The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  PERSONHOOD AND THE EVERYDAY

  Compared with the late Mesolithic, Neolithic/Chalcolithic practices undeniably created new kinds of person, just as these new kinds of persons created a different material world. This multiple emergence can be framed within developmental age and gender principles specific to their societies and related to the ways that objects contributed to creating persons.

  The emergence of new kinds of personal skills was of major importance at the start of the Balkan Neolithic and the Copper Age (Chapman et al. 2006b; Chapman and Gaydarska 2011). Farming necessitated new types of skills, pertaining in particular to farming and herding but also potting, polished stone tool-making, and perhaps brewing. These skills co-emerged with new foodstuffs and objects, such as flour, bread, pottery, and axes. Notions of personhood were influenced by new relations based upon these embodied skills, as well as by their interplay with traditional skills. The discovery of secondary products—milk, wool, and traction—again ushered in new episodes of personal skill-creation. Persons involved in skilled crafts, such as ‘miners’, would have been united by a shared practice of communal labour and a communally validated system of rewards for the production of a valued material. The cross-cutting interests of such groups created a differentiated society, requiring complex and powerful practices of integration. The widespread failure of such integrative practices led to a less complex society, dependent upon exotic metalwork, in the post-climax period.

  The emergence of new kinds of personal skills through practice is nested within two contrasting age- and gender-based principles guiding people’s life-course, each materialized in the lifecycles of the dominant style of clay figurines. The first is ‘Hamangia-type personhood’, widespread among early farming groups, showing a three-stage development (Chapman and Gaydarska 2006):

  •birth as an androgynous person grown out of both parents (complete androgynous figurines with female traits and a male, phallic neck with testicles symbolized by breasts);

  •gradual shedding of one gender during maturation to become a single-gendered person (breaking a complete figurine into a male neck and female body);

  •old age, when the return to androgyny marks the integration of all gendered identities of the life-course (complete androgynous figurines).

  Whilst almost all fragmentary figurines were discarded in settlements, where they were used in everyday negotiations over gender relations, many complete figurines were found in graves, symbolizing the integration of gendered identities as the culmination of an age trajectory.

  In contrast, the three stages of ‘Dolnoslav-type personhood’ (Chapman and Gaydarska 2006), typical in the mature farming and climax periods, are:

  •birth of a person without gender characteristics (gender-neutral figurines);

  •gradual growth of one gender during maturation (single-gender females/males);

  •gradual fading of that single gender for post-menopausal women and older males (gender-neutral figurines).

  This emphasizes gender as a characteristic of growth and personal maturation rather than the inheritance of both genders from birth and a higher value placed upon age. If Hamangia personhood is essential, with androgyny present at birth and death, Dolnoslav personhood relied on adding single-gender characteristics during the life-course—an incremental form of gendering.

  The rich material culture of south-east Europe and the Carpathian Basin differentiates it from Neolithic communities further north and west. Objects reveal two ways by which personhood was created. The design principles embodied in material culture show how people understood and valued their world and, simultaneously, an objectification of persons in the objects they made and used. Certain design principles embodied a geometric outlook on material forms—symmetry, compartmentalization, precision, and standardization (Fig. 8.2) (Chapman and Gaydarska 2006). People making pottery or macroblades embodied these principles and practices, and those seeing and using such forms accepted the materialization of those principles into their habitus. An aesthetic of colour and brilliance was also central, whether in highly burnished fine wares, brilliant gold decorations, or shining shell rings (see Chapman and Gaydarska, this volume; Chapman 2006, 2007).

  FIG. 8.2. Schematic representation of cognitive complexity in later prehistoric Bulgaria (Chapman and Gaydarska 2006, fig. 8.1).

  These key principles were expressed in different materials. In the early farming period, locally manufactured pottery (Spataro 2007) showed technical mastery and precision in painting, but standardization of design was minimal and compartmentalization limited to low feet and, rarely, lids. This changed dramatically in the mature farming period, when the aesthetic of colour and brilliance was materialized in widespread dark burnished wares. Compartmentalization and precision increased through legs, handles, lugs and lids, and the new 360o design fields. Colour contrasts in decoration and a wider range of forms lower levels of standardization. The diversification of forms continued in the climax period.

  Similarly, fired clay figurines in the early farming period showed low indices of standardization, but multi-part androgynous rod-head figurines required right–left symmetry, some precision, and compartmentalization. In the mature farming period, the frequency and diversity of fired clay figurines increased, especially in the central Balkan Vinča group (Hansen 2007), but precision, compartmentalization, and standardization remained low. The climax period emphasized variety of sizes, shapes, materials, contrasting surface colours, decoration, and contexts of use and deposition, whilst figurine-making virtually collapsed in the post-climax period.

  Lithic production demonstrates a contrasting trajectory. In the early farming period, macro-blades made on colourful high-quality raw materials showed signs of symmetrical design, precision of core preparation and pressure-flaking, and standardization of blade production. In the mature farming period, lithics were less diversified. Local raw materials dominated in the south Balkans, contrasting with an emphasis on producing shining black obsidian bladelets in the north Balkans (Biró 1998). The climax period saw a wider range of chipped stone tools than before. At one extreme was the household making of end-scrapers for working skin in the yard—at the other, the 41cm-long superblade from grave 43 in the Varna cemetery. Superblade technology represents the apogee of lithic technology in Balkan prehistory (Manolakakis 2005). Some superblades were made in the post-climax period, but smaller tools predominated.

  A few exotic polished stone objects are known from the early farming period, with a wider range of forms, including miniatures, and materials—marble, nephrite, jadeite, and occasionally turquoise—in the mature farming period. Extraordinary skill went into the highly polished climax period carnelian beads, with up to 32 facets on a small surface, probably made using a fast wheel (Kostov 2007). Polished stone sceptres typified the martial character of the post-climax period.

  Metal objects in the early farming phase occur in a limited range of shapes (awls, fish-hooks, beads, and rings), which betokens early steps using an unfamiliar material that nonetheless shone beautifully. Quantity and differentiation of metal objects remained modest until the climax period. Then coppersmiths relied upon technical innovations to produce a wide range of objects. The other highlight of the climax period was goldworking, as exemplified in the Varna cemetery (Eluère and Raub 1991). Gold wire, sheet gold, gold casting and gold painting allowed the creation of an enormous range of new ornament forms, showing symmetry and precision, but a marked lack of standardization. In the post-climax period, an exotic Caucasian technology based upon arsenical copper created new forms of bright and colourful status objects (Sherratt 1976).

  To summarize, the early farming age-gender principle of essential inherited characteristics (the ‘Hamangia’ type) matched a reliance on ancestors, near and far, as well as promoting gender harmony. The later, incremental principle of age-gender development (the ‘Dolnoslav’ type) resonated with increasing social and material complexities in the climax period. From the earlies
t farming period, fundamental geometric principles of harmony and precision and an aesthetic of colour and brilliance are combined, with a complex pattern of change, and a peak in design complexity for all materials in the climax period. How did these changing structures and practices work out in the domestic domain?

  HOUSEHOLDS

  Houses and households have been central to many debates in Balkan prehistory, whether as symbolic principles for living (Hodder 1990), as living entities enfolding social practices (Bailey 1990), as the basic decision-making unit for economic and social practices (Tringham and Krstić 1990), as places for gendered encounters (Tringham 1991), as the material framework structuring settlement space (Kotsakis 1999), as places incorporating the new relations of Neolithic lifeways (Jones 2005), or as distinctive structures shaped by ideologies as much as practices (Souvatzi 2008). Here, the house is treated as an equal agent in relationships from which persons and households reflexively emerged in processes creating and materializing cultural values.

  At most stages of their biography, households would have contained the elderly, the middle-aged, children of both genders, domestic animals, and perhaps garden plants. Living together and interacting much of the time, the persons in their variety of combinations, changing yearly and perhaps seasonally, created the personality of their own house. It was largely out of the household that gendered (in)dividuals emerged through reiterated practices of cultural transmission.

  Cultural transmission also concerned domestic animals, which were incorporated into households and became transformed from an exotic presence in the early farming period to familiar local staples—mostly cattle and pigs, adapted to the Balkan climate, by the mature farming period. The range of cultivated cereals and pulses narrowed further north and west across Europe (Colledge and Conolly 2007), but whether for social or climatic reasons remains unclear. Their tending, harvesting, conversion into food, storage, and consumption created a new suite of personal skills and defined a fundamental set of household practices. Successful relations between plants, animals, and humans ensured a wider range of environments could now be permanently settled. These extended settlement opportunities were materialized through a tradition of timber-framed, wattle-and-daub housing continuing to this day in parts of Europe.

  The construction of the standard one-floor, two-roomed prehistoric house required considerable communal labour, comparable to that needed to build a small western European megalithic tomb. As with objects, precision, symmetry, and compartmentalization were of great importance in building a house and maintaining geometrically-based cultural order. For instance, the location of most entrances symmetrical to the gable end or the long wall created a left-right, back-front symmetry potentially drawn upon to frame social relations and action inside the house. The main posts and beams involved precision in their cutting and assembling, as did the coppiced wattling. The division of the interior revealed varying degrees of compartmentalization, whether vertical or horizontal. Finally, house standardization can be seen at many sites through markedly similar length:width ratios, room number, and layout of internal fittings. The regularities in the dimensions of houses at Lepenski Vir, Targovishte, Radingrad, and Poljanitsa (Chapman 1989, fig. 12; 1990) indicate the effort spent on carefully reproducing traditional design, based upon ancestral practices materialized in the successive phases of long-term dwelling. This long-term continuity in fundamental principles of geometric order strongly influenced the persons growing out of these houses.

  We should not over-stress standardization in houses, any more than in objects: diachronic differences in size, shape, building techniques, and construction materials are well attested (Bailey 2000; Burdo et al. 2012). However, houses in many different cultural contexts shared overall design principles. Houses were normally rectangular, whether built of wattle-and-daub or, exceptionally, of stone, as on the Durankulak tell. The regularity of a rectangular internal space allowed further regularity in spatial sub-divisions through walls, screens, or upright posts, as well as the adding of extra rooms—a potential rarely utilized until the climax period (e.g. the seven-room house at Gorzsa, Hungary; Horváth 1987; the eleven-room house at Poljanitsa, Bulgaria; Todorova 1979, Table 14) (here Fig. 8.3a). Houses were higher than any palisades and fences and so clearly visible from within and outside the settlement. The emphasis on the vertical and visibility was especially marked in two-storey constructions (e.g. on the Csőszhalom tell; Raczky et al. 2002). Moreover, the house provided a counterpoint of order and tidiness to the disorder of the external spaces, where walking over exposed sharp ends of animal bones and sherds, food refuse, and faeces could have been a dangerous, and smelly, enterprise. In short, the house co-emerged with its household, using a geometric logic embodied in the many miniature house models known from the Balkans and eastern Europe.

  FIG. 8.3. (a) Plan of Polyanitsa Phase IV (adapted from Todorova 1979, Table 14). (b) dispersed tell network (adapted from Dennell and Webley 1975, fig. 8.3).

  Turning from principles to practice, the diversity of household activities carried out in similar two-roomed structures has hitherto been assumed rather than demonstrated (cf. Hayden and Cannon 1983). Many everyday household practices, such as sleeping (often on a special platform), food storage (usually in a special annexe), and cooking were embedded in domestic ritual, as indicated by the figurines often deposited in association with the spatial foci of such activities (Chapman 1981). Some scholars maintain that those structures containing altars, plinths, or concentrations of figurines indicate not just domestic ritual, but public ‘shrines’ (e.g. Parţa, Romania, Lazarovici et al. 2001). However, the ‘normal’ household materials (animal bones, sherds, and lithics) deposited in these structures suggest the ritualization of domestic spaces rather than Near Eastern-like public buildings (Bradley 2005).

  The final stage of some Neolithic, and many Chalcolithic, houses was their deliberate burning (Stevanović 1997), perhaps upon the death of a household leader. The emotions spilling over from bereavement and the memories of the person now lost to the household were symbolically evoked in the dramatic, transformative ceremony of house burning, from which emerged a distinctive ancestral identity for the newly dead and the beginnings of a healing process for the ruptured society. Added symbolic value emerged out of the memory of the material culture burnt with the house. The visual spectacle of a house-burning ceremony also symbolized the transformation of a community-wide nexus of relations. It is to this level that we now turn.

  COMMUNITIES AND CORPORATE GROUPS

  Whatever their size, permanence, and structure, the communities in Balkan Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlements represented something more than the total of the personal and enchained relationships within their boundaries—the symbol of a supra-household and trans-generational entity, materialized through settlement plans, object accumulation, and other shared practices. Moreover, the community guaranteed a shared identity that anchored a person in a moral and juridical framework without overly constraining (in)dividuals in their lifeways.

  The personal identities based upon community membership emerged out of the settlement’s specific context. For an extended family in an isolated homestead, the house was the central focus of identity as symbol and practice, but the household required, for survival, a breeding network enchaining it to another 0 or 40 homesteads. In the tell-based or open village, the multiplication of identical elements (house, oven, storage area, sleeping platform) produced a coherence reinforcing the identities of separate households and framed relations within and between them in a consistent way. However, living on an isolated homestead offered fewer possibilities for diverse personal practices than living on a tell, with its wider range of persons ready to transmit embodied skills.

  In areas with dispersed settlement structures, low-level centres developed, sometimes as enclosed sites (Chapman et al. 2006a). Our poor knowledge of such sites is a direct consequence of the paucity of aerial investigations. Most enclosed sites shared the s
ame contexts of structured deposition—especially pits—with unenclosed sites, but feasting deposits, special colours, and figurine clusters are more frequent in enclosed sites. Enclosing banks and ditches reinforced the geometric order of circular interiors.

  The principles of cultural order were variably expressed at the community level. The majority of horizontal settlements were not deliberately planned, growing through multiple copies of the same spatial clustering of the house-and-garden complex, which brought persons, plants, and animals together in an intimate way. The obvious exception was the concentric principle structuring vast, 250-hectare Tripolye settlements such as Nebelivka, culminating in over 1500 rectangular buildings arranged in two concentric circles (Chapman et al. 2014). The alternative pattern of a grid of houses built along parallel paths (e.g. Grivac: McPherron and Srejović 1971) was apparently rare on horizontal sites.

  Whilst tell dwelling reinforced the ancestral basis for personhood, with people living above where the ancestors had lived, certain climax period east Balkan tells exemplified remarkable geometric order, embodying the principles of symmetry, precision, compartmentalization, and standardization (e.g. Polyanitsa and Ovcharovo, Todorova 1979) (Fig. 8.3a). However, west Balkan tell communities generally rejected the geometric option in favour of loose structuring similar to nearby horizontal sites (e.g. the Vinča tell, Chapman 1989). Whichever layout, many activities were impossible on tells, such as growing legumes or herbs in a garden, herding sheep or cattle, organizing outdoor rituals or dances, smelting copper ores, or firing ceramics. This spatial differentiation of practices on or off the tell led to a well-developed sense of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.