The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  The open-air art tradition of Portugal and western Iberia has a more restricted range of anthropomorphic references, principally including hunting scenes and weapons (which may act as indexes indirectly of persons) (Bradley 1997).

  The human body in burial and art: Copper Age

  With the Copper Age, from the mid-fourth millennium onwards, burial customs display both continuity and change. Burials continue to be made in two main contexts: megalithic tombs and caves. In general, existing forms of burial are made more formal and elaborate. In Almeria, for instance, small megalithic cists for collective burials develop into more monumental tholos tombs which stood out in the landscape (Hernando Gonzalo 1997). In Galicia, many monuments were originally sited in visible, landscape-defining places; later ones tend to be smaller and less prominently sited, but now show an increasing architectural definition of separate areas such as chambers and thresholds over time, probably corresponding to increasingly complex ritual practices (Criado Boado and Fabregás Valcarce 1989). In Portugal and Estremadura, increasingly elaborate tombs combining a tholos (domed chamber) and passage are built (Oliviera Jorge and Oliviera Jorge 1997), although smaller and simpler burial sites continue to be used (Lillios et al. 2010). Besides this architectural shift, there are really three relevant social trends. First, burial sites often become larger and include more buried individuals, suggesting that they articulated larger social groups. Second, grave goods sometimes reveal an increasing concern with status. Whilst the abundant grave goods at sites such as Los Millares and La Pijotilla provide the most florid illustration of the use of ritual in defining social class, this is evident to a lesser degree in many other sites. Third, grave goods throughout the peninsula generally conform to a relatively limited range which shows an increasingly stereotypical set of imagery for materializing a social persona: ornaments, weapons, pottery, and occasionally ritual gear. Of these, the first three formed part of a fourth millennium idiom found across Europe; the latter (ritual paraphernalia) tends to be specific to very local regions, suggesting quite locally defined communities of ritual practice.

  One feature of the late Neolithic/Copper Age burial record is the increasing visibility of bodily violence. Whilst in part this may be due simply to the larger amount of skeletal material recovered and analysed for this period, there are also a number of sites which either include traumatized individuals or which may be mass burials following a massacre. The best example of these is San Juan Ante Portam Latinam in Cantabria, where at least 338 individuals were buried in a small natural cave, at least some with peri-mortem trauma and/or probable arrow wounds (Vegas 2007). Whilst violence was obviously known in earlier periods (indeed, some of the most striking images of violence come from battle and ‘execution’ scenes in Levantine rock art), such mass burials may suggest a new social prominence for violence as a bodily practice—one consonant with the increased prominence of weaponry in grave goods and human representations (cf. Guilaine and Zammit 2005 for parallel developments in southern France).

  FIG. 50.4. Small anthropomorphic figures from Copper Age Iberia, from varied sites. a. ‘cruciform idol’; b. ‘phalange idol’; c. ceramic anthropomorph; d. ‘eye idol’; e, f, g. ‘plaque idols’ (modified from Del Rincón 1998, fig. 3.4).

  One of the most striking aspects of this period is the great florescence of small, portable human body representations, known as ‘idols’ in the Spanish literature (Fig. 50.4). These seem to owe nothing at all to the earlier Mediterranean/Near Eastern figurine tradition, which is earlier and whose westernmost, late exemplar might conceivably be the ‘Venus of Gava’ in Catalonia. Instead, they seem to represent the development of varied forms of ritual practice using a range of native idioms. ‘Plaque idols’ were hand-sized flat pieces of slate or schist carved to represent anthropomorphic figures with elaborate dress; they were deposited with burials in Copper Age southern Portugal and Spanish Estremadura (Lillios 2008). Contemporaneously, in Almeria, animal phalanges were carved into small, highly schematic figurines, and cylindrical stones of all sizes were made into ‘eye idols’ by adding a pair of eyes. Elsewhere, small human figurines of varied forms were made and deposited in tombs with the dead. On a larger scale, statue-menhirs evolve into more carefully carved statue-stelae which represent ancestors or cosmological beings; whilst most Iberian statue-stelae date to the Bronze Age, a few demonstrate the Copper Age or late Neolithic roots of this tradition (Bueno Ramirez 1995). There is a clear shift in statue-stelae thematism, with ‘cosmological’ representations, possibly of ancestral figures, in the Copper Age, warrior figures with weapons in the earlier Bronze Age, and more complex ‘narrative’ scenes of warriors in the later Bronze Age and Iron Age (García Sanjuán 1999; García Sanjuán et al. 2006).

  Particularly in the late Neolithic and Copper Age, Iberian human body representations demonstrate the strikingly widespread distribution of two distinct sheaves of meanings. One was a complex of gendered symbols centred around hunting, weapons, and males which was widely shared across fourth and third-millennium Europe. The other, specific to Iberia, centred on the image of sometimes elaborately dressed beings whose eyes are surrounded by radiant lines, perhaps indicating spiritual power. It is striking that hunting imagery and material culture appears to be more similar across broad swathes of Europe spanning Iberia and the Alps, whilst death- and power-related imagery takes much more localized forms. This latter set of meanings displays one of the most notable characteristics of Iberian art: whilst elsewhere in Europe forms of representation generally appear as discrete genres, each with its own conventions about how to depict the body, here visual idioms wash together and cross media so that (for example) ways of defining and ornamenting the body turn up on stelae, on megaliths, in schist and slate plaques, and in various forms of figurines. This may suggest that there was a range of general cosmological concepts shared throughout Iberia which were reworked into highly varied local forms of ritual practice.

  DISCUSSION

  Space does not permit extensive discussion of the archaeological data presented here, but it is worth briefly considering two particular questions: regionality and the body in its various contexts.

  Every time we connect the dots to create a picture of prehistory, it requires a model of a social process creating that picture. In this sense, there can be no purely descriptive archaeology. Moreover, scale is important, even if it is often an invisible parameter of our models. For example, we might explain convincingly why people in a single community turned from collective burial in longbarrows to single burial under round barrows by pointing out how this fits into an ideology of local political identities. However, such an explanation is no longer entirely sufficient if we realize that many communities across a wide swath of Europe made a similar choice at about the same time; at the very least, we need to add a rider specifying some inter-group institution-specific vector of communication about possible customs across an area of this scale, and some reason as to why many of them should have made the same local choice instead of all deciding different things. This has been an important lacuna in many otherwise convincing post-processualist models of social transitions from the adoption of agriculture onwards. Conversely, models which begin with the big picture work best when they can identify a big causal factor to drive broad patterns; it is easy to explain the spread of similar institutions across Europe when one can blame it upon the Roman Empire. When such a factor is lacking, they falter; they tend either to retreat to the level of pure description, to ascribe broad changes to some extra-cultural determinism such as climate change, or (as in ‘Indo-European’ and ‘Beaker Folk’ migration models) to promote some process which in fact happens at the local level—social identities, for instance—as a reified large-scale phenomenon, effectively denying agency to the ancient people trapped within their models.

  This issue is not coincidental but fundamental to Europe between 6000 and 2000 BC, for it is above all a period characterized by the paradox of archaeologically visible
broad-scale changes which happen in a completely decentralized social landscape. We have, as it were, Big Changes, and only Little Causes are available to explain them by. Without lengthy discussion, the best approach here it to look at prehistory as multi-scalar, as an intersection of histories unfolding at different scales. If people work within an inherited cultural repertory of possible thoughts and actions, then this repertory itself can have a history and geography; by virtue of the fact that people and communities do not invent their culture ab novo with each social act, a cultural repertory can be seen historically as more than simply the sum of its component acts of local making. A similar argument can be used to understand traditions as agents (Robb 2008). Individual creative acts will thus both be contingent upon these large-scale histories and able to redirect them.

  Figurines have to be seen as part of a regional Neolithic cultural repertory spanning the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East; Italy, Malta, and Sardinia lie upon its western margin. Making and using small clay representations of the human body, particularly females, appears to have been transmitted as part of a bundle of institutions at the beginnings of the Neolithic in the area; it probably included specification of actual practices in which figurines were used. However, these ideas and practices were continually subject to ongoing, highly local reinterpretation, which resulted not only in the highly varied forms of figurines but probably in their actual uses as well (for instance, the generally unparalleled inclusion of figurines in burials in middle Neolithic Sardinia) (Robb 2008). Moreover, these now local histories intersected later ones. During the later fourth and earlier third millennia, small female figurines generally went out of use on the mainland, but remained in use in many places along the southern edge of Europe (Cyprus, the Aegean, Malta, Sardinia, even perhaps south-eastern Iberia). In these places, however, they tended to become larger, to shift from clay to stone (particularly white marble), and to be used particularly in contexts associated with death. All of these three changes are part of the general transition in how human bodies were used across much of Europe; rather than linking the islands as evidence of some westward influence radiating from the Aegean, as Mediterranean prehistorians often do, it makes more sense to consider them as parallel local developments in which a similar but not identical Neolithic heritage was reformulated locally using selected ideas available as part of a new regional repertory, for instance the linkage between death and the materiality of stone. We can make similar arguments for other genres of human body representation, for instance the parallels between hunting art at Porto Badisco, Italy, and in the Spanish Levant. Indeed, such a multi-scalar interpretation is necessary if we are to explain not only why statue-stelae appear in many places of Europe at roughly the same time, but why they were not made in some areas, why all the traditions differ, and why some (such as Valcamonica) are completely divergent.

  This leads to burial. In the most general sense, burial in the central Mediterranean in the sixth millennium BC tends to be relatively simple; the fifth millennium is marked by more experimentation with elements such as rite, grave goods, architecture, further use of skeletal material, and location. This develops into increasingly formalized burial sites particularly from the mid-fourth millennium onwards. In Sardinia, Corsica and some areas of the Alps this intersected the area of western and central Europe in which megaliths were a cultural option, but elsewhere it is expressed by cemeteries of underground collective tombs, cemeteries of individual graves, or burial in funerary caves. Thus, although it has been traditional in British and Scandinavian archaeology to associate the construction of megalithic monuments with the onset of the Neolithic, it is more accurate to contextualize this at a greater scale and within historical time. The fourth millennium BC was characterized by a general monumentalization of the landscape which happens across Europe both in societies which were going Neolithic at the time and in societies which had already been Neolithic for up to two millennia. Effectively, one cultural repertory was slowly replacing another across the continent. Yet the great variety in ways this happened on the ground suggests that what was shared was relatively abstract possibilities for meaningful practices; exactly what these meant, and how to enact them (if at all) were worked out through local practice.

  Finally, what do we gain by looking at burials and human representations together? Both are social representations of the body, and they provide a lens upon the body’s role in social reproduction. Yet they refer to the treatment of the body in different contexts which may not overlap. In the earlier part of the Neolithic, figurines probably refer to particular ritual contexts; inasmuch as they referenced understandings of the body relevant to other contexts, these involved gender, which is little differentiated in burials. But the two foci of human representations and burials converge in the fourth to third millennia, drawn into a complex of mutually reinforcing ideas and practices. Constructing burial sites, whether megalithic or not, was one of the principal ways in which humans established a long-term, monumental presence in the landscape. It would have integrated ideas about the human body as a means of relating people (for instance via kinship links) and as a substance (for instance through homologies of bone as ancestral substance and stone as an enduring medium); these in turn would also have been involved in the logic of new genres of human representations such as the development of menhirs into statue-stelae; the latter probably represented ancestral figures and, when not actually placed in a funerary context, were used to mark historical landscapes in similar ways to monuments. A final convergence between burial and images of the body happened when the two contexts are used to present a similar idea of the human body through divisions of the body and material culture such as weaponry and ornaments. The emergence of a clear ideal of the body relevant across contexts, as well as within them, marks a new mode of political interaction, particularly focusing upon exchange and display (Robb 2007). As such, if these changes were relevant to self-presentation in contexts of inter-group contact, this may provide a reason why they might have spread rapidly from one group to another in a world without large-scale institutions.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to Sheila Kohring and to Leonardo Garcia Sanjuán for their help in clarifying matters of Iberian prehistory touched upon in this chapter. I am grateful to Guillaume Robin for information on Sardinian tombs and art. Any inaccuracies remain my own responsibility.

  Note

  1.All dates in this chapter are given in calibrated radiocarbon years.

  REFERENCES

  Atzeni, E. 1982. Ichnussa: la Sardegna delle origini all’età classica. Second Edition. Milano: Garzanti.

  Atzeni, E. 2004. Laconi: Il museo delle statue menhir. Sassari: Carlo Delfino.

  Bagolini, B. 1981. Il neolitico e l’età del rame: ricerca a Spilamberto e S. Cesario, 1977–1980. Bologna: Tamari.

  Bailo Modesti, G. and Salerno, A. 1998. Pontecagnano II.5, La necropoli eneolitica: L’età del Rame in Campania nei villaggi dei morti. Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale.

  Barfield, L. 1985. Burials and boundaries in Chalcolithic Italy. In C. Malone and S. Stoddart (eds), Papers in Italian Archaeology IV: the Cambridge conference, 152–176. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports International Series II.

  Barth, F. 1987. Cosmologies in the making: a generative approach to cultural variation in inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Beltrán Martínez, A. 1982. Rock art of the Spanish Levant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Bernabò Brea, L. 1946. Gli scavi nella caverna delle Arene Candide. Parte I: Gli strati con ceramiche. Bordighera: Istituto di Studi Liguri.

  Bosch Argilagós, J. and Martín, A. E. 1994. La venus de Gava (Barcelona): una aportación fundamental para el estudio de la religión neolítica del suroeste europeo. Trabajos De Prehistoria 51, 149–158.

  Bradley, R. 1997. Rock art and the prehistory of Atlantic Europe: signing the land. London: Routledge.

  Bueno Rami
rez, P. 1995. Megalitismo, estatuas y estelas en España. In S. Casini, R. De Marinis and R. Pedrotti (eds), Statue-stele e Massi Incisi nell’Europa dell’Età del Rame, Notizie Archeologiche Bergomensi, 3, 77–129. Bergamo: Civico Museo Archeologico.

  Camps, G. 1988. Préhistoire d’une île. Paris: Éditions Errance.

  Casini, S., De Marinis, R., and Pedrotti, A. 1995. Statue-stele e Massi Incisi nell’Europa dell’Età del Rame, Notizie Archeologiche Bergomensi, 3. Bergamo: Civico Museo Archeologico.

  Casini, S. and Fossati, A. 2004. Le Pietre degli Dei: Statue-Stele dell’Età del Rame in Europa—lo Stato della Ricerca, Notizie Archeologiche Bergomensi, 12. Bergamo: Civico Museo Archeologico.

  Castellana, G. 1995. La necropoli protoeneolitica di Piano Vento nel territorio di Palma di Montechiaro. Agrigento: Regione Sicilia Assessorato Regionale Beni Culturali Ambientali e Pubblica Istruzione.

  Cazzella, A. 2003. Rituali funerari eneolitici nell’Italia penisulare: l’Italia centrale. Atti, Riunione Scientifica dell’I.I.P.P. 35, 275–282.

  Chapman, R. 2003. Archaeologies of complexity. London: Routledge.

  Chapman, R. 2008. Producing inequalities: regional sequences in later prehistoric southern Spain. Journal of World Prehistory 21, 195–260.

  Cipolloni Sampò, M. 1982. Gli scavi nel villaggio neolitico di Rendina (1970–1976): relazione preliminare. Origini 11, 183–323.

  Contu, E. 2000. L’ipogeismo della Sardegna pre e protostorica. In G. Tanda, M. G. Melis, and P. Melis (eds), L’ipogeismo nel Mediterraneo: origini, sviluppo, quadri culturali, 1, 313–367. Sassari: Università degli Studi di Sassari.