6 Southern Bavaria Daniela Hofmann, Joachim Pechtl, R. Alexander Bentley, Penny Bickle, Linda Fibiger, Gisela Grupe, Julie Hamilton, Robert Hedges, Michael Schultz and Alasdair Whittle 6.1 Introduction Bavaria is Germany’s largest federal state, reaching from the Rhön mountains in the north to the Alps in the south. It is dominated by two large river systems with their tributaries: in the north the Main, which eventually joins the Rhine, and in the south the Danube, which lows from its source in Baden-Württemberg through Bavaria and then on to the south-east. These axes of communication have strongly inluenced the cultural afiliation of northern and southern Bavaria from prehistory onwards (Zimmermann 1995; Bück in Engelhardt 2006, 61; Roth 2008; Pechtl 2010, 42–6). The region referred to here as southern Bavaria is located largely south of the Danube, comprising – from east to west – the modern administrative regions of Lower Bavaria, a very small part of the Upper Palatinate, northern areas of Upper Bavaria, and inally Swabia, which straddles the border with Baden-Württemberg (Fig. 6.1). Southern Bavaria is dissected by numerous rivers lowing into the Danube. Beginning from the east, the Inn and Isar run in a roughly south-west–north-east direction, while rivers further west, such as the Lech and the Iller, run more north–south, making west–east travel dificult (Küster 1995, 9). LBK sites tend to be located along the smaller streams and tributaries of these riverine axes (such as the Aiterach, Ödbach and Irlbach; K. Reinecke 1978a; 1982; Gronendijk 1992; Gerhard 2006, map 30; Pechtl 2009a, 4), although especially in the Gäuboden there are also sites on the terraces of the Danube itself, for instance at Stephansposching (Pechtl 2009a) and on the higher terraces south of Regensburg (Schier 1985, 17; Paetzold 1992, 98). Deining clear geographical borders to this area can be dificult, especially in the west and south-east. To the north-east, the mountain range of the Bavarian Forest separates Bavaria and Bohemia, although there is evidence that this was no barrier to communication in the Neolithic (Chapter 6.4.3). North of the Danube, the ranges of the Franconian and Swabian Albs also provide reasonably clear demarcations, although they have yielded LBK inds (Bück in Engelhardt 2006, 57). However, the territory of Swabia continues westwards into Baden-Württemberg without any obvious geographical breaks. Only west of Ulm is there a break in loess cover that could form a convenient boundary with the Baden-Württemberg LBK. Similarly, there are no real physical barriers between the Danube and the Alps; the only clear limiting factor is the extent of the fertile loess soils preferred by the LBK. A continuous loess cover exists in the eastern part of the region, in the lat, very fertile Lower Bavarian area now known as the Gäuboden, roughly between the modern towns of Regensburg and Vilshofen (Küster 1995, 9; Völkel 2006, 27). Loess patches of various sizes exist throughout the tertiary hills which extend south- and westwards towards Landshut and beyond, but the further west one goes, the stonier and less fertile the soils become (Küster 1995, 9). The southern part of southern Bavaria is dominated by sediments of glacial origin, which were not settled by agricultural communities until the latter half of the Neolithic (Uenze 1990; Nadler and Zeeb 1994; Küster 1995, 9). The Gäuboden is a relatively warm, dry and fertile environment with a long vegetation period of over 220 days a year, corresponding to the conditions preferred by early Neolithic settlers elsewhere (e.g. Sielmann 1972; Lenneis 2008, 165). However, these conditions deteriorate as one moves into the tertiary hills (R. Hofmann 1983/84, 121–4; Sachweh and Enders 1996, maps 16 and 47; Pechtl 2009a, 5), and compared to other areas, southern Bavaria has been characterised as a rather marginal zone, where the parameters tolerable for LBK settlement only existed in restricted areas (Sielmann 1972, 28–33). Although this work has been criticised as too coarse-grained to take into account the variety of local conditions (Bakels 1978, 135; Kreuz 1990, 162), or indeed the impact of continuing luctuations in rainfall throughout the LBK (Schmidt and Gruhle 2003a; Schmidt et al. 2004), parts of southern Bavaria certainly fell short of ideal LBK settlement conditions in spite of the presence of loess soils (Pechtl 2009c, 82–3).