The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Finally, the latest deposits of several sites in the Marmara region (Hoca Çeşme, Aşaği Pinar, Mentese, Ilipinar) indicate affiliations to the Bulgarian Karanovo culture. Domestic structures are rectangular and have interior features such as clay platforms, bins, and domed ovens (Fig. 13.2). Along with the rest of the material culture, this indicates a clear shift in interaction sphere and has no resemblance to Anatolian assemblages (Özdoğan 1999, 218).

  FIG. 13.2. House No. 4.7, Asagi Pinar layer 4, western Anatolia. The building is contemporary with the Karanovo III-IV transition at the end of sixth millennium BC.

  (Image courtesy of M. Özdoğan).

  The Levant

  Further to the east, the Mediterranean corridor in the Levant has been identified as the formation zone of the Neolithic, and although its primacy is currently disputed (Watkins 2008), it nevertheless presents the earliest information of sedentary communities, starting from the Epipalaeolithic Natufian culture (eleventh millennium BC) (Watkins 2012; Cauvin 2007; Kuijt 2000).

  The second half of the seventh millennium marks the end of a very long period of pre-pottery Neolithic cultures which, starting from small hunter-harvester communities, managed to coalesce into a quite distinctive whole (known as PPNB, i.e. Pre-Pottery Neolithic B). The PPNB is characterized by large, organized settlements, extremely complex houses (multicellular and multipartite), distinctive transformative technologies (such as, apart from lithics, the production of lime plaster for manufacturing hard floors, domestic installations, sculptures, and vessels), domestication of plants and animals, and a revolution in symbolic culture manifested in mortuary rituals (plastered skulls), on-site ritual centres, and even regional funerary centres (for fuller discussion, see Kuijt 2000; Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, 57–67). By the end of the seventh millennium this whole system seems to collapse, the Pottery Neolithic is introduced, and the area is characterized by a mosaic of regional cultures, population movement, and a decrease in site numbers.

  Evidence from the Pottery Neolithic on the northern coast is rather limited, and the most significant developments are manifested near the Syro-Turkish borders, in the Halaf culture (c. 5900–5300 BC) (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, 106–115). There are, however, habitation sites in the southern Levant, especially of the Yarmukian culture (Sha’ar Hagolan, Munhata, Hamadiya, Megiddo, ’Ain Ghazal, Byblos), indicating the existence of small villages. Houses are built in mudbrick on stone foundations and can be rounded, rectangular, single- or multicellular (Munhata, ’Ain Ghazal). Reconstructing household activities is difficult, but small circular mudbrick silos or plaster-lined basin installations do exist (Gopher 1998, 209–211, 220; Garfinkel and Miller 2002, 82–83).

  The site of ’Ain Ghazal east of the Jordan valley is an important exception to the general pattern of severe disturbances. Its long, constant occupation for over 2,000 years (7250(?)–5000 BC) and its population explosion by 6000 BC into a densely occupied 15ha settlement with an estimated population of 2,500 support suggestions for population influx from abandoned settlements in the area. Apart from the evidence for ‘public buildings’ and ‘ritual deposits’, there is significant diversity in domestic architectural types throughout the site’s occupation, as well as rich material culture inventories. These have allowed hypotheses on the nature of social transformations and the identification of different households (nuclear vs. extended families, farmers vs. pastoralists) (Rollefson 1997, 2000).

  Burial customs in the Pottery Neolithic changed dramatically. Intramural burials containing one flexed individual without grave goods (in some cases underneath floors, but often in shallow pits dug into abandoned trash) show that the house is still symbolically connected to the dead, but the PPNB custom of skull removal, related to ancestor worship, no longer exists. Separate extramural graveyards, common also in the Chalcolithic (from 4500 BC), probably begin now (Gopher 1998, 218–220).

  Cyprus

  The island of Cyprus is significant for its considerable number of extensively excavated and well-preserved Neolithic sites. Even more noticeable is the idiosyncratic character of its built environment compared to the nearby mainland. Cypriot aceramic cultures were initially part of short PPNB colonization waves from the Levant, but by the seventh millennium Cyprus develops insular characteristics which persist throughout the aceramic phase (ending in the sixth millennium BC) and into the end of the Ceramic Neolithic (first half of the fourth millennium) (Peltenburg and Wasse 2004; Swiny 2001; Guilaine and Le Brun 2003).

  There are two significant patterns in relation to domestic architecture. The first concerns the type of architecture and domestic space in aceramic sites (Khirokitia Vounous, Kalavassos Tenta) and the existence of circular houses several centuries after their disappearance on the mainland (Le Brun 2001, 2005; Peltenburg 2004). More specifically, sites are densely built, enclosed by walls, and divided into segments by alleys and courtyards (Fig. 13.3). Individual structures are arranged in compounds and built of stone and mud (mudbricks or pisé), whilst their interior is usually subdivided by low partition walls, platforms, and sometimes a kind of loft resting on pillars. Floors were mud-plastered, and interior walls were also plastered and occasionally embellished with painted murals (Le Brun 2001, 114–115). The maintenance and constant rebuilding of the houses onto the underlying deposits, usually without foundation trenches, as well as the heavy use of plaster, strongly resemble mainland traditions, but in Cyprus these are applied on a different, circular, architectural type. Burial practices, though intramural, differ from the mainland and comprise single, primary inhumations without any evidence for special treatment of the skulls (Le Brun 2005, 115).

  Fig. 13.3 Complex of structures, Khirokitia Vounous, Cyprus.

  (Image courtesy of A. LeBrun).

  The second notable pattern relates to ceramic Neolithic sites (Ayios Epiktitos Vrysi, Sotira Teppes) and a change in depositional practices. Ceramic Neolithic sites yield rich inventories of useable items from floor assemblages, a practice continuing to the succeeding Chalcolithic, but in sharp contrast to the abandonment processes of the aceramic tradition, when houses were mainly emptied out. Many of these deposits have been related to ritual abandonment and closure ceremonies. In association with the first appearance of pottery and the disappearance of intramural funerary practices, these new depositional practices indicate a shift in the rules of material engagement and the symbolic value between burials, houses, and artefacts (Peltenburg 2003, 114; Papaconstantinou 2010).

  CHANGING THE RULES OF MATERIAL ENGAGEMENT: IDENTITY IN THE MAKING AND THE ROLE OF DOMESTIC SPACE

  Domestic space and the organization of the built environment in the Neolithic Mediterranean constitute the means communities used to make concrete their central choice for co-residency and cooperation (see also Watkins 2004). The comparison of their morphological characteristics indicates great variability: distinctions in materials and construction techniques, differences in repairs and rebuildings, various types of spatial demarcation of domestic activities.

  The view from a large-scale perspective supports the idea that, compared to western regions, the east Mediterranean has a longer tradition in this process, resulting in greater standardization of architectural patterns, greater differentiation and segmentation of space, and a more ‘canonical’ behaviour regarding communal life and its organisation.

  Having acknowledged the importance of that pattern, however, it is significant to understand what these differences stand for.

  The comparison of morphological characteristics, as part of an initial ‘cartography’ of the evidence, is useful for analysing how communities set rules of co-existence and organized their built environment. But diversity is not self-explanatory, and these kind of typological schemes, seen from a comparative perspective, seem to have value only if used within evolutionary-diffusionist models. Otherwise, they reveal the limits of our discourse, leading to geographically sweeping generalizations, overemphasizing variability, and eventually masking genuine local div
ersity by insisting on difference at all scales (Bradley 2005; Tringham 2000).

  The Neolithic Mediterranean is a good example in that respect. Since it is now clear that there is no simple demic diffusion from the heartland of south-west Asia across Anatolia towards south-east Europe (Watkins 2004, 2008; Lichter 2005b), it is also evident that Neolithic domestic space, despite sharing some morphological characteristics throughout this geographical area, acquired different roles (functional–symbolic), developed out of different processes (sedentary gatherers vs. sedentary farmers), and probably came to mean very different things.

  If change is indeed ‘an experience articulated through novel material metaphors’ (Gamble 2007, 278), then major structural changes like those witnessed in Neolithic societies might be better understood as changes in the rules of material engagement that affect both social reproduction and the construction of identity, rather than in material culture per se.

  So far, discussions on materiality have concentrated mostly on certain types of artefacts or raw material, emphasizing their ‘ascribed social value’ and their role in the self-creation of identity (Renfrew 2001, 2004). More recent discussions, however, approach material culture not as a simple reflection of systemic developments but as ‘things [which] were in contest rather than “there”, and becoming rather than complete’ (Wobst 2000, 47; see also Lucas 2008), and indicate the need to explore new ways of narrating the past, moving away from particular occurrences, and towards an understanding of the way things related to each other (see discussion in Lichter 2005b, 6; Schoop 2005, 45; Watkins 2004, 9; 2006; Gamble 2007, 257, 263).

  In that context, domestic space as the environment in which different categories of material culture come together and create new conceptual arrangements and major structural changes, provides a whole new ground for analysis and becomes a field with much greater potential.

  The differential rates of change between architectural styles and different kinds of material culture in western Anatolia, or the changing symbolic (?) role of certain floor assemblages in depositional practices in ceramic Neolithic Cyprus, are good examples of such a new perspective (see Hodder 2006, 237–258; see also Papaconstantinou 2010). Narratives of the human past would in this case focus on the construction of multilayered identities on a local basis, without needing a checklist. For interpretations to be different, questions must be different, and archaeology has the advantage of being able to explore not only processes of inhabitation, but also the conditions under which places became uninhabitable, as well as the reasons why people decided to move on and leave past lives and things behind.

  It has often been said that our interpretations lack ‘the human presence’, that we should try harder and put ‘faces’ in our reconstructions of the past. The truth is, however, that we have never stopped seeking for people, talking about them, imagining their lives, reconstructing their everyday activities. Up to a point this is inevitable, since archaeology’s scope is to explore ‘life in the past’. It is strange, however, that our narratives sometimes make it much easier to ‘visualize people’ than to deduce the state in which prehistoric settlements were actually found, how they were abandoned, what happened whilst they were deserted, or how the rules of material engagement towards specific types of objects changed from phase to phase and were related to certain practices.

  Such stories are yet to be told and could be equally engaging. They could provide a more lively canvas for the ‘emplotment’ of our anthropologically informed interpretative models, and most importantly highlight and enrich the role of archaeology as a discipline in adding new dimensions and perspectives to the understanding of human culture.

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