The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

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  * * *

  * Received June 2009, revised February 2012

  CHAPTER 14

  LONGHOUSE LIFESTYLES IN THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN NEOLITHIC

  JONATHAN LAST

  INTRODUCTION

  ALTHOUGH named after its characteristic pottery, the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture is perhaps better defined by its buildings: there are hard-and-fast rules which allow us to recognize an LBK longhouse from western Hungary to eastern France (Stäuble 2005a, 207).1 In the 70 years since the first major publication (Buttler and Haberey 1936), research on LBK houses has primarily attempted to define functional categories of building (e.g. Modderman 1970, 100–120) and tease out local sequences (e.g. Stehli 1994). Perhaps because of their resemblances to the later long barrows of north-west Europe, British archaeologists have more readily engaged with the symbolic dimensions of houses (e.g. Hodder 1990; Bradley 1996). Both approaches, however, present rather static, idealized views (Hofmann 2006, ch. 3); detailed considerations of how longhouses were inhabited in practice remain rare.

  In the 1980s, knowledge of LBK houses and their middle Neolithic (MN) successors (together termed the ‘Danubian’ tradition) was synthesized by Coudart (1998) and Hampel (1989). Since then, important new research directions have been established, with significant implications for understanding houses. One is the study of the ‘earliest’ (älteste) LBK, mostly in Germany and Austria (Stäuble 2005a), which has raised questions about the development of the ‘typical’ later longhouses and the use of space in and around them. A second research area has drawn on isotope studies of human and animal bones to highlight social aspects of houses and households, such as migration, marriage, and transhumance (Bickle and Hofmann 2007). Finally, the growing evidence for violence, both real and symbolic, in the late LBK (e.g. Orschiedt and Haidle 2006; Bentley et al. 2008) should inform our understanding of the transition to the MN, with its regionally distinctive house forms.

  The LBK spans the second half of the sixth millennium BC, whilst the regionally circumscribed MN cultures (including Lengyel, Stichbandkeramik, Großgartach, Rössen, and Villeneuve-Saint-Germain) cover the first half of the fifth millennium. For the purposes of this chapter, I divide the LBK into three stages–early (älteste, c. 5500–5250 BC), middle (sometimes termed ‘Flomborn’, c. 5300–5150 BC) and late (c. 5150–4950 BC)—whilst noting that questions remain about the chronology of the early stage (Gronenborn 1999, 153–156), the duration of the overlap between early LBK and Flomborn (Cladders and Stäuble 2003), and regional variations at the end of the LBK (Farruggia 2002).

  HOUSES AS MICROCOSMS

  Although the traditional LBK house typology of Großbau (type 1), Bau (type 2), and Kleinbau (type 3), first set out by Modderman (1970, fig. 12), has been subject to revision and critique (cf. Coudart 1998, this volume; Birkenhagen 2003), observed variation in house form remains limited. The key structuring principles of LBK longhouses include: their rectilinear or slightly trapezoidal groundplan; their orientation, which shows systematic regional variation (Mattheußer 1991); their modular construction, with buildings comprising particular combinations of north/west, central, and south/east parts; the division of internal space by numerous transverse rows of three posts, producing a four-aisled structure; and the presence of elongated pits flanking the long walls. Collectively, these make up a ‘linear house’ with a ‘dramatic effect of sequence and order’ (Hodder 1990, 119) (Fig. 14.1b).

  FIG. 14.1. Representative house-plans: (a) early LBK (after Stäuble and Lüning 1999, fig. 1a); (b) middle/late LBK (after Lüning 2000, fig. 53); (c) MN (Rössen; after Coudart 1998, fig. 93a). Not to scale.

  However, recent studies of early LBK longhouses have modified this picture. In a revision of the Modderman typology, Cladders and Stäuble (2003, fig. 2) summarize the differences exhibited by the early buildings, including: a more trapezoidal shape; an orientation closer to north/south; a different logic to the modules; a reduced number of internal posts, especially in the central part; and trenches or gullies between the long walls and the flanking pits (Fig. 14.1a). The origins of these houses are still poorly understood, but may lie in the Starčevo-Körös tradition (Gronenborn 1999, 159; Bánffy 2004). Whatever their genesis, they formed a stable and widespread architectural tradition and clearly played a key role in creating LBK cultural identity. Around 5300 BC, alterations in house form were synchronized with changes in other aspects of material culture, notably pottery, and with a further stage of LBK expansion. The Flomborn houses represent a sudden development following a long conservative phase, rather than a gradual transition (Cladders and Stäuble 2003). However, the two styles appear to have overlapped, possibly for more than a century, although rarely on the same site. So, rather than representing an unchanging cultural backdrop, house form served to differentiate groups or traditions within the LBK and was actively deployed in creating new identities.

  Houses may have been particularly important because they established homologies between aspects of human society and cosmological principles, as in many ethnographic examples (e.g. Hugh-Jones 1979, 236; Waterson 1990, ch. 5). Their orientation may have referenced a deep history based on a sense of shared origins (Bradley 2001), even though local chronologies and the general lack of evidence for repair and renovation indicate that individual buildings had relatively short lifespans. Thus, in the Merzbachtal area of the Rhineland, some 15 phases fit into a period of roughly 300 years (Stehli 1994). This suggests analogies between the lives of houses and people, with buildings possibly abandoned on the death of the household head (Bradley 1996; Zimmermann et al. 2005, 16).

  However, abandoned houses also had an afterlife. The scarcity of intersecting groundplans at most sites shows they survived as visible ruins which were not built over, and their significance was sometimes remembered for many generations, for example, at Bozejewice in Poland, where a late Lengyel house was directly superimposed on an LBK one (Midgley 2006, 9). Houses may therefore have established links between the different temporalities of everyday life and the world of the ancestors (Marciniak 2004, 131). Some practices varied regionally, however: rebuilding houses on the same spot seems more common in east-central Europe (e.g. Pavúk 1994; Grygiel and Bogucki 1997), which perhaps reflects principles prevailing on tell sites.

  The differences between early and later houses can shed some light on symbolic meanings. For instance, the more open central space in the early stage suggests that the proliferation of post-rows in later houses had no structural necessity (Cladders and Stäuble 2003, 495; Whittle 2003, 138). Perhaps the conspicuous consumption of timber and the increased labour reflected a need for larger social networks in the cont
ext of settlement expansion and forest clearance. Internal posts often play an important symbolic role (e.g. among the Toraja of Sulawesi: Waterson 1990, 89), and for Stäuble (2005b) the deep post-row at the rear of the central part of early LBK houses was the conceptual and structural axis of the building, perhaps continued by the ‘corridor’ of two closely set post-rows commonly found in the equivalent place within later longhouses.

  Following the break-up of the LBK, the MN cultures incorporated a mixture of Danubian and exotic influences (e.g. Hauzeur and van Berg 2005). House forms were accordingly more regionalized, though longhouses still formed a key part of group identity and maintained some core principles, such as the cross-rows of three posts. Only in the Lengyel culture, within the area of Balkan influence, was this replaced by internal divisions of five postholes (Pavúk 2003). Within an overall context of greater diversity ‘select tendencies of LBK architecture are isolated and magnified’ in the MN (Hofmann 2006, 105), this selectivity demonstrating the complexity of meanings which the longhouse continued to embody.

  FRAMEWORKS FOR LIVING

  Turning to the role of the longhouse as the architectural framework for daily life, the location of the entrance(s) is a key point for analysing household space. It is generally believed that the main door was in the narrow gable wall at the south/east end (Coudart 1998, 71), implying that access to the house reflected its linear principles. However, lateral openings have been suggested on the basis of phosphate analysis (Stäuble and Lüning 1999) and recurrent patterning of finds in the flanking pits on some sites (e.g. Hachem 2000, 310) (Fig. 14.2b), suggesting more flexible patterns of movement.

  FIG. 14.2. Different models of household space in the LBK: (a) layout of pits within the Hofplatz in the Merzbachtal (after Boelicke 1982, 24f); (b) discard patterns in the flanking pits at Cuiry-lès-Chaudardes (after Hachem 2000, fig. 1; heavier shading marks finds concentrations); (c) fenced enclosure attached to an SBK longhouse at Atting-Rinkam