The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  In the climax period, the messages from objects and the built environment were curiously contradictory. Villages and houses tended to embody geometric order whilst material forms produced an explosion of diversity and differentiation that threatened standardization. The proliferation of limited interest groups, whether households, kinship groups, occupational units, or age-sets, was a principal aspect of identity. To the extent that Copper Age persons increasingly lived in planned villages, geometric order and the spatial segregation between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour strongly influenced personhood.

  Mortuary statements, a key element of community structure, were not as common or monumental as those in the Neolithic of north-west Europe. The key long-term practice in the Balkans was individual burial of complete bodies, with occasional ‘deviant’ burials—where elements were added or subtracted from the corpse, or replaced by objects or animal parts. Collective burials were rare, except in the early farming period (Chapman 2010).

  On early farming period tells and flat sites, intra-mural burials were the commonest form of disposal (Lichter 2001). Age or gender differentiation by mode of burial or grave goods was rare. Creating a mortuary zone separate from the settlement produced a new distance between the living and the dead alongside the necessity to bridge that gap, as through deliberately fragmentating objects, with one part in the grave and one part with the living. Corporate cemeteries (from a dozen to several hundred graves) became established in the mature farming period, usually in regions of dispersed settlement (Fig. 8.4). However, poor and rich intra-mural burials are also known. Many rare exotic objects were deposited, sometimes with favoured adults, sometimes with children. In the climax period, cemeteries became more widespread and larger. The mortuary domain also stimulated a huge increase in the acquisition and deposition of exotic objects, a trend related to the growth of copper- and gold-working. Only the Varna cemetery shows hierarchical differentiation, suggesting vertical structures were used to integrate societies characterized by increasing complexity and diversity. Elsewhere, communities drew on the same range of material culture to establish age- and gender-based identities. By contrast, no cemeteries have been found in some regions characterized by settlement nucleation (e.g. Cucuteni-Tripolye) or dispersion (e.g. south Bulgaria), where intra-mural burial continued. In the post-climax period, the mortuary domain gained in importance relative to the settlement domain, with barrow-dominated landscapes in eastern Hungary and parts of the east Balkans.

  FIG. 8.4. Spatial scale of mortuary practices (Chapman 1983, fig. 8.3).

  Corporate groups gained in importance with the development of a major mortuary domain or a significant level of settlement planning. Interestingly, the conjoint development of both is rare: an exception is north-east Bulgaria, with small cemeteries often located near their respective tells (e.g. Goljamo Delchevo). This suggests that channelling corporate power into one domain or the other was a form of constraint upon that power by households or individuals. To put these power relations into a wider context, we now turn to the landscape and the networks crossing it.

  LANDSCAPES AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

  The social relations of a person may be conceived as a network of nested sets of contacts, most intensive near the home settlement and decreasing with distance. Larger, seasonal festivals would have brought together extended families from many homesteads—perhaps an entire breeding network—providing a regular context for exchange and marriage negotiations. The larger groups of people living on tells also formed part of overlapping breeding networks, perhaps linking a tell particularly closely to four or five others. In each type of network, low-level ‘centres’ emerged, perhaps for decades or longer, as focal points for the communal identity of dispersed kin networks.

  The choice of place for such an accumulation of communal memories was a vital decision. Examples from dispersed networks included the foraging centre at Lepenski Vir, with its concentration of locally produced and exotic things (Chapman 2000, ch. 6); Dolnoslav, with its concentration of ceramic and figurine fragments, which was central to dispersed tell networks; the Vinča tell, with ritual innovations in its early phase (Chapman 1998); and the large horizontal Turdaş settlement, with its rich pit deposits.

  Settlement density was an important factor in local networks (Chapman 2000). Whilst the distance between early Neolithic tells ranged between 10km (the Struma valley) and 25km (north Bulgaria), the density of the east Balkan late Chalcolithic settlement network meant a tell was rarely more than 5–8km from its neighbours (Dennell and Webley 1975, fig. 8.3) (here Fig. 8.3b). The implications of increased density were more informal contacts and a wider choice of social relations for individuals, potentially leading to tensions or clashes of loyalty within households or settlements. Closer relations stimulated increasing demand for objects to materialize these relations. The overall impact was undoubtedly a growing social complexity—materialized in the complex designs of climax-period ceramics, figurines, and metalwork. However, as a counter-example, late Neolithic tells and large horizontal settlements in eastern Hungary, with their rich material culture, were often separated by 20–25km, whilst the peak of copper and gold deposition occurred at a time of pronounced settlement dispersion (Sherratt 1982, 1983).

  The negative side of increasing density and complexity was the increase in tensions between (in)dividuals and groups. Much warfare may simply be triggered by the failure to reciprocate an enchained gift with an object of suitable fame, the theft of another’s sexual partner or a copper axe, or the excessive usage of inter-communal resources. Significantly, the quantity and diversity of weapon-tools and defensive structures steadily increased from the early farming to the climax period, when there was a quantum leap in defences and the first appearance of true weapons (Chapman 1999). The emergence of a new kind of person—the ‘warrior’—as attested at the Varna cemetery confirms the importance of local warfare.

  At the regional scale of exploration and contacts, people discovered the environmental diversity of the Balkans, especially complementary resources offered by lowlands and adjacent uplands (Chapman 2008). Early farmers were clearly familiar with both areas. Although we know more of their lives in the lowlands of the Thracian valley or the Alföld plain, they also settled in inter-montane basins in the Rhodopes and the Carpathians, making seasonal visits to even higher zones and depositing lowland material culture in rocky places. Conversely, lowland dwellers regularly brought a part of the mountains to the lowlands: lithic raw materials, fine stones, or pigments. There was also exchange between different lowland zones; for instance, exotic, high-quality, honey-coloured flint for macroblade production marked the start of the Neolithic over much of the Balkans. Thus, one opposition regularly drawn on to structure social relations was that between local and exotic objects, whether from the uplands or the distant lowlands. The abundance of shiny and colourful exotic raw materials and objects lent visual diversity to lowland settlements, but could also become a basis for ritual power through control over the exotic (Chapman 2007).

  Later expeditions for metal took mature farming groups far outside the lowland zone. Discovering such a remote and small-scale source of copper as Rudna Glava (Jovanović 1982) implies systematic prospection of uplands, leading to the discovery of many other lithic sources for tools and ornaments. For example, an increased range of raw materials was used more intensively by Vinča groups in comparison with Starčevo early farmers (Chapman 1981, 77–83). Exchange of exotic materials in the climax Copper Age, whether pigments, stone ornaments and figurines, salt, shells (see Chapman and Gaydarska, this volume), or flint and metal objects, enchained increasingly wide groups of people. The mines and surface exposures of north-east Bulgaria provided high-quality flint for macroblade production in the south Balkans, as well as the north Pontic and eastern Carpathian zones (Manolakakis 2005). Everyday social reproduction was increasingly based on the difference between exotic and local materials. The lead isotope analyses of late Copper Age meta
l objects indicated the use of many separate copper sources all over the Balkans (Pernicka et al. 1993, 1997; Gale et al. 2000). Despite the large-scale labour invested in the Ai Bunar mine (Chernykh 1978), locally deposited objects were mostly made of copper from north-west Bulgaria and eastern Serbia; Ai Bunar thus became one node in an ‘export-led’ exchange network.

  Overall, the entanglement of the exotic in the identities of local people reached its apogee in the climax period. The sedimentation of increasingly strong links to local places challenged people to define their place in the world by acquiring exotic objects through inter-group exchange or the activities of long-distance specialists (Helms 1993). In this way, remote landscapes were often ‘domesticated’ in settlements through the presence of their physical remains—whether volcanic rocks, marine shells, or metal. Intertwined biographies of places, persons, and things in settlements and cemeteries spread across the Balkan landscape are a particular characteristic of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic.

  SUMMARY

  In this chapter, I have tried to give a flavour of Balkan later prehistory—of the kinds of persons comprising a family in a rectangular timber-framed house in a west Balkan open settlement or an east Balkan tell site. The predominance of settlements makes these lifeways quite distinctive from those of north-west Europe, with communal values and principles relating to geometric order, harmony, colour, and brilliance clearly materialized in a vast array of objects in the home and within the settlement. Intriguingly, although exotic objects occurred from the earliest farming period, it is only in the fifth millennium BC, with the expansion of the mortuary domain, that the ancestral basis of communal living was partially displaced by an ideology of material accumulation as much related to individual persons as to corporate groupings.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In such a work of synthesis, I have drawn upon the research of many people whom I have met over many years and to whom I am very grateful. It would be (in)vidious to signal out a few (in)dividuals from that large group of friends and colleagues whose contributions are deeply appreciated. I cannot ignore the contribution of my wife, Bisserka Gaydarska, to my life and to my research over the last eight years. For this, no measure of thanks is too much to give.

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