The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Even where substantial houses were common in Neolithic Europe, individual structures could be relatively impermanent, being replaced once a generation in the LBK of central Europe (Last, Chapter 14) and on tells (Raczky, Chapter 12), and even more frequently in the Alpine foreland (Menotti, Chapter 15). Contributions in this section draw out the differing temporalities of house biographies alongside the longer-term patterns of change and continuity. The social and symbolic importance of the house (e.g. Papaconstantinou, Chapter 13; Last, Chapter 14) remains crucial in understanding both these recurrent rhythms and architectural transformations in the longer term. Coudart (Chapter 16) addresses this through the relationship between idealized ‘mental representations’ of houses and the relative speed with which the constituent elements of central European architecture changed, and her discussion grapples with the tension between architectural standardization and variation. These could well be related to variations in household composition and routine practice, themes explicitly addressed by Last (Chapter 14) and Menotti (Chapter 15). Yet even in contexts with exceptional preservation, such as the Alpine lake villages, these factors remain difficult to trace. Overall, much more remains to be written about the social implications of different styles of architecture and how they assisted in creating or maintaining certain kinds of communities and lifestyles.

  Routines, whether associated with domestic spaces or out in the landscape, remain central for social reproduction and change, as discussed in Subsistence and social routine. The requirements and tasks associated with plants and animals were central to Neolithic life and took up the bulk of people’s time. Although the Neolithic has been defined on the basis of the introduction of and reliance on domestic animals and crops, the extent to which this holds true is chronologically and regionally varied. ‘Agriculture’ could have been practised in many varied ways alongside other subsistence activities and as part of differing daily, seasonal, and annual routines, a point recently stressed in relation to the importance of garden-type cultivation in Neolithic societies (e.g. Jones 2005). Drawing on stable isotope analyses as well as more traditional forms of evidence, Schulting (Chapter 19) challenges the view that there was a gradual transition to a Neolithic lifestyle, as has long been argued for in north-west Europe, but points out that hunting, gathering, and fishing continued or made a resurgence during the Neolithic in some areas, such as the Netherlands and parts of Scandinavia (cf. Brown et al., Chapter 2). Bogaard and Halstead (Chapter 20) argue that we have spent too much energy focusing on the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition and on drawing up facile oppositions between hunting/gathering and farming/herding lifestyles. They explore the rich detail provided by faunal and palaeobotanical evidence in particular, identifying differential regional roles for activities such as gardening, hunting, and tending domesticated animals. In south-east and Mediterranean Europe, the transition to an intensive agricultural system was rapid and subsistence strategies were, at least initially, less varied than those related to social reproduction or settlement. This was also the case either side of a long-lasting chronological hiatus in the expansion of farming across western and northern Europe (Rowley-Conwy and Legge, Chapter 22). Bartosiewicz and Lillie (Chapter 21) contrast eastern central Europe, which exhibits greater coherence in spite of some regional variation, and the much more diverse, gradual, and piecemeal adoption of farming in the Baltic and Ukraine.

  These varying rates of adoption were not only due to environmental and climatic differences, but were also intimately connected to new socialities, social identities, and worldviews. These too would have affected daily routine. Taking a phenomenological perspective, Mlekuž (Chapter 23) connects the often repetitive rhythms of the seasonal round to the formation of identities by interlinking the biographies of people, gardens, and houses in south-eastern Europe. He also stresses the importance of harvests and festivals as potentially subversive episodes during an otherwise harmonious flow of interconnected activities (potentially also ritualized) throughout the year. Equally important points about the social and symbolic dimensions of human–animal relations are discussed later in the volume by Marciniak and Pollard (Chapter 39). Through feasting, their role in myths, or as wealth ‘on-the-hoof’ which needs to be cared for, animals were clearly critical factors in the biographies, identities, and routines of Neolithic people. Daily life was also punctuated by other concerns. Religious routine and pilgrimage is explored by Loveday for Britain (Chapter 24), where these concepts have a particularly long research pedigree associated with the study of earthen, wood, and stone monuments. Loveday associates specific beliefs and practices with particular monuments which were only built in certain landscapes in some periods of the Neolithic. His suggestion that pilgrimage was a key mechanism for the spread and distribution of certain types of monuments and practices once again brings connectivity across parts of the British Isles and continental Europe to the fore: all the more so if we place this contribution alongside the discussion of causewayed enclosures across northern Europe by Andersen (Chapter 42), or the evidence for related traditions of megalithic and non-megalithic chambered tombs discussed by Cummings et al. (Chapter 43).

  New subsistence practices, social identities, and worldviews also meant new objects. The rejection of ‘archaeological cultures’ in some parts of Europe during the 1970s to 1990s arguably led to a neglect of the interpretive potential inherent in the close stylistic study of a variety of artefact types. Detailed appreciations of typologies of objects and architecture are crucial to exploring change: object ‘types’ are not merely archaeological descriptions but outline the key relationships constituting those things. Changes in artefact types do not only occur at period boundaries, although they may be more pronounced at such times, but repeatedly and unevenly through periods. This theme, whilst taken up by earlier chapters, is the focus of the section entitled Materiality and social relations. Artefacts have often been used to define the onset of new periods—most notably pottery and polished stone tools for the Neolithic, and the first metal objects for the Copper Age. Yet chapters in this section transcend the formal description of such objects, focusing also on the complex relations and meanings with which their making, use, and deposition was imbued. This can take the form of biographical approaches which broadly link the life courses of things and people (e.g. chapters by Cooney, Pechtl, Chapman and Gaydarska, and Axelsson et al.). Comparing artefact biographies can draw out diversity in the use of superficially similar types of artefact. Flint daggers, for example, were seemingly prestige goods in some areas, but used for routine plant processing in others (De Grooth, Chapter 25). This cautions against a too simplistic identification of ‘high-status’ goods which have the same significance in all the regions in which they appear.

  These complexities are traced by focusing on three sets of material—lithics, pottery, and a variety of ‘exotic’ items. Whilst lithics are employed in routine, everyday tasks, contributors here also stress their importance to the creation of social identities and their symbolic implications. The sourcing of materials is especially significant in this regard, be this through the technologically demanding mining of high-quality flint (Capote and Díaz-del-Rio, Chapter 26) or the careful selection of sources for stone axes (Cooney, Chapter 27). It may also be useful to think about different spheres of use and exchange, some more routine than others. Various artefacts, some the products of part-time specialists (De Grooth, Chapter 25), could circulate within and across these spheres in the course of their biographies, occasionally punctuated by rather formalized acts of deposition (e.g. Cooney, Chapter 27). We can also consider places of production as ‘special’, or even as monumental, as in the case of the flint mines (Capote and Díaz-del-Rio, Chapter 26), and such locations may have been connected with ancestral powers (Cooney, Chapter 27). Again, the movement of some axeheads, such as those of Alpine jadeite, across enormous distances underlines the degree of interconnectedness and mobility that was a key feature of Neolithic Europe (Pétrequin et al. 20
12).

  Whilst clay artefacts generally moved less far, the chains of activities connecting people and materials in the production of pottery were as significant as for stone tools. Pechtl (Chapter 29) and Petersen and Müller (Chapter 30) provide insights about the tasks associated with procuring and transforming materials during the production of pottery, the participants involved, the spread of potting techniques, styles, and decorative motifs, and the implications for understanding social dynamics. It is also apparent that variations in size, shape, and decoration yield important information about the affordances and effects of vessels, particularly when combined with contextual information about deposition and analyses of fabric composition and food residues. Pechtl explores the implications of conservatism and innovation in ceramic design for understanding cultural identity among LBK communities, whilst Petersen and Müller discuss the use of ceramic vessels in both domestic and monumental contexts in northern Europe. Both contributions stress the restricted range of vessel forms present at the outset of the Neolithic in each region.

  Despite the importance of fabric analyses, the sourcing of raw materials for pottery conventionally plays a secondary role compared to the shape and surface decoration of the finished piece. Traditional culture history has (sometimes unfairly) been criticized as equating these stylistic aspects with prehistoric ‘peoples’, a theme taken up in detail and with the use of new biomolecular techniques by Budja (Chapter 28), who investigates the relationship between pottery and population flows across south-east Europe. Similarly, Vander Linden’s (Chapter 31) discussion of Bell Beakers combines the archipelagic nature and local diversity of this phenomenon with the evidence for considerable individual mobility. Interestingly, in spite of some discussion about the use of differently-sized vessels for different social occasions (Pechtl, Chapter 29), there is still a division between studies of pottery, where routine practices and production processes have proven very fruitful avenues for research, and items such as figurines and miniatures, particularly frequent in south-east Europe (Nanoglou, Chapter 32) and traditionally discussed with reference to a ‘ritual’ sphere. Where available, figurines—through their degree of standardization, hybrid nature, use, and deposition—can provide productive avenues for the discussion of personhood and identity, but they need to be more consistently related to other aspects of Neolithic life to reveal their full interpretive potential. We still need to understand why these miniatures were a central and long-lived part of Neolithic life in some regions but rare or absent in many others; and their connections with routine activities and the everyday links between bodies and materials is an under-explored avenue in this context. Perhaps this could also shed light on the contrast between areas exhibiting representational art in enduring media like stone and those where representation was largely either avoided or reserved for ephemeral media (see Chapters 44–46 and Fowler and Scarre, Chapter 53; cf. Robin 2012).

  The last set of chapters in this section is concerned with durable artefacts which were distributed over long distances—in some cases thousands of kilometres. Perhaps the best-known example is the Mediterranean Spondylus shell, exchanged across central Europe and as far west as the English Channel. As Chapman and Gaydarska (Chapter 33) show, its use in different regions was bound up within changing local discourses of prestige and the exotic, providing yet another example of the way in which widely shared materials were enmeshed in a myriad of local concerns. In contrast to Spondylus shell, Baltic amber was collected and worn from Mesolithic times, but saw fundamental changes in manufacture and distribution in the Neolithic, with the quantities of amber deposited varying widely over time and space (Axelsson et al., Chapter 34). Like Spondylus, the restricted littoral distribution of amber made it a rare, exotic material inland, but its value, significance, and use changed through time and varied between regions.

  The relationship between metal manufacture, specialization of production, and social differentiation is taken up in the contributions by Heyd and Walker, Bartelheim and Pearce, and Roberts and Frieman (Chapters 35–37). The earliest objects have long been regarded more or less exclusively as indicators of wealth and identity, but these contributions highlight the complex and varied relationships instrumental to the emergence and spread of early metallurgy. Heyd and Walker explore the geographical ebb and flow of metal supply and metallurgical activity across central and south-eastern Europe, emphasizing variations in the availability, value, and impact of early metal objects whilst stressing the complex chains of relations needed to produce these artefacts. Connections with other areas like the central and western Mediterranean were established and enhanced through trade in copper, but these were unstable. Bartelheim and Pearce consider how copper may not always have been regarded as valuable in the earliest period of its use across the western Mediterranean, and may have been available in greater amounts than previously thought, whilst Roberts and Frieman illustrate that whilst metal objects were often ‘eye-catching’ ornaments, they did not directly cause social transformation, nor in themselves consolidate any existing social differentiation in northern and western Europe. All these contributors highlight how much is still to be done in better understanding the relationship between the circulation and deposition of various categories of object. Taken together, they invoke a Neolithic world populated with a plethora of colourful and diverse things with a range of uses, properties, and effects, of which but a fraction of the most durable have survived.

  As with all sections of the volume, the chapters in Monuments, rock art, and cosmology are necessarily selective given the enormous variety in Neolithic monumentality across Europe: the megalithic monuments of the Mediterranean, and from northern Europe cursus monuments, stone alignments and henges are the most notable omissions. Nevertheless, a wide range of site types are represented. The contributors concerned with enclosures (Petrasch, Chapter 40; Skeates, Chapter 41; Andersen, Chapter 42) highlight the diversity in their shape, size, and use, which precludes a single function for such sites. Certain divisions are possible, for instance between continuous enclosures surrounding settlements, as in earlier fifth millennium Italy (Skeates, Chapter 41), or fourth millennium causewayed enclosures in northern and western Europe (Andersen, Chapter 42), which often form the focus for deliberate deposits of human remains and artefacts. Enclosures of both types exist in central Europe, where Petrasch (Chapter 40) draws out how fifth millennium roundel enclosures were oriented towards celestial events and along cardinal points, providing an axis mundi. In common with Hoskin’s (Chapter 48) interpretation of passage graves across Europe, this suggests that celestial and particularly solar phenomena were a significant element to religious worship and practice across large areas.

  The question of whether such monuments were ‘central places’, crucial in the creation of power relationships and of community identities, also applies to other kinds of site, such as the chambered cairns discussed by Cummings et al. (Chapter 43). Their wide-ranging geographical coverage, extending from Iberia to Britain and southern Scandinavia, enables the authors to draw out regional patterns alongside broad cosmologies. Building chambered tombs changed the nature of place and drew together materials from different locales and sources in producing new architectural effects. Indeed, a review of the chapters in this section, and related recent work (e.g. Cummings 2012; Noble 2006; Scarre 2011), suggests that the earliest Neolithic monuments in northern Europe were subtle translations of local places, integrated within cosmologies that may have identified specific places (and rocks and trees) as special. Subsequently, in each region of north-western Europe, monuments increasingly also exhibited a concern with celestial bodies, and arguably with the cosmos at a grand scale. Such monuments created new social relationships, but also became vital media through which people made sense of their world—from the changing tides (and sea levels) to flowing rivers and streams, from gradually opening vistas to the passages of the celestial bodies—and their place in it. As a result, they became places of renown that
drew in pilgrims from afar, as suggested by Loveday (Chapter 24).

  The importance of natural places and phenomena in the cosmology of Neolithic peoples is also illustrated by the contributions on rock art. One key research problem is the relationship between figurative and abstract rock art motifs, particularly in Iberia (Fairén-Jiménez, Chapter 44), the Alps (Fossati, Chapter 45), or Scandinavia (Cochrane et al., Chapter 46). In Britain, rock art is exclusively abstract, and the glimpses of figuration in media such as carved chalk are predominantly of body parts rather than complete bodies (Fowler and Scarre, Chapter 53). As Cochrane et al. argue, the presence or absence of figuration may well indicate different prehistoric meanings and effects, and has arguably also caused some divergence in methodological approaches: the symbolic meaning of images is often stressed in areas with representational art, whilst the performative effects of engravings are brought to the fore where these are abstract. Rock art is also one of the ways in which the landscape is textured, and there are striking differences between, for instance, Britain, where smaller panels of art are often situated along routeways, and areas such as Valcamonica (Fossati, Chapter 45), which may have been centres for large gatherings revolving around the repeated production of rock art and stelae. As Fairén-Jiménez notes, open-air rock art in Iberia was densest and most complex at ‘natural corridors’ through the uplands. Skeates (Chapter 47), discussing the natural caves and artificial hypogea of the Mediterranean, underscores the variety of practices at these sites. His chapter also invites us to reconsider whether the distinction between ‘natural’ and artificially created spaces was important for their Neolithic users—much as in the case of monuments elsewhere in Europe, the merging of different kinds of site into a meshwork of powerful places and landscapes may be the more appropriate line of investigation.