Hillforts, particularly in western Europe, are usually thought of as being symptomatic of the Late Bronze Age, where the warrior ideal reached its zenith, and communities took to marking and defending their wealth and land in an increasingly competitive and hostile world, and of the Iron Age, where a highly stratified society of elites, retinues, craftsmen, shamans and commoners took shape and those at the (literal) top could control the surrounding landscape and exploit its resources.
Enclosing land in a monumental fashion goes back before the Neolithic; in northern Finland, for instances, vast hunting or possibly communal-gathering enclosures, made of loose stones, were built by Mesolithic communities, monuments known as Giant's Churches today. But there was not the political or social complexity of the Bronze and Iron Ages, which the hillforts, requiring thousands of man-hours and an organised command hierarchy, are testament to, and therefore the Neolithic is not known for them.
However, hills have always had the potential to be a natural form of defence; from scavengers, enemy tribes, flooding and food scarcity. Archaeology and genetic evidence certainty suggests that the periods before the Bronze Age, the Mesolithic and Neolithic in particular, were hardly peaceful utopias, it was not just when people tilled the soil, gathered fruit from trees, and gave thanks to the earth goddess, a harmony that was only shattered when the fearsome nomads from the east arrived.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the late Linear Band Ceramic culture of central Europe, which seems to have burnt up in a flurry of mass-grave digging and ritual execution. Even the earliest farmers who sailed into the Western Mediterranean, circa 6000 BCE, deliberately sailed around areas occupied by territorial Mesolithic hunters, and the entire tradition of megalithic monuments, at least in Europe, is thought to have its origins in the need of early farming communities to mark their territory; in essence, telling the remaining hunter-gatherers to stay away. So the nastiness of human politics was clearly around at this time. Is there any evidence, then, that this was taken to the next level; in the form of monumental defensive enclosures?
Three good candidates for the earliest hillforts are four situated in the basalt deserts of northern Jordan: Jawa, Tulul al-Ghusayn, Khirbet al-Ja’bariya and Khirbet Abu al-Husayn. These are all located on extinct volcanoes, and were surrounded by temporary hunting camps and pastoral activities. Surface finds have dated these hillforts to 4449 cal. BCE at the earliest, well within the Chalcolithic period of the Middle East and the early Neolithic of Europe. These sites were probably occupied until the Early Bronze Age, around 3500 - 3000 BCE. While they are impressive monuments and must have been a good defensive feature, there is no evidence for a stratified and specialized society that produced the better-known hillforts of later periods. The hillfort-dwellers here seem to have been egalitarian, based on the uniform house structures within the forts themselves, and likely did not use the forts primarily for defence, but for a range of functions such as storing animal produce.
The oldest hillforts in Europe, however might be Fortín 1 and Fortín 5, two of a cluster of forts in Almeria in south-eastern Spain, with the first walls and embankments dated to the Middle Copper Age, between 4000 - 3600 BCE. Unlike the Jordanian hillforts, these monumental structures are right beside a river, and seemed to have been abandoned at the end of the Chalcolithic. Their function seems to have been to control the major artery of trade passing along the coast of Spain, as well as east from the Mediterranean.
In general then, hillforts appear first in the Chalcolithic, in a few isolated places around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, usually connected with centres of metalworking, such as the late copper Age and early Bronze age hillfort of Masckowice, Poland, or trade routes, as with the hillforts of Almeria. For all we know, there might be older hillforts, that are hidden from the archaeological record by virtue of them having no datable artefacts. But based on the current evidence, it seems that once metal and metallurgy started to proliferate, hillforts followed soon after.
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