by Chris Fowler
Gardens with their accumulated histories are media through which the agency of ancestors could be felt, but the growth and care of annual plants also testifies to the skill, effort, and knowledge of people maintaining them (Malinowski 1965). Rhythmical flows of activities performed within gardens produce and reproduce historical knowledge and moral wisdom (cf. Basso 1996). The gardens exercise their own agency in the process, as they not only provide the context for the growth of plants, but through their material presence and continuous transformation during the agrarian cycle remind people of the past and serve to shape future conducts.
Gardens were worked, manipulated, changed, and curated. They need constant daily maintenance and a flow of substances to replenish the nutrients in the soil. Through middening the discard from houses is incorporated in the matrix of the garden, making the soil more organic, fertile, and darker in colour (Jones 2005). Hence, houses fed gardens which in turn fed those houses. This accumulation of substances and residues also incorporates the identity of people in the soil of the garden plot as traces then encountered during daily work. Tilling, for example, exposes the buried pottery or bones from the midden, making visible the work of the ancestors (cf. Evans 2003, 45–72). In this way, the garden is never complete and finished (cf. Borić 2002b, 50). Neither would its existence be taken for granted. Left alone for a few months, or even a few weeks, gardens become overgrown with weeds, hiding indices of human agency.
Gardens and houses
The agrarian year can be divided into a ‘production period’ where the conditions for growth are established by low-intensity activity like weeding and the protection of plants, and shorter but more labour-intensive ‘working periods’ which include tilling, sowing, and harvesting (Marx 1967, ch. 12). Grain becomes available only after harvest and the temporality of ‘delayed return’ (Woodburn 1980) means it must be stored for future use, becoming quite literally part of the house. It is incorporated into storage bins, vessels on the floor, bags, baskets hanging from the ceiling, or is stored as sheaves in the roof rafters (Marinova 2007) and in storage pits around the houses. Stored, the seeds are dormant, waiting to be consumed or brought back to the gardens.
Controlling the flow of materials from gardens to storage is an important means of maintaining the identity and coherence of the ‘house’ (sensu Borić 2008). Julia Hendon (2000, 50) says: ‘Storage, whether “utilitarian” or “ritual”, raises issues of secrecy, memory, prestige, and knowledge that help construct the moral system within which people live’. Control is the embodiment of the ties and claims of houses over gardens. In this way, stored grain not only embodies labour throughout the agrarian year but also the agency of ancestors.
Houses possess a different sociality to gardens. They are the focus for the accumulation, preparation, and distribution of food, and as such are places of mutual obligation between the members of a house, and indeed the whole community involved in the production process. Thus the house is not necessarily opposed to the community, but rather an embodiment of the different relations expressed at different times in the yearly cycle (Harris 1998, 78). The transfer and storage of grain in houses is a time when different relations between people become explicit and when identities are contested and negotiated. If the ‘production period’ is a time of shared work across the open space of gardens, then after harvest tasks become confined to the houses. Thus the seasonal rhythm of agrarian tasks associated with tending annual plants also embodies contradictory social relations of production, one based on conviviality and collective production, the other on the appropriation of crops and accumulation by houses.
There were obviously different ways that houses were connected with gardens through the flow of substances and people. Soultana Valamoti (2005) noticed that in northern Greece nucleated sites appear to be rich in grain, cereals, and pulses whilst extended sites are rich in chaff. This is a result of different flows of substances, and different ways plants were being used and deposited. On nucleated settlements, storage of grain in the houses and (intentional?) destruction of houses resulted in deposits of burnt grain. On the extended settlements burnt chaff ended up in the pits, hearths, ditches, and floors. Whilst burnt grain is an index of storage, chaff is a result of dehusking, a time-consuming process which was part of the preparation and consumption of grain. Thus, on nucleated sites, with the clear demarcation of space between the settlement and the surrounding landscape, and between the houses themselves, the flow of substances between house and garden was tightly controlled. The lack of chaff means it was disposed of outside the settlement in gardens or refuse areas.
Domestic waste is not necessarily neutral refuse (Douny 2007). The flow of refuse from house to garden may be part of an ‘economy of vitality’, establishing conceptual relations between both and playing an active role in their renewal. On extended settlements, where houses were located amidst the gardens, refuse was routinely spread on the gardens, blurring the border between garden and house (Valamoti 2005). Remains of deliberately burnt houses—daub—were also incorporated in storage pits or spread around the house and possibly on the gardens (Bogaard et al. 2007; Macphail 2007). In this way, different temporalities were physically woven together. The rhythmic temporalities of house histories and the life-cycles of their inhabitants became connected with the growth of annual plants. Burnt daub was ‘stored’ in the storage pits, dormant in anticipation of new growth, or ‘sown’ in gardens.
The bodies of children were also deposited in storage pits—a practice common in Starčevo and Körös villages—and the bodies of women deposited in the shallow pits and scoops around houses (Leković 1985), possibly in the garden themselves. Thus, for example in Divostin, a pregnant female was found buried along the edge of a daub concentration and a child deposited near a shallow pit filled with chaff (Fig. 23.2). The fact that bodies were not disturbed means they were deposited at the end of occupational cycles (Bogdanović 1988). Bodies were therefore ‘sown’ in the gardens or ‘stored’ in the pits in the same way as daub from burnt houses and seeds from gardens. This is almost a literal citation (cf. Borić 2002a; Fowler 2001) of the activities of the agrarian cycle which evokes the agency of the gardens to provide a caring environment for new growth.
Thus the rhythmical temporality of plant growth as embodied in grain is linked with the temporality of human life-cycles. Grain provides the ‘conditions for growth’ of humans in the same way as humans provide the ‘conditions for growth’ of plants. In this way the boundaries between temporalities become blurred as the garden ‘fuses the cradle and the grave (the same little corner, the same earth), and brings together as well childhood and old age (the same grove, stream, the same lime trees, the same house), the life of the various generations who had also lived in that same place, under the same conditions, and who had seen the same things’ (Bakhtin 1981, 210).
The metonymic connections between houses and gardens would be strengthened by using the chaff, chopped straw, or even wheat grains as temper for daub or mudbricks and possibly straw for roof thatch, as commonly practised by Neolithic house builders in the Balkans and Greece. Through the incorporation of substances imbued with the vitality of the garden, houses might have acquired their powers. Quantities of plant material incorporated into houses were considerable (Stevanović 1997, 358–359). The construction of houses was embedded in the agricultural year. It took place after harvest, when chaff and straw were available in large quantities; but this was also a potentially dangerous time, given that the intensive inter-house cooperation of the growing season was giving way to the appropriation of crops by individual houses.
Peter Gose (1991) describes a house re-thatching ritual in the Andes which creates more than just a new roof. It is a festive and even carnivalesque (sensu Bakhtin 1984) ritual, occurring during the seasonal shift from the individual appropriation of the dry season to the collective inter-house production of the growing season, which plays out both opposing moralities. Their intersection and struggle anima
tes the symbolism of the act and provides its practical grounding.
The carnival’s recurrence during a significant transformation in the agrarian cycle is connected to this being a time of potential crisis or a breaking point (Bakhtin 1984). The carnival, with its emphasis on ‘the material bodily lower stratum’ (Bailey 2005; Bakhtin 1984)—the ambiguity of identities, the openness of the body, and the fluidity of its borders with the world, including its potential of absorbing, ejecting, and transforming substances, often in a grotesque way (excessive eating, sex, excretion)—represents the transformation of substances through bodies and objects. Death, birth, revival, and change lead to carnivalesque perceptions of the world which depend on an ecstatic collectivity that supersedes individuality, demystifies social roles and relations of power, and generates social growth and flexibility through speeches, songs, dances, feasts, and profanities. With these factors in mind, it is worth noting that large-scale feasts may have been a recurrent event during the Neolithic of at least Greece (Halstead 2004), if not also elsewhere. Thus, for example, in Makriyalos a massive deposit of animal remains was found that probably represents large-scale feasting on domestic animals that took place in autumn (Pappa et al. 2004).
CONCLUSION
Gardens are places where rhythmic temporality is clearly visible and palpable. By tending the garden during the year, people not only observe the process of growth, but actively participate in it. The generative and regenerative powers of gardens are maintained through work and the accumulation of substances which originate from the house, the midden, and animal pens. This flow of substances not only linked houses, gardens, animals, and people in a web of relations, but also created the history of the particular plot. Through the agency of gardens, the substances of humans, plants, animals, and ancestors became intertwined and fed into each other. Gardens became imbued with the vital essence of people, houses, and animals, and substances that originated from the gardens were inalienable to the process of social renewal (cf. Fowler 2004, 108). Gardens thus formed a complex amalgam of temporalities and relations created through the rhythmical flow of substance. Here, temporalities are materialized through the agency of the gardens. They provide ‘material metaphors’ (Brück 2004) which are used to produce analogical relations between different tasks and temporalities. Gardens are chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981), nexuses where time is brought together and where representation can emerge. Abstract aspects of social life—cosmological and social generalizations, ideas and symbols—take on flesh and blood here, permitting the imaging power of metaphors to do their work. By bringing objects to places during the rhythmical pattern of activities, the chronotope mediates the transfer of meanings and creates temporal relationships. In this way the flows of tasks and mutuality become vehicles for collective representations about past, personal or group identity, and cosmology.
But the rhythm of seasonal tasks associated with tending annual plants has a breaking point—the harvest—which marks a shift in the flow of activities and substances, and correspondingly, in social relations. Harvest is the time of abundance, of feasts, but it also marks the shift of activities and flows of substances from garden to house, with a corresponding negotiation of social relations and identities. This transition may be associated with the special time of the carnival, where ambiguities embodied in the agricultural year become exposed, celebrated, mocked, and subverted. Carnival implies a change from stability to new possibilities. It is a time ‘out of time’ when substances acquire new forms and where carnivalesque forces of laughter and parody provide the potential for renewal, new growth, and change. Yet structure and tradition always dominate this creativity, for the carnivalesque feast also retains, reinvents, and restores the past (cf. Borić 2002b, 59–60). New and old are fused together as the cycle of seasonal tasks starts, even if people, gardens, and houses are not the same as they were last year.
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