. So the exact points of origins are still under debate, but it is by and large a French or Western European phenomenon, as many influences in Michel's Berg come from southern France. Interestingly, at the very early periods, we also have indications, burial indications, from France only of elite burials, like those from the Bourriere and Valley, and other than that the evidence for burials or elites is unfortunately very dim, but we do have an increasing number of burials. I'll be speaking about the burial aspect tomorrow in another session today. I'll restrict myself on the aspect of the settlement system. This is the settlement system as I have sketched it out so far. We have a central area which is highlighted right there in the Rhine Mine area, so presumably people moved from the west into the Rhine Mine area in the process that we don't yet really understand fully. We see in many areas that there is a hiatus between the later Middle Neolithic and Michel's Berg, so presumably the area was empty for maybe 100 or 200 years, a bit uncertain, and then all of a sudden we see Michel's Berg sites appear, very small Michel's Berg sites, not many really, just a few dots here and there, and very small sites too. So that is the full evidence that we have when we plot the entire time as slides together. We have a cluster of large sites like Omed's, I'll be talking about it soon, Schierstein and Kapellberg all in this area along the Rhine, and then we have an outlier of those large sites here, presumably at the site of Zost in Westphalia, but it's a site that is fully covered now by the modern or medieval town of Zost, so we don't really know its extensions, but the biggest sites here with Omed's, Schierstein, Kapellberg and Glauberg are right here in the Rhine Mine area, and you can see if you plot the Michel's Berg economic system or the long-distance trade system as we conceptualize it very vaguely though, you can see that the Rhine mine area might have served sort of as a hub between the western French regions and the regions where people got sold from, and there's good evidence that one commodity that was important in the Michel's Berg long-distance economy was really sold, and they might have geared towards the salt sources in Eastern, Central Europe today, Halle, and if you plot, which has been done by colleagues from France, if you plot the salt sources together with the jade access, you can see they sort of overlap. Nowhere is there one archaeological site where you can find those two aspects together, but it's just on this grand scale that you see, okay, we have those deposits, the depots of jade access, and near-salt sources, and all this might be linked to a long-distance trade net, a trade net which follows, and that had been said before, which is using or which started long-distance roads, which are still in use today. So many of the German autobahns follow those routes, and this is, for instance, A3 right here, which were probably being started in Michel's Berg, and the link between Michel's Berg site and long-distance overland route has been said before, so it's nothing that I or we invented in our group, and this is another cluster that shows the dimensions. We have sites nothing above 100 hectares, so they're minute compared to the Tripelio sites, but it's the biggest that we have. Ormits right here, which are slightly above 100 hectare in size, and this is the site of Ormits right here. It's been excavated before World War II, fortunately because after World War II, the volcanic ash layer there was completely taken away, so that the entire soil now was four meters below what it was during the hollow scene to rebuild bombed Germany, so we don't have any evidence of the site right now any more. The site is completely gone, so all we have to look at is the excavation evidence largely between the first and the second World War, and you see people there concentrated really on the ditch system right here. We have two ditch systems, and we have evidence of five houses in between, but very little of the interior was excavated, nor surveyed, so we really don't know what's inside. This is the entire conjecture. That's why I had the artist put the fog right here. We don't really what it looked like in the interior, but we know that the ditches were of enormous size, and we also know that the palisades were of enormous size. The moat length is three kilometers, interior size is 100 hectares. Sima Man calculated about 10,000 people if you think of a dense occupied space. I agree with this. We can come up with 14,000, but we only have, actually we only have five house features documented, so it's all really conjectured. This is the palisade right here. You see the excavators in there, so it was really massive, massive structures which remind me of the Mississippian structures in North America where you have similar posts around the site of Cahokia. Not that I'm suggesting that Ulmets was like Cahokia, but there are certain similarities in the site structure, but that's about it. We can't say more than structurally, it looks like a large farming society, agglomeration site. Let's go to Sheerstain. Again, we know nothing anymore. Again, an excavation between the wars. No, no, even earlier, before World War I, a layman excavated this ditch system right here, two ditches again, and it sort of follows on the outskirts of this medieval fishing village, which is now completely overbuilt. We think we can reconstruct the site to this sort of D-shape right here, but you see nowadays you can't find any evidence of the site anymore. State heritage has looked. There's no evidence. So all we have are these early excavations. There's a Mischelsberg 3, 4, 3, 4 pottery assemblage, and we're now running C-14 dates from the little bone evidence that we have. So a site of possibly enormous dimensions. We don't know anything about the molding, but possibly 100 hectares again. Again, calculated inhabitants, if you think of a dense occupation space, about 1,000, but here in this case zero house features documented. Another site, Glaubert, underneath the Iron Age site and underneath the medieval site with a Neolithic occupation layer underneath, the Neolithic site was bigger than any other site thereafter. Wall-mode length uncertain, possibly 25 hectares, so minute compared to Tripolgia. Calculated inhabitants about 7,000, again if it was densely occupied, like the Tripolgia sites, but again zero house features documented but continuous layer. We envy you for this data because we have the phenomenon, but we don't really know what to do with it. Only one site, the site that we're working on for about nine years now, is Kappenbeck in the Rhein-Main area right here, an outlier from the Taunus Hills. You can see the extension of the site right here. It's three kilometers mold length right here between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. My remember here, Schierstein is right here, so it's very close between, or midway sort of between Schierstein and Glaubeck, a Neolithic site which has the entire wall-and-mode system preserved, three-dimensionally, it's still there because the site was never plowed over or never built over. So this is our latest reconstruction, wall lengths three kilometers, maximum extension 1,300 meters north-south, east-west 500 meters, encompassed space in the outer-mode, 45 hectares, so slightly bigger, but the actual settled space is only 24 hectares. So here at first, we have the evidence that the outer-mode is not the space that was completely settled. It's half of it, really. How do we know it? Because the site has been surveyed by a gentleman who was unfortunately died some years ago for 30 years and he picked up in the deeply forested territory, where he picked up each shirt, and we can now plop this shirt. You can see almost little dots represent the shirt or a lithic artifact, and you can see it's restricted to the ridge, whereas the outer-mode is right here. So you have a covered, settled space on the ridge, but the outer fringes were not settled with houses. Two minutes, oh goodness. We caught the entire site and we found out that still, although the site is well preserved, the entire hill ridge is turned over, so we have sedimentary loss there as well. We don't have any house remains either, but we have pits and we have parts of house foundations, but unfortunately we can't come up with any pictures like we've just been shown, but we excavated within those regions and found a layer of pottery and some pit features there, and what we've did with this stator here again is some foundation structures, pottery here, so we do have an in situ layer about 30 centimeters from the top layers are now missing, and we think that the site became already decomposed at the time when the people settled there. So this is our calculation for Kapellenberg. If we compare it with Lakeshore sites and the density of houses there, we come back to the conclusion that the density of house sites from the pottery remains that we have would have been only about a few years. This is still in German, I'm sorry. It would have been just a few years. So our first calculation was 7,200 inhabitants, but if we use comparison data from the Lakeshore settlements, we come up to a much lesser number, 700 to 900 inhabitants for about 7 years of duration. We know pottery is missing, but still this is the lowest number that we can up with. So just about not more than 1,000 people live at this site for currently we think about the lowest number at 7 years. However, the C14 data that we have showed that the site was inhabited for about 200 years. So we have to fit this period of 7 years plus within those 200 years somehow. And this is the model that we use it right now at the moment. We have an erection of the first wall system around 4,100 to 4,000, no evidence of inside occupation, a reconstruction of the wall, of the moat and ditch system, again no evidence for inside occupation, then a reconstruction, a re-fortification of the defense system, then we have for 200 years evidence for interior occupation and then a final phase, well a most massive wall was built, but for this period again we don't have any inside occupation from the little data that we have. So a very volatile, very fluctuating system which we have to somehow fit into a settlement system that we don't really understand, but we think circles around those keywords, that's why I use those keywords because we don't have really much to say but just giving glimpses and aspects of what the Michel's Berg system consisted of. We have this concentration of huge sites of probably short-term occupation, interior occupation, but which were built for almost 800 or stood there in the landscape for almost 800 years and that's why it sort of composed an inner core settlement system from which the Michel's Berg culture radiated out to its periphery with compositions of slavery, violence and aggression involved, I'll be talking about this tomorrow, and all this was somehow tied together by a long distance trade system which circled around bringing jadexes in and possibly taking salt out to the more western regions. These are the dynamics, our site numbers and we see that the sites were inhabited towards the peak and towards the end of the curve system, so a pattern which is roughly similar to what we see in the LBK system and this probably has to do with the end of it. We have a draw up here very much at the end of the Michel's Berg culture but this is of unimportance right here. Thank you for your attention.