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* Received March 2009, revised December 2011
CHAPTER 16
THE BANDKERAMIK LONGHOUSES*
A Material, Social, and Mental Metaphor for Small-Scale Sedentary Societies
ANICK COUDART
IN this chapter, Neolithic longhouses serve as a pretext for discussing social and conceptual aspects of the kind of small-scale sedentary societies represented by the first European agriculturalists. In particular, we are here concerned with the large Neolithic entity called Linear Pottery culture, ‘Linearbandkeramik’ (LBK), or ‘Bandkeramik’ (c. 5600–4900 BC), after the linear decoration on its pots, or ‘Danubian’, after its region of origin on the middle Danube (Bogaard 2004, chapters 1 & 3; Lichardus et al. 1985, 271–305, 338–55). But before discussing Bandkeramik societies and their dwellings, we must outline the role the dwelling plays at the core of each and every society: a topic that has been at the core of my own ethnographic fieldwork for over twenty years.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE DWELLING
The house and the organization of domestic space are material in nature. That notwithstanding, they are not direct responses to the ecological constraints of their environment. In fact, the latter factors are often—in the words of Amos Rapoport (1969a, 2005)—limiting rather than enabling. Certainly, the house is meant to dominate a physical environment, but it serves above all to instantiate the rules and referents of the society that built it. It is, first and foremost, erected and used according to the social and ‘ideational’ norms underpinning the system of representations of the group that creates and uses it. As such, the dwelling shapes the social and cultural entity of its makers (in reality or symbolically) and users (nuclear or extended family, lineage, clan, allies, friends, neighbours, professional bodies, etc.).
The domestic space and the dwelling—where human beings live and move around on a daily basis—structure and reproduce the shared worldview of a society’s members in the mental and the material realms, from the individual house to the society as a whole. The components of the dwelling separate and articulate private and public spheres, masculine and feminine, self and other, the places to rest and to receive guests, nuclear and extended family, pure and impure, dry and humid, high and low, etc. (see Bourdieu 1970, 1979).
Of course it is because they are material and exist in space that dwellings, families, and lineages are socially and culturally sustainable. Anchored in a territory, the dwelling presents a social group which—over time and across generations—sees and recognizes itself as belonging there. Moreover, when associated with a particular way of dividing the world (a sequentia), the topological and geometrical relations—which create a mental map and represent the space inhabited—are conceptually immutable (as we see in the work of cognitive scientists, ethologists, technologists, or specialists in traditional architecture). This ‘spatialization’ is one of the foundations of the ‘persistence’ of human cultures.
Hence, it is my point of departure that a society finds it difficult to change the way it inhabits its dwellings without fundamentally questioning the foundations of its identity and existence. Contrary to objects, architectural techniques and the chaîne opératoire of house construction are normally neither copied nor exchanged between different societies (see, for instance, Rapoport 1969a).
Because the house is both a whole (a social and cultural entity) and a distinct instantiation of that whole (a specific dwelling inhabited by specific individuals), it also carries and produces ‘individual’ meaning. Domestic architecture can therefore lend itself to many variations whilst the conceptual partition of space—as it is lived from day to day—remains immutable. Moreover, a dwelling—a composite object if there is one—combines many technical cartographies.1 That heterogeneity is the reason that individual dwellings may incorporate certain elements from other cultures and are subject to the contingencies of history—but only if these do not upset the underlying spatial structure.
THE HOMOGENEITY OF THE BANDKERAMIK LONGHOUSES
Despite regional variations in material culture, the homogeneity of Bandkeramik architecture in central and western Europe bespeaks an astonishing and exceptional cultural unity across a very large territory (more than 1,500km from east to west, between the Vistula and the Paris Basin) and over a long period (from the second half of the sixth to the first half of the fifth millennium). Raising cattle, ovicaprines, and pigs, and cultivating cereals as well as hunting and gathering, the Bandkeramik peoples were the first sedentary populations in temperate Europe. A widespread and sustainable ‘culture’: the first, and, maybe the last, observable instance of European identity.
More than 2,000 ground plans of Bandkeramik dwellings have been revealed.2 Their characteristics are well-known, all the more so because they conform to a model3 that is universally shared among their builders and users. The Bandkeramik ‘standard’ did not emerge instantly—but neither did Gothic or Romano-Byzantine architecture. It co-evolved with the development of Bandkeramik culture. It is therefore normal that we do not find all its constituent elements in plans of the oldest dwellings. First, the house is long and quadrangular (Figs 16.1 and 16.2). At ground level its plan is a rectangle or an isosceles trapezium of which the longest of the short sides is the house’s façade (a third type combines characteristics of the first two: rectangular in front and ‘trapeziform’ at the back4); that façade faces the region of origin of the Bandkeramik culture, the middle Danube (Mattheusser 1991). Small ceramic house models dating especially to the somewhat later fifth millennium BC Lengyel group give an idea of the superstructure of the buildings, with a roof s
loping off towards the long sides. Second, the length ranges widely from 10 to 45 metres. Comparatively speaking, the width of the houses varies less, generally between 5 and 7 metres (with some extreme cases between 3.6 and 8 metres), probably due to the absence of transverse links such as a roof truss system. Third, the moulds of the posts (that constituted the framework of the houses) are aligned in successive transverse rows of three along the length of the building, together forming three lengthwise parallel lines (Fig. 16.2). Everything points to these being the supports of lengthwise architectonic links, such as are still observable now in Indonesian ‘longhouses’ or the quadrangular dwellings in the Papua New Guinea highlands. Fourth, once the standard of the internal space was well established, the spatial units (i.e. the span between two rows of three posts) organize the interior space in a way very particular to Bandkeramik architecture, and which may be summarized in the following sequence: ‘1x – 2x – 3x’ (see Fig. 16.2.1e). This configuration is not due to a physical constraint, but rather responds to the population’s mental representation of a house. The number of rows of three posts is, for example, much greater than physically needed to support the roof. The shorter the house, the higher the number of post rows relative to its length and hence the shorter the span between two rows. Inversely, the longer the house, the greater the span between rows. The length of each span was therefore not imposed by the techniques used. Rather, it seems as if a certain number of spans was ‘mentally’ necessary for the building to resemble a Bandkeramik house. Finally, the pits alongside the houses (interpreted as construction pits, from which the clay covering the walls was extracted) contain waste materials that, in the absence of the original palaeosol, allow us to reconstruct the inhabitants’ activities and the foods they ate, and also to date the houses and tie them into one of the groups constituting the Danubian culture.