by Chris Fowler
We need to keep the house firmly in its social context. If we accept the models of garden cultivation and small-scale animal keeping in early stages of the Neolithic in south-east Europe (which worked well at Ecsegfalva: Bogaard et al. 2007; Bartosiewicz 2007), how did this operate in detail? Did house equate to household, and were all houses the same? And what changes in the sphere of production can be seen through time? Was agriculture the motor of continuing Neolithic development?
Two of the most revealing studies so far for the detail of agricultural production at a community level have come from the LBK. The practices of the LBK are often modelled as very uniform, though close analysis can reveal surprising diversity (Modderman 1988; Bickle and Whittle 2013b). Although it could be potentially misleading to base interpretations of recurrent practice on just two studies, both provide very revealing insights which could inspire much further research. The first, Vaihingen in south-west Germany, informs on the organization of cereal production within an LBK community (Bogaard et al. 2011; Bogaard 2012). The site is a large concentration of longhouses, enclosed by a ditch and palisade in its initial phases. In other LBK settlements, the longhouse has often been modelled as existing in its own space or ‘yard’, but here the houses seem closer set. Analysis of decorative motifs on the pottery suggests a series of six groupings of adjacent houses, here dubbed ‘clans’ (and elsewhere ‘wards’). The excavations were accompanied by unusually extensive recovery of charred plant remains, and differential patterns of cereal remains and especially weed species mapped surprisingly well on to the ceramic distributions. Cutting a long story short, the interpretation is of varying access to land and soils of differing quality around the site (Bogaard et al. 2011). It is not clear if households operated on their own within the putative clan or ward organization, but there is striking evidence for difference within the community. This is further borne out by the varying history of the clans or wards; one or two of those with what is interpreted as access to land of poorer quality may have come to an end before the more successful ones, and the people in question might even at that point have migrated elsewhere (Bogaard et al. 2011, 408).
For the second LBK study, I must go beyond the area of my brief, to bring in Cuiry-lès-Chaudardes, in the Aisne valley of northern France. This was an area where LBK settlement began towards the end of the sixth millennium BC. Excavations since the 1960s have revealed a series of settlements along the terraces of the river; Cuiry stands out as one of the largest and longest-lived, with a mixture of larger and smaller longhouses, the latter more often on the periphery of the settlement (Ilett 2012). Animal bone preservation is variable across the LBK distribution; here it is very good. Once again, a surprisingly differentiated picture has emerged (Hachem 2011). In essence, the animal bones found in the borrow pits beside the larger and more centrally placed longhouses have much higher proportions of cattle and sheep, whilst the assemblages associated with the smaller, mainly peripheral houses are dominated by wild game such as deer and boar. We do not know the duration of individual houses, nor of the different phases detectable at this site; nor are we sure whether the deposits in question belonged to the founding of buildings or accumulated during their use (Hachem 2011). In any case, what is significant here is the evidence for difference, whether it speaks for specialization (herders and hunters), household totems or other signifiers, or household success (in the Aisne valley, larger houses are more generally associated with the larger sites).
We do not yet have the detail for animal husbandry at Vaihingen, nor of plant use for Cuiry-lès-Chaudardes, but a more integrated picture, also showing difference within a single settlement, is seen in the later fourth millennium BC at Arbon Bleiche 3 on the Bodensee (Jacomet et al. 2005; Menotti, this volume). We tend only to have summary pictures of subsistence practices for the tells and large flat settlements of south-east Europe. There are preliminary reports of a predominance of wild animal remains on the tell at Csőszhalom-Polgár in northern Hungary, contrasting with the domesticates found in the surrounding large, flat settlement (Raczky and Anders 2008; Raczky, this volume). But what differences were there within the flat settlement, here and elsewhere? How were the very large settlements of the later sixth to the earlier fifth millennium cal BC in south-east Europe supported? More generally, what changed through time in the sphere of agricultural production, and what was the rate and character of change?
These are hard questions to answer, and serve to define goals for future research, and to frame recovery strategies in excavations of all kinds. One change may be in the scale of animal keeping. The case of Okolište, Bosnia, is useful (Müller, this volume; Müller et al. 2013), since it is a large settlement in a confined basin, where the setting suggests the necessity to have kept animals elsewhere. The probable example of large-scale feasting on cattle has been highlighted for a sixth-millennium episode at Makriyalos in northern Greece (Pappa et al. 2004; Bogaard and Halstead, this volume). Although sheep and goats were the favoured animals of the early stages of the Neolithic in south-east Europe, that did not last, and with time cattle became much more prominent generally; the same holds true within the LBK as a whole. The shift to cattle in the LBK has been connected to the changing environment, wetter and more wooded, as one goes further into central and western Europe, but since the same shift is found further south, I believe that this was conditioned principally by social factors. In the LBK context, houses and wards did not exist on their own; they were part of neighbourhoods and other social networks. Cattle may have begun to be kept in their own right as signifiers of prowess and success; studies of LBK assemblages in central Poland also show probable use of cattle for feasting, contrasting with the treatment of sheep and pigs in what appear to be more routine settings (Marciniak 2005). Keeping large houses and large settlements going required social connections and obligations to be satisfied; large-scale sharing of food, presented on and enhanced by arrays of decorated pottery (Halstead 1999), was probably one of the principal ways in which this was achieved. Study of animal bone assemblages in the Vinča culture of Serbia and surrounds, in the later sixth into the first half of the fifth millennium BC, may tell much the same story (Orton 2010).
That still leaves many questions about how larger settlements were supported on a regular basis. There is much work to be done on the detail of daily lives, house by house, and ward by ward. We could look forward to wider studies applying isotopic analysis of diet and lifetime movement to the burial record of south-east Europe, including from the numerous cemeteries (Borić, this volume), and to further faunal assemblages (e.g. Balasse et al. 2012); perhaps further advances in genetic analysis would enable further insight into the history, composition, and exchange of herds and flocks in any given region. There is surely scope for exploiting pollen from old river meanders and other deposits close to settlements large and small.
Not that long ago, questions about subsistence change through time might have been answered with reference to the idea of the ‘secondary products revolution’, in which traction (for wheel and plough), milking, wool, alcohol, and even drugs were supposedly prominent innovations from the south-east from the fourth millennium BC onwards (Sherratt 1981, 1987, 1991). The picture now, however, is much more varied (Marciniak 2011). Perhaps only the wheel still definitely belongs to the fourth millennium BC (Schier, this volume); its importance is not to be under-estimated, if only for the possibility that it facilitated mundane but vital tasks such as shifting manure. The evidence for the use of dairy products has gone much earlier, into the early Neolithic in at least parts of south-east Europe (Craig et al. 2005; Evershed et al. 2008), and now in parts of the LBK distribution in central Europe (Salque et al. 2012). There are unresolved questions about the development of lactose tolerance in the human populations concerned (Itan et al. 2009), but there is enormous scope for further research on both the initial and subsequent stages of development (Richard Evershed, pers. comm.). The evidence for the introduction of the plough remains amb
iguous, and its place in garden systems unclear. Did gardens or more extensive cultivation, or both, support the major settlements of south-east Europe? Whatever the resolution of these individual issues may be, there is no clear signal at present for marked intensification of the agricultural system through time. That is a puzzle, given the large numbers of people that seem to build up in given situations (the developed LBK; the later Lengyel and Vinča cultures; and widely in other parts of south-east Europe by the fifth-millennium BC). It could also be part of an explanation of possible cycles of demographic growth and apparent collapse, themselves another avenue for fruitful future research (e.g. Shennan 2009). I will come back to this below.
COMMUNITY AND SOCIETY: CONNECTIONS AND DIFFERENCE
What was Neolithic society like? The dominant tendencies in interpretation have been to seek and find differences in social position within any given community, and to see an intensification in social differentiation through time; by later in the Neolithic, people are seen as living in webs of more hierarchical social relations than their predecessors. Agriculture and settling down become connected to a steady increase in the concentration of power in fewer hands. Spectacular discoveries such as the most abundantly furnished graves in the mid-fifth millennium BC cemetery at Varna on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, with their rich arrays of gold and copper (Ivanov 1988; Renfrew 1978; Chapman 2013; this volume), are harnessed to this narrative, which alongside the debate on beginnings tends to dominate Neolithic studies as a whole. There are many problems with this kind of account, which I still think distorts the nature of Neolithic history. First, there is the question of how to characterize social relations in any one context, and then there is the uncomfortable observation that things did not steadily intensify as time passes. Social relations in the fourth millennium were not demonstrably more hierarchical than in the fifth millennium (though they need not have been identical), and even by the earlier third millennium BC in the Corded Ware orbit, there is a sort of formalized simplicity to strongly gendered relations within family and other descent groups. Profound changes in settlement and material culture in south-east Europe from the later fifth millennium BC (Anthony 2010a, 2010b) raise the possibility of a series of interruptions and innovations from the outside—from the east—but they also set difficult questions of cause and effect. If there were eastern incomers at this stage (Gimbutas 1991; Mallory 1989; Anthony 2010a, 2010b), were they instigators of change, or did they merely take advantage of radically altered circumstances? This is another part of the unexpected histories of Neolithic Europe.
I have probably been guilty of excessively ‘flattening the hierarchy’ in my previous interpretations (Whittle 1996a). Beyond the area of my brief for this chapter, the speed and range of changes now detectable within the early Neolithic sequence in southern Britain certainly encourage us to think of a social dynamic based on emulation, competition, and probable increase in numbers of people on the ground (Whittle et al. 2011). These central questions deserve another book in their own right, so here I want simply to try to identify some of the key components of the argument.
We are not short of candidates for signifiers of social difference. Many of these belong to horizons after the first appearance of the Neolithic. Even for the initial spread of the LBK, however, it has been suggested that it was lineage competition that drove colonization (Frirdich 2005). Inherited social position, seen in the burial of children with numerous or special grave goods, has been claimed for both part of the LBK in the later sixth millennium BC and in some of the Lengyel culture cemeteries of western Hungary in the earlier fifth millennium (Jeunesse 1997; Zalai-Gaál 2010). Large houses, and large settlements, have both been claimed as markers of preeminent social position in LBK community (e.g. Pechtl 2009; Petrasch 2003); and subtle differences in access to land and soils have already been noted in the study of LBK Vaihingen (Bogaard et al. 2011). The production and possession of unusual, desirable or otherwise rare and exotic artefacts, such as in copper, gold and jadeitite, have also regularly been linked to themes of social difference, broadly from the fifth millennium onwards (Chapman 2013). As well as simply differences in size, subtler aspects of prominent settlements or places have also been linked to themes of social difference. Control of time and the past has been argued to be at the heart of the emergence of tells on the Great Hungarian Plain as ‘arenas of social power’ (Chapman 1997), and special ritual knowledge could have been behind the emergence of the great tell of Vinča-Belo Brdo itself (Chapman 2000, ch. 6). The list of individual cases could go on, but it is clear that social difference has been sought in a range of factors, which we can note tend often to vary from case to case, but which include access to land, control of labour, an ability to accrue possessions, prowess in gift exchange, secret ritual knowledge, and domination of systems of descent.
On the other hand, it seems likely that most if not all Neolithic people and groups had potentially equal access to the means of production. In the case of Vaihingen, it is variation in the local landscape of fertile loess soils that is at issue. Perhaps a key means of establishing difference lay in the ability of households or other social groupings to mobilize labour and allies. It also seems likely that most if not all Neolithic people and groups had equal access to the means of self-defence. It is certainly true that the evidence for inter-personal and inter-group conflict and violence has improved markedly over the past two decades of research (e.g. Schulting and Fibiger 2012), another theme that could have figured more prominently in this handbook. Generalizing, alongside the occasional episodes of dramatic inter-group violence, such as in the late LBK cases of Talheim and Asparn, and the still unexplained and remarkable instance of ritualized dismemberment and even cannibalism at Herxheim (Boulestin et al. 2009), also in the late LBK, the picture seems to be of endemic but fluctuating inter-personal violence, leaving a legacy of healed and unhealed wounds. Could some of the larger and more nucleated settlements, for example in the LBK or in fifth-millennium south-east Europe, be a response to the threat of violence, on analogy with situations in North America (Bandy and Fox 2010)? Could some of the variously ditched, palisaded, and banked enclosures of the later fifth into the fourth millennium BC in central Europe (and westwards) also be a response to the threat or reality of violence? The case of extensive burning of houses at Okolište, Bosnia, can be noted (Müller, this volume; Müller et al. 2013), and there may be others, including Uivar in western Romania (Draşovean and Schier 2010), but by and large so far there is no compelling evidence for the universal burning of whole settlements in south-east Europe (as opposed to the destruction, possibly deliberate, of individual buildings: Tringham 2005), nor for preferring the explanation of defence over other roles for the majority of ditched enclosures (Turek 2012).
What we seem to see over and over again in the varying regional sequences of south-east and central Europe is an emphasis on commonality, in tension with the other, varied indicators of social difference. Commonality exists in settlements and cemeteries, and also in wider patterns of material culture, the latter a factor which tends either to be taken for granted within the culture history framework or ignored simply because it is ‘old-fashioned’ culture history. Generalizing deliberately, we do not see marked difference within settlements in terms of variation in size or elaboration of buildings. Most settlements are collectivities of buildings, and completely isolated houses are rare; in this sense, these are house societies, whether or not all the anthropological connotations of that term fully apply. People lived in communities, even if there were subtle (or in some cases, perhaps less subtle) differences within them. Even in LBK contexts, where there clearly is gradation in longhouse sizes, it is rare to find single outsized buildings, rather than pairs or more; such buildings might have had special roles as club or meeting houses, and the recurrent pattern is of fluctuating layouts through the varying phases of longer-lived LBK settlements.
Whilst we can be fairly sure that people lived or were based in the
settlements identified in the archaeological record, we can be much less confident that the people found in cemeteries represent the whole of the population. For the LBK, this seems demonstrably not the case (van de Velde 1997), and the same should apply to many of the large cemeteries of south-east Europe (Borić, this volume). Those buried in formal burial grounds could therefore already be a self-selecting element of the community as a whole, but with that important caveat most cemeteries, like most settlements, seem to project commonality. There are often lines, rows, or other groupings within them, which could reflect the presence of individual lineages or other descent groups. In the LBK context, there are plenty of variations in the detail of grave orientation and body position, for example (Bickle and Whittle 2013b), but by and large through all these cemeteries in south-east and central Europe there are strongly shared, recurrent ways of dealing with the dead. There is potential tension again. On the one hand, the mortuary arena can be used for the relative elaboration of provision of grave goods, but this took place within the shared space of designated burial grounds close to shared settlements. Living and dying well together seem to be key themes in the history of the European Neolithic, and appear to be key indicators of the sanction of the community. Leadership does not often emerge in a vacuum, without the tolerance of the majority.