The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Sommer, R.S., Benecke, N., Lougas, L., Nelle, O., and Schmölcke, U. 2011. Holocene survival of the wild horse in Europe: a matter of open landscape? Journal of Quaternary Science 26, 805–812.

  Stevens, C.J. and Fuller, D.Q. 2012. Did Neolithic farming fail? The case for a Bronze Age agricultural revolution in the British Isles. Antiquity 86, 707–722.

  Thomas, J. 2003. Thoughts on the ‘repacked’ Neolithic Revolution. Antiquity 77, 67–74.

  Thomas, J. 2008. The Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Britain. In J. Pollard (ed.), Prehistoric Britain, 58–89. Oxford: Blackwell.

  Tresset, A. and Vigne, J.-D. 2007. Substitution of species, techniques and symbols at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in western Europe. In A. Whittle and V. Cummings (eds), Going over: the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in north-west Europe, 189–210. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Proceedings of the British Academy 144).

  van der Veen, M. and Fieller, N. 1982. Sampling seeds. Journal of Archaeological Science 9, 287–298.

  Whittle, A., Healy, F., and Bayliss, A. (eds) 2011. Gathering time: Dating the early Neolithic enclosures of southern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxbow.

  Woodman, P.C., Anderson, E., and Finlay, N. 1999. Excavations at Ferriter’s Cove, 1983–85: Last foragers, first farmers in the Dingle Peninsula. Bray: Wordwell.

  Zeiler, J. 2006. Mammals. In L.P.L. Kooijmans and P.F.B. Jongste (eds), Schipluiden: a Neolithic settlement on the Dutch North Sea coast c. 3500 cal BC, 375–420. Leiden: Leiden University (Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia 37/38).

  CHAPTER 23

  THE NEOLITHIC YEAR

  DIMITRIJ MLEKUŽ

  INTRODUCTION

  HUMAN activity is not only embedded in the long-term unfolding of history, but also in more repetitive daily and seasonal cycles. The impressive achievements of environmental archaeology—in developing tools and approaches for determining the seasonality of a site (from the presence or absence of certain organic finds to physical indices on the bones and teeth of animal remains, or, more recently, stable isotope analysis)—have assisted in interpreting sequences of events throughout the year (e.g. Blaise and Balasse 2011; Pike-Tay et al. 2004; Valamoti 2007). Whilst these approaches identify discrete blocks of time, and their associated seasons and tasks, they have yet to consider the wider implications of these sequences of activity for long-term change.

  As a result, seasonality serves only as an ecological backdrop to pre-industrial communities which are presented as timeless, locked in an ever-returning agrarian year and living outside of history. But how do the repetitive tasks of the yearly cycle relate to each other? How do they structure relations between people, other social agents, and the material world: and how does history emerge from those relations? This paper is concerned with the way in which the rhythmic temporality of the yearly course was woven into the way European Neolithic people lived, experienced, and transformed their worlds. It examines how routine social practices structured within the yearly cycle extended their duration to the life-courses of people and objects, and to generational and longer-term changes. Its main point of departure is the concept of ‘being in the world’, or the dwelling perspective (Heidegger 1962; Ingold 2000), where human experience consists of relationships with other people, other social agents, and the material world, and is performed through tasks and activities which change the material world and thereby extend their effects beyond their immediate execution.

  MUSIC OF SOCIAL LIFE

  Life consists of a continuous flow of daily tasks. People’s time is consumed by these, no matter how insignificant or trivial they might seem. Walking, cooking, caring for children and animals, attending plants, hunting, building, and talking are all part of this flow, and are activities which perpetuate life and create histories. We are born into this flow and begin to participate in it from the beginning of our lives. But those tasks are not isolated, discrete events, like beads on a string; they are more akin to music. In music, we do not hear isolated tones, but rather tune, as Husserl (1964) illustrated in his highly influential work on the phenomenology of time consciousness, and tune is created by repeatedly remembering past tones (retention) and anticipating the next (protention). Analogously, every task ‘has its own thickness and temporal spread’ (Gell 1992, 223). They make sense only when related to those already performed and those to be performed. Hence, life is not just a succession of isolated seasonal tasks, but a flow of tasks implicitly or explicitly related to one another. Each task is made possible by past tasks—and future tasks give it purpose. This network or ‘referential system’ (Gosden 1994) unfolds over space and time.

  Tasks have their own specific temporalities which emerge from the interaction between people and the material world around them. The temporality of tasks is inherently social, the result of attending, adjusting, and timing our acts in relation to other agents and rhythms of the material world. Tim Ingold (1993, 2000, 196–197) calls this process ‘resonance’. Just as music emerges from the interactive attention of musicians to each other and their instruments, social life emerges from the mutually attentive performance of social agents and the world around them. But this resonance is not only with other humans. By performing tasks we are alert to the conditions and changes in the environment, such as weather or the ebb and flow of rivers, adjusting actions accordingly. We attend animals, are aware of their own tasks or bodily rhythms, and we also resonate with plants and their growth cycle. Similarly, plants and animals respond to the actions of people and their rhythms, creating a sociality which transcends the species boundaries. Environmental rhythms imposed from the outside therefore become woven into the tune of social life.

  Mark Harris (1998) describes the rhythms of sociality in the Amazon floodplain. During the flood season people are confined to their houses: this is a time of low moods, illness, and potential danger. But when the water recedes, a burst of social activity and cooperation emerges: people are in a good mood, and this is a time of feasts but also tensions and conflicts. The rhythmic temporality of social life reflects the seasonality of the Amazon and emerges from people’s active engagement with its ebb and flow and with each other.

  Rhythm is what makes music move on and flow. The same can be said for the flow of life. It is the repetition of tasks that creates time, and gives pace or tempo to social life. And through the rhythmical repetition of tasks they become learnt and embodied as practical skills and postures. Through this pattern of involvement with surroundings and specific routines, people acquire ‘dispositions’, or a ‘logic of practice’, about how to go on (Bourdieu 1977). This entire subjective experience of the world, or habitus, does not need discursive formalization since it results from participation in the flow of life.

  As with music, there is interplay between performance and more durable habitus (Harding 2005). The material world has a crucial role in this. Tasks are material practices which involve bodies, things, and places. People till gardens with tools, harvest crops with sickles, store grain in the house, dump refuse on the midden, prepare food in a container, share and eat it, and excrete and dump substances. Bodies, things, and places are mutually constituted through action (Knappett 2005; Latour 2005; Miller 1987), becoming changed during their joint performance of tasks. Tasks leave traces on tools, places, and bodies. Through repetition those traces accrete or layer one upon another, and through this process repair, adaption, modification, or curation occur, creating sedimented biographies of objects, bodies, and places (Gosden and Marshall 1999; Knappett 2006). People also become more skilled as tasks are repeatedly performed. Their bodies accumulate skills, repertoires of stances and gestures, and knowledges alongside the traces of past practices. Rhythms of daily and yearly engagement are thus ‘techniques of the self’ (Foucault 1988; Warnier 2001) through which people are constituted.

  This mutuality is a continuous historical process, a rhythmical flow through which people, things, and landscape can constantly change. Due to the inherently material nature of ta
sks, cyclical repetitions and flow repeatedly constitute each other—and by constantly involving and changing bodies, objects, and substances, the material word is forever in the process of ‘becoming’. As Chris Gosden (1994, 77) puts it, the ‘world created by people will be a world into which their children will be socialized’. Hence, every repetition has the potential for change and renewal. The flow of life is carried on by repeating seasonal tasks, but because people, things, and places change, no one season is the same.

  The non-discursive nature of most practices does not mean they are incapable of creating meaning. Routines may be embodied, but they are seldom neutral. The habitus has an endless generative capacity for producing ideas, perceptions, emotions, or actions. The material world has a crucial role in this. The famous Kabyle house, for example, is a principal locus for the objectification of habitus which gives meaning and significance to daily and seasonal tasks by providing analogies between the agrarian cycle, its spatial division, and the arrangements of material culture within it. The Kabyle house brings together space and the material world with the rhythms of daily life and the agrarian calendar (Bourdieu 1990). Meaning is generated at the intersection of the material world and the temporalities of social life.

  THE TEMPORALITY OF NEOLITHIC HOUSES AND GARDENS

  In the seventh millennium BC, people in Greece and the Balkans created new social settings by selecting particular places in the landscape and erecting durable structures. Those places were centres of activity, and they structured the way people interacted with each other, with animals, and with the surrounding landscape (Bailey 2000; Borić 2008). They were where the bulk of activities, daily rounds, seasonal tasks, and people’s life-cycles took place. Houses and settlements were literally places where time and space intersect and fuse, giving meaning to the flow of social life.

  But there are also marked differences in the way people organized and reproduced their social settings. In some villages, especially in Greece and Bulgaria, houses were closely spaced; people and animals lived together in a cramped social environment. People emphasized the sense of bounded space by digging ditches or erecting palisades around settlements (Fig. 23.1). Houses were not relocated, but re-used the same plots. Cycles of destruction, reworking, and building over generations created large artificial tells.

  FIG. 23.1. The Eneolithic tell of Podgoritsa (Bulgaria) with offsite structures. Ditches, other linear features (field boundaries or water management structures), and anomalies which might represent rubbish tips or off-site structures can be seen around the tell. Gardens were located outside it (after Bailey et al. 1998, fig. 4).

  In the northern Balkans, but also in Greece, we have evidence of short-lived settlements, consisting of widely spaced wattle-and-daub houses (Fig. 23.2). Many houses were (intentionally) burnt down, creating deposits of daub which were moved around or incorporated into pits and other features. New houses were rebuilt elsewhere and settlements abandoned after a few generations. There is a general ‘sense of ephemerality’ (Thissen 2005), marked not only by destruction and the displacement of houses, but also by traces of people and animals leaving and coming to the site (Valamoti 2007; Whittle 2007). Obviously, other activities were integrated into the flow of social life, but occurred elsewhere: examples include herding, fishing, hunting, and gathering.

  FIG. 23.2. The Starčevo phase at Divostin (Serbia). Houses are separated by open areas and surrounded with large irregular shallow pits, filled with daub, ash, and bone. The areas between them were probably used for gardens, animal pens, paths, rubbish pits, tips, and other activities. A pregnant woman and child were deposited in the shallow pits (after Bogdanović 1988, plan I, fig. 5.7).

  But villages, with their new social setting and intrinsic temporality, were not the only innovations. There were also new tasks, based on novel associations with people, material culture, plants, animals, and landscape. Those associations were not the same everywhere, part of a totalizing and unifying ‘package’, but were constituted from a repertoire or interrelated set of ‘new’ and ‘old’ material resources available to people (Thomas 1999, 2003).

  The relative importance of specific cereals such as emmer, einkorn, and barley; legumes such as bitter vetch, grass pea, and chick pea (Kreuz et al. 2005; Marinova 2007; Valamoti and Kotsakis 2007); and animals such as goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs (Halstead 1996) differ from site to site, but collectively embody new social relations. It seems that ‘growing crops and raising animals are not just ways of producing food; they are forms of life’ (Ingold 1996, 24).

  There is a lack of evidence for large-scale clearance in the European Neolithic. Data from weed composition suggest that intensive garden cultivation was the most common form of crop production in Neolithic Europe (Bogaard 2004a, 2004b, 2005). Gardens require a constant human presence, with monitoring, tilling, protection, manual weeding, and manuring. It takes years of care to produce good fertile tilth (Jones 2005). There was also a strong rhythmic flow of substances and animals, including the transportation of manure and midden deposits to the garden plots; taking grain, chaff, and straw back from the gardens; and the grazing of fallow and young cereals to prevent lodging (Halstead 1996, 2006). In short, there was a very close relationship between people and their gardens. This implies the spatial proximity of garden plots to the settlements and houses (Jones 2005). Given that they provided grain for households (Bogaard 2004b; Halstead 2000; Jones 2005), these plots were most likely permanent, if not extensive.

  On extended settlements the gardens might be located within the settlement between the widely spaced houses (Kotsakis 1999, 73) (Fig. 23.2). Large shallow features and pits filled with domestic debris, including burnt cereal processing waste rich in phytholiths, burnt bone, fish remains, coprolites, and the burnt remains of stock herding (animal fodder, bedding, dung), might be the remains of middens which were spread on the gardens (e.g. at Ecsegfalva: Macphail 2007; Whittle and Zalai-Gaál 2007). On the nucleated tells the gardens were located outside the settlement (Fig. 23.1). The physical separation of domestic and agricultural space on nucleated settlements, sometimes emphasized by ditches and palisades (Bailey et al. 1999, 153–154), was a means of creating household identity, together with the control of space within the domestic areas themselves. On the other hand, the close association of gardens and houses on dispersed settlements may have played an active part in the negotiation of social identity within households (Johnston 2005; Kotsakis 1999).

  Environmental evidence provides an outline of seasonal tasks in the gardens: gardens were sown in autumn (Bogaard 2004b; Bogaard et al. 2007; Marinova 2007); spring was a time of grazing young cereals, then weeding, and as their crop was becoming ripe the plots would need protection; intense summer activity culminated in harvesting in July or August, followed by the processing and storage of crops, the grazing of fallow, tilling and manuring, and then finally sowing again in September or October.

  Yet gardens were not only places of production, but locales where people, animals, and plants interact with each other, where environmental knowledge and skills were learned and controlled, and where social roles and identities were defined, maintained, and contested (Johnston 2005, 212). Garden plots were places where the rhythmic temporalities of plant growth, the daily and annual rhythms of people’s tasks, and animals visibly came together. Through activities and the flow of substances, people and garden plots mutually established each other.

  Annual plants, such as cereals with their fast lifecycles, participated in the social world of interpersonal relations as people observed their growth (Hastorf 1998; Rival 1993). Different seasonal tasks gave rise to different possibilities in social lives as they provided fixed places and a diversity of meaning (Evans 2003, 233–234). Activities connected with caring for plants evoked connotations which associated gardens, plants, and other activities with qualities linked to parenting (Brück 2005, 150–151). In this sense, working the garden, caring ‘with almost individual attention to crop plants’ (Bogaard
2004b, 41), and ‘establishing the conditions for growth’ (Ingold 2000, 86) can be related to the care of children (Hastorf 1998).

  Garden work would have been implicitly or explicitly connected with other tasks in the flow of social life: people associated with them have their patterns of rhythmic movement associated with other people, animals, and other places, these then becoming part of their identities. The flow of substances, people, and animals link gardens with other places and thus establish material and conceptual connections between places and activities—hence, the agrarian cycle becomes grounded in different temporalities as mnemonic and anticipatory relations are played out as specific social practices.

  In this way activities performed on gardens extended beyond their duration. Gardens acquired a ‘temporal thickness’ through being the medium for those activities and through the accumulation of residues from the activities themselves. Like Keith Basso’s (1996, 62) description of Apache places, they were locations ‘where time and space have fused and where, through agency of historical tales, their intersection is “made visible for human contemplation”’. Different temporalities became interwoven into biographies through the garden’s daily maintenance, the annual growth of plants, and the agency of ancestors who created and maintained the plot in the past. Therefore, the Neolithic year was only one of the scales of time generated and experienced in each unfolding Neolithic garden.

  The growth of the garden

  The biography of a particular clearing started with the choice of place for the settlement and the act of clearing the forest and erecting huts. The clearing, houses, and garden plots thus provide material evidence which links the ancestors, who created the particular setting, with the people now living there and maintaining the continuity of seasonal and daily routines. People clearing space for the houses and gardens were socialized in such places themselves, acquiring their skill and knowledge of how to treat people, crops, animals, and substances.