The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  FIG. 35.3. Copper axe from Osijek, Croatia (after Jovanović 1979).

  FIG. 35.4. Giurgiulesti, Moldova, grave 4: plans, section, and funerary equipment

  (after Govedarica 2004).

  A key theme is the relationship between graves, hoards, and single deposits (Lichardus-Itten 1991, 757–758), especially since the same metal categories, like the copper axes, golden lozenges, plates, and pendants, came from all three. Indeed, the so-called ‘cenotaphs’ from Varna and other cemeteries in the west-Pontic region are effectively hoards in a funerary context (see Chapman 2000). It must be mentioned that there is an independent structural similarity with other regions and periods: valuable object deposition in graves and hoards is known from the Nordic and Atlantic Bronze Age, Urnfield central Europe, and the Carpathian basin in the late Bronze Age, indicating a deep-seated correlation between burial and hoarding which is cross-cultural and supra-regional. One can infer that the Varna cemetery and its contemporary hoards are just one among many similar patterns in later European prehistory.

  Whilst metal objects had a fluctuating value, it was essential that the rarity of the material and the skills needed to produce it were not available readily. Through limiting people’s ability to access and produce metals themselves, and the events during which it was produced and used, and by controlling the amount available by conspicuously removing some of it from circulation, elites were able to maintain the management of it. It was crucial that metal retained its performative quality, such as the significance of its use in funerary customs, for social power and control to be maintained. The graves and hoards therefore demonstrate sharp inequality over wide parts of Europe in the fifth and early fourth millennia BC which can be best explained in terms of social stratification. Evidence from fifth-millennium BC settlements can be added for many parts of south-eastern Europe, with new functional ideas on tell sites and their surrounding outer settlements and perhaps satellite flat sites opening up new perspectives (e.g. Pietrele: Hansen et al. 2007), with proven inequalities within settlements in the form of house sizes (e.g. Durankulak: Todorova 2002), two-storey houses (Nikolov 2004), and evidence for pottery inventories of larger houses differing from their neighbours in both quality and quantity (e.g. Drama: Lichardus et al. 2003).

  This pattern of robust social institutions and enhanced complexity, of lineages and powerful individuals, of networks and bonds, remains persistent in time and space, albeit fluctuating in intensity. Social and economic peaks, such as at Varna and the human groups and individuals behind the described hoards, or the ‘mega-villages’ of the middle and late Tripolye in the Ukraine (Kruts et al. 2001; Kohl 2007), exist for centuries and then vanish. However, we also see depressions in that picture, such as with the aforementioned geographical shift in metallurgical activity from east to west. Another example are the centuries during the middle Copper Age when institutions, networks, and international exchange are partly interrupted, and a system of symbols and values other than metals and exotic objects finds its expression. Lavish graves and hoards disappear, but there can be no doubt that social complexity continues on some level, even if archaeologically it is more difficult to understand. The tide turns again in the late Copper Age, at least regionally, when princely graves like Velika and Mala Gruda or Podgoritsa-Tološi, all in Montenegro, and strongly hierarchic settlements like Vučedol in Serbia, appear in the first quarter of the third millennium BC (Harrison and Heyd 2007), foreshadowing Bronze Age consistency. The European Copper Age was not a stable world, and this system of inherent instability is one of its characteristics, beside the megaliths, recurrent steppe infiltrations, and the ideologies, to name but the more prominent.

  As for the societal impact of early metallurgy, there can be no doubt that any exploitation of ores—particularly in the early copper mines of Aibunar and Medni Rid (Burgas) in Bulgaria, and Rudna Glava and Majdanpek in Serbia—along with ore preparations, the reduction process, and then casting, occurs at a scale in excess of the self-sufficient hamlet or village. It requires the division of labour, specialization, and the year-round availability of skilled individuals. The marketing and exchange of finished products beyond the local scale demands even more specialists, likely absent from their kin for long periods, and creates new or enhanced networks and communication routes. The restricted availability of metals, their resultant social prestige, and their cumulative value as a contributor to and indicator of wealth would all have created and enhanced their significance.

  Whilst this is true, closed statements about the role of metals solely creating a vertical social stratification are now recognized as outmoded and simplistic, and what can also be seen is horizontal differentiation. The origin of metal production and use is not the only trigger of a new Copper Age epoch with a differentiated social system, although it is one of the more important dimensions. Margareta Primas’s statement about the Bronze Age (1996) can be applied earlier—metals were the grease which kept the Copper Age motor running.

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