The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  CONSUMPTION

  Ornaments are usually associated with living people. In archaeological contexts, the link is more complex (see below), but there can be little doubt that Spondylus was worn as jewellery, as part of costume, or ceremonial regalia. Arms, ankles, and necks are the body parts most commonly associated with rings, pendants, and beads; belts and headgear are less frequent. Whilst men, women, and children wore Spondylus ornaments, experimental work suggests that most rings could have been worn only by children or placed on the arm during childhood (Gaydarska et al. 2004).

  So far, there are only two areas where Spondylus ornaments are entirely related to the living—Greece and the east Adriatic coast—significantly, both areas of the shell’s origin. By contrast, in areas furthest from these coasts, such as the western LBK, shell ornaments almost exclusively related to burials (Fig. 33.1). The few exceptions (K. Fowler 2004; Müller 1997) cannot overturn this striking difference in consumption. The communities between these two poles were using Spondylus in the domain of both the living and the dead (for regional variations, see Müller 1997). A few key points, however, are noteworthy.

  All phase 1 finds from Greece and the Balkans derived from settlements, where intramural burials are rare (Halstead 1993; Hourmouziades 1979). In phase 2, the late sixth millennium extramural cemeteries provide a new context for increased ornament consumption, as at Botoš, Cernica, Durankulak, and in the Carpathian Basin. One can consider the overwhelming Spondylus deposition in phase 3 burials (Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary) as a cultural norm, but the rare Spondylus hoards such as Galabnik, Kozludža, Ražanac, Karbuna (Chapman 2000, 246–254), Szekszard-Palanki-hegy (Siklósi 2004), and Bernburg (Willms 1985), although differing in number and type of Spondylus objects and associated finds, nevertheless identify the shell as a highly valued resource for social negotiation and prestige accumulation outside the burial sphere.

  THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ORNAMENTS

  Ornament biography portrays the tension between group values and the personal identity of the wearer. Whilst we can rarely tell if an ornament or set was created specifically for one individual, once the object(s) become directly associated with one person, a series of discourses opens up about age-sex classes, kinship, status, rites of passage, the exotic, intertribal communication, personhood, and the boundaries of the body (Stig Sørensen 2000). Emphasizing the collective, Newell et al. (1990, 79) propose that ornaments denote group membership and signify a group’s internal ordering and structure. For the individual, ornaments are so close to the human body, that they become an indissociable part of that specific social persona (Riggins 1994). Ornaments encode the quality and differential degrees of human-ness, dependent upon a scale of values expressed through style. There will be differences in the value of a fired clay and a shell pendant, or one made of marble. In this way, ornaments are the locus for potential conflict, since cultural priorities are not necessarily accepted by everyone—style is inherently political.

  Ornament materials are a visually significant aspect of style, providing insights into the relationship between persons and exotic origins. Ornaments from freshwater molluscs emphasize local place-value and the familiar, those of marine shells highlight the Other and the foreign. Whilst the familiar was part of local identity, materials brought from afar required ‘domestication’ before safe use so close to the body. The dangers of foreign materials were reduced through transformation into material culture, achieved aesthetically—by creating regular, harmonious forms (Helms 1993), and socially—through the co-emergence of the objects and their contexts of use (e.g. public ceremonies).

  In addition, the aesthetics of object colour and brilliance were shared by many Balkan Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities (Chapman 2006, 2007), as well as the LBK. Spondylus shells can range from snow-white to deep red through white, off-white, yellow, pink, and red. Grinding and chipping away successive layers constantly reveals new colours which can be selected as the surface colour of the ornament. Surface grinding and polishing, most dazzling in the highly polished bracelets of the Varna and Durankulak cemeteries, contrasts with the dull, pitted, and extremely rough surfaces of LBK pendant blanks.

  It is also important to distinguish between a single ornament worn on its own, and a set of multiple elements, which would look out of place if worn singly. The formation of sets opens further possibilities concerning origins and time (Jones 2002; Woodward 2002). Some homogeneous necklaces were formed of items perhaps made from one shell by the same person in one operation. More varied necklaces consisted of beads of different materials from varied sources and perforated by different persons over a much longer time. Moreover, some beads are worn, perhaps betokening heirloom status, whilst others are in mint condition, seemingly produced shortly before the creation of the set (e.g. in some Varna graves, Chapman and Gaydarska, in prep.). The extreme wear of many Spondylus objects in the Paris Basin may be associated with ancestral qualities.

  Central to ornament use is their display in the appropriate context, such as a rite of passage. Sets such as necklaces enhance an individual and also partly constitute them, whilst connoting relationships with other persons by sharing matching necklace parts. Those with insider knowledge could read off meaning from the overall form, ordering, and constituent parts of necklaces, thus putting the wearers into a multidimensional social context. C. Fowler (2004, 103) sees personal decorations as changing the nature of the person by providing a new identity, new perspectives, and a different sense of self. This occurs because each artefact provides a relational position for persons in the wider society. Craik (1994) observes that clothes are activated as much by their wearing as bodies are activated by the clothes they wear, and this goes for ornaments, too.

  THE PLACE OF SPONDYLUS IN WIDER EXCHANGE NETWORKS

  Possibly the best summary of Neolithic exchange networks was written 30 years ago by David Clarke (1979, 287): ‘this complex distribution could be sustained only in the context of very active and well-organised systems of interlinked ceremonial gift exchange cycles’. Items included ‘pigs, dogs, axes, shells, teeth, boar’s tusks, ochre, pitch, furs, feathers, amber, beads, bracelets, pots, obsidian, copper trinkets and display gear, selected artifacts and cereals’ (to which we may add ‘lithics’), items ‘required for the continuous rites of passage of tribesmen’s life-cycle’. In this section, we trace the changing configurations of such networks in the three phases of Spondylus exchange—the early phase, the LBK peak, and the Greek–Balkan–Carpathian peak.

  In the early phase, foragers and farmers widely interact in Greece, the Balkans, and the middle Danube basin, with farmers’ products deposited in foraging sites (e.g. pottery at Lepenski Vir), and lithics with sources outside farmers’ territories (e.g. Szentgál radiolarite, Zemplén obsidian, and limnoquartzites) utilized on farming sites, as well as in foraging contexts in central Europe (Mateiciucová 2004). There is also farmer–farmer exchange (e.g. Adriatic amber to Bosnia). Whatever the nature of the exchange, materials most frequently moved at local scales; this is true of fine stonework for axes and ornaments, for early copper, cinnabar for pottery decoration, and probably salt. Pottery and figurines were now produced locally (Spataro 2007). However, set against this emphasis on the local is the small-scale ‘domestication’ of colourful, highly polished exotics from 100km or more away (Chapman 2007, table 33.3) One exception is the much more large-scale distribution of Melian obsidian by specialist seafarers as far as Thessaly (Perlès 2001). But, in general, Spondylus exchange fits into the exotic aspect of early-phase networks.

  During the LBK Spondylus peak, farming settlements in north Greece and the Balkans were more numerous and sedentary, occupying a wider range of regions (e.g. the west Pontic zone), including uplands (e.g. the northern Hungarian mountains). The increasing regional differentiation of material culture and settlement trajectories contrasted with the more homogeneous pattern of LBK expansion. In many Balkan cases, such as the Vinča networks, a wider range of materials was e
xchanged over longer distances, with ‘intercultural’ exchange of pottery, more extensive prospecting, and the consequent utilization of lithics, axe materials, and copper from uplands in every major lowland basin. Typically, Balkan exchange expanded, as seen in the peak of obsidian exchange, now distributed from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, and Poland to northern Greece. However, the distribution of high-quality north-east Bulgarian honey flint and Melian obsidian in Greece contracts. Exotics are firmly established within local cultural value scales.

  At least three major long-distance networks supply western LBK settlements—Spondylus (from Hungary to the Paris Basin, in Jeunesse’s tradition A burials), Szentgál radiolarite (from western Hungary to Köln, mostly in settlements), and amphibolite axes (from Silesia to Köln, in tradition B burials). The Spondylus network is by far the longest prestige-chain, covering between 2,000 and 3,000km. The spatial exclusivity of traditions A and B, with their respective differences in exotics, suggests different networks, contrastive value systems, and even distinct forms of personhood.

  The abrupt decline in Spondylus in post-LBK communities was not mirrored in Greece, the Balkans, and the middle Danube basin. Instead, the fifth millennium BC represents a climax in the quantity and diversity of material culture deposition, and in certain technologies, notably the production metals, flint ‘superblades’, and highly decorated pottery and figurines (Chapman 2000). The diversity and range of exchange networks also peaks, most clearly seen in copper exchange (Chapman 2000), with products often consumed in spectacular mortuary displays. Obsidian declines in favour of higher-quality materials suited to macroblade production, from north-east Bulgaria and the Prut-Dniester zones. The long-distance exchange of Szentgál radiolarite was replaced by more intensive mining for local and regional networks. In these contexts, Spondylus ornaments regained importance in settlement and mortuary contexts as one of the most attractive costume elements in a huge range of other exotica, including turquoise, nephrite, carnelian, marble, and other marine shells. In the late Neolithic of Hungary, Spondylus ornaments were imitated in limestione and local fossil Ostrea (Siklósi and Csengeri 2011).

  CONCLUSIONS

  The rise and fall of the Aegean and Adriatic shells Spondylus gaederopus and Glycymeris from no or minimal use in the Mesolithic, to Neolithic and Chalcolithic peaks, to sporadic use in the Aegean Bronze Age covers the period 6400–3500 BC. Whilst Spondylus typifies the Neolithic desire for bright, colourful, exotic, and prestigious personal ornaments, the variations in use in these three millennia cannot all be explained by such a general notion.

  Spondylus ornaments are among a narrow range of exotica ‘domesticated’ through aesthetic codification into several ornament types and deposited on early Neolithic settlements in Greece and the Balkans. Rather than ancestors, these ornaments referenced remote people and places, perhaps through the intermediary of long-distance travellers.

  The explosion in LBK consumption of Spondylus ornaments north of the Carpathians depended on demand for grave goods to embody connections between the newly dead in a novel zone and the remote ancestors. What the LBK communities traded in return for the thousands of shells required each year is unknown (salt, stock?). The steady increase in Spondylus consumption in the Balkans and Hungary relates to three factors: the slow growth of a specific mortuary domain, moderate social differentiation, and the existence of other, tell-based, ways of invoking ancestral presence.

  Two of the LBK’s three most popular long-distance items—Spondylus and Szentgál radiolarite—virtually disappeared in the now well-established settlement microregions of the post-LBK world, leaving only amphibolite to presence ancestral exchange networks within central Europe. The rapid and extensive growth of the mortuary domain in Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary sustained variable rates of accumulation, to which Spondylus ornaments contributed as much as copper and gold. Complete and fragmentary Spondylus ornaments concentrate in late Copper Age Black Sea graves without gold and copper. The slow, regionally variable decline in Spondylus wearing matched the decline in all long-distance exchange networks, save those of metal, in the different worlds of the Bronze Age.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  We are most grateful to the editors for their kind invitation to contribute to this handbook. The British Academy and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (through the Inter-Academy exchange programme), the British School at Athens (through a Catling Bursary), and Durham University (through travel grants) have all been generous in their support for the research on which this summary is based. We wish to acknowledge our friends and colleagues in Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary for their collaboration: Dr Valentin Pletnyov, Dr Vladimir Slavchev, Ms Olga Pelevina (Varna cemetery assemblage), Professor Henrieta Todorova and Dr Todor Dimov (Durankulak cemetery assemblage), Mrs Vasiliki Adrimi-Sismani, Professor G. Hourmouziades, Mrs Litsa Skafida, and Dr Stella Souvatzi (Dimini assemblage). Michel Séfériadès, Johannes Müller, Valentin Dergachev, and Daniela Hofmann all kindly supplied publications on Spondylus, whilst Pál Raczky, Nándor Kalicz, Dan Monah, Chris Scarre, Robin Skeates, and John Watson discussed aspects of prestige goods exchange with us over the years. Finally, Michel Séfériadès, Johannes Müller, and Marianna Nikolaidou kindly provided coments on an earlier draft, for which much thanks.

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