Michelsberg

A Middle Neolithic culture of Belgium, northeastern France, the Rhineland and parts of Switzerland from c 4500-4000 BC. It occupies a frontier zone on the borders of the Danubian culture, TRB culture, and western Neolithic complex, and shares traits with all three. The type site is a hilltop enclosure in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. There are many regional subgroups. The Belgian one has leaf-shaped arrowheads, antler combs, flint mines, and enclosures similar in construction to causewayed camps, and may have had links with the Windmill Hill culture of Britain. In the Rhineland and Low Countries, the culture was closely related to Funnel-Necked Beaker Culture and a succession to the Röessen Culture. Pottery forms include pointed- and round-based vessels with flaring rims and flat pottery disks (plats à pain) which were probably lids. One of innovations was use of deep mines for flint (Spiennes in Belgium, Rijckholt in Netherlands) where axes were made. Contacts by the Michelsberg with late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers north of the loess zone gave rise to semiagricultural communities, as evidenced by relics from about 4000 BC found in the Netherlands delta at Swifterbant in Flevoland and Hazendonkborn and Bergschenhoekborn in Zuid-Holland.

A Neolithic culture of the late 4th and early 3rd millennia be, found mostly in the Rhineland and stretching from Belgium in the north to Switzerland in the south. Connections have been claimed both with the north European TRB culture and with the west European cultures such as Chassey and Windmill Hill. The Belgian group of the Michelsberg culture shows strong connections with the British Windmill Hill group in such features as ditched enclosures, flint mines and some artefact types, such as leaf-shaped flint arrowheads and antler combs.