ch1_douglass bailey&alasdair whittle

7/30/2019 Ch1_Douglass Bailey&Alasdair Whittle

1/7

1. Unsettling the Neolithic:breaking down concepts, boundaries and origins

Douglass Bailey and Alasdair Whittle

Introduction

To unsettle the Neolithic of central and eastern Europe is

to recognise the limitations of fundamental concepts and

structures that underlie research. It is to ask difficult

questions and to think in new and challenging ways. Are

we satisfied with our use of concepts such as sedentism

and mobility, or domestic economy? Are we aware of the

inherent assumptions that accompany ideas about the

origins of or transitions to the Neolithic? Are we at ease

with the very idea of an entity that we call the Neolithic?

The major aim of this book, besides presenting a range of

individual reports on innovative research, is to ask these

questions and, in doing so, to unsettle our understanding

of human activities in central and eastern Europe from

65003500 cal BC. If, as we suspect, the answers that

emerge expose frailties in many of the core concepts that

we use to orchestrate our research, our excavations and

our interpretive efforts, then what are the consequences?

If we become dissatisfied with the ways in which we

engage the Neolithic of central and eastern Europe, then

what are we to do?

Unsettling the Neolithic is not only a stimulation to

question the coherence and independent validity of

phenomena such as mobility or sedentism, though theseare important issues that contributors raise in the pages

that follow. By attacking assumptions about the dis-

tinctions between hunter-gatherers and farmers, our idea

of unsettling the Neolithic intends to unbalance the

inherent equilibrium of the concept of the Neolithic as an

essentialised cultural and archaeological phenomenon.

Overall, our call is to abandon the widespread

intellectual comforts of generalisation that permeate work

on our common field of study. This is a process which

requires critical examination of the metaphors and devices

through which we speak and write about broad concepts,

such as sedentism, and about explanatory and descriptive

constructs, such as the type-site for a culture. For example,

Kostas Kotsakis (chapter 2) undermines the way in which

the tell settlements at Argissa and Sesklo in northern

Greece became official representatives for the Greek

Neolithic. In a similar fashion, John Evans (chapter 12),

Paul Halstead (chapter 5) and Ian Hodder (chapter 13)

question the soft acceptance of a settlement tell as a

generalised social and taphonomic construct, and Lszl

Bartosiewicz (chapter 6) uses the Hungarian early

Neolithic occupation of Maroslele-Pana, often quoted as

some kind of reliable reference point, as an example of

how much of our perception of such sites may be changed

by more rigorous recovery methods and analysis.

To borrow Kotsakis phrase, the invitation to reader

(and contributor) is to anatomise the concepts of the

Neolithic, to rupture the simple equations between

residence, economy, materials, transitions and origins

that underpin our understanding of central and eastern

Europe in the Neolithic. The call is for a radical re-

appraisal or, at the least painful, a re-thinking of the

traditional models and concepts that have conditioned

the study of this region in this period.

Beyond sedentism, residence, mobility and

settlement

Many of the papers in this volume critically examine theconcepts of sedentism and mobility. Some suggest, like

Laurens Thissen (chapter 8) that we speak of a Neolithic

in terms of semi-sedentism, and that we recognise that

the sites that are taken to represent the Neolithic in a

particular region (for example sites such as Sesklo in

northern Greece) are only one part, and importantly

perhaps a significantly small part, of a regions total

settlement system. Others, like Paul Halstead (chapter

5), make the case that sedentism does not preclude a

significant degree of mobility, that there is a range of

mobilities (daily, seasonal, inter-annual, generational and

longer-term), and that different temporal and spatial

scales of mobility can characterise sedentary villages.

The closer that one looks at familiar, basic concepts in


2/7

Douglass Bailey and Alasdair Whittle2

the study of the Neolithic, such as sedentism, the clearer

become doubts about their applicability without con-

siderable qualification and elision.

A common aim in much work on the Neolithic in

central and eastern Europe (though also to the west) is to

seek out and document distinctions between sedentaryand mobile communities. Indeed this distinction is at the

core of many traditional definitions of Neolithic

behaviour. A significant justification for these definitions

is the assumption that what we understand as sedentism

and mobility can be read from re-constituted records of

homogenous, repeated, static human behaviour of the

past. Importantly, the majority of serious searches for

sedentism/mobility in the Neolithic rely on the use of

proxy evidence. As Nicky Milner argues (chapter 4), there

are substantial problems in using proxy evidence to

support conclusions about human residential activities.

The widely held bioarchaeological assumption is thatpatterns of faunal remains provide a proxy for seasonality

of residential activities. Milner questions these relation-

ships and examines the employment of seasonality studies

in building models of mobility or sedentism. She reveals

the simplicity of arguments that reconstruct degrees of

sedentism or mobility and which rely on seasonal

availability of plants and animals in order to do so. She

notes variations in the use of concepts such as sedentary

and permanent, and she highlights the frequent absence

of explicit definition. The basic question to be faced is

whether we can in fact justify the use of modern analogies

to understand prehistoric plant, animal and human

behaviour.Milner suggests that behaviour that we witness today

(such as patterns of bird distribution) does not necessarily

correlate with behaviour in the past. Thus, there are

important variations in the birthing seasons of particular

animals (such as sheep) which complicate simple

correlations of sheep mortality patterns with human

behaviour. The use of annual lines on oysters can vary

depending on ambient environment. In the end, the utility

that modern behaviour has for understanding the Neo-

lithic rests not on the patterns of the data recovered but

on the questions which direct analysis and fashion

interpretation. Crucially, in ethnographic terms, a societymay have had a significant element of mobility in its

lifestyle, but the archaeological record of that society

may well suggest sedentism.

Equally important is Halsteads recognition (chapter

5) of the possibility that Neolithic mortality patterns of

young livestock may display seasonality for reasons

unconnected with actual temporal patterns of human

residence. Critically, evidence for year-round Neolithic

activity is related not to the type, location or date of a

site, but to sample size and preservation, retrieval

strategies, levels of detail of analysis of dental remains

and chronological resolution of individual excavations.

As Kotsakis suggests, we are very bad at understanding

the logistical mobility for segments, as opposed to the

entireties, of farming groups. The more critical the

discussion that takes place, the greater becomes the risk

that the faunal approach to documenting mobility/

sedentism is nothing more than an exercise to fill-in-the-

blanks of rigid sentences written decades ago, which

themselves followed an inflexible structure and grammarthat have remained unchanged and, indeed, which resist

alteration.

For the majority of Neolithic data sets, the critical

qualifier is the presence (or in many cases absence) of

appropriate excavation and analytical controls over inter-

assemblage micro-chronology and taphonomic process.

As important is the recognition that even in cases where

high levels of attention to recovery detail are present (for

example at Makriyalos in northern Greece: see Halstead,

chapter 5), we are left with a site that gives itself equally

to either a sedentary or a mobility interpretation.

The questions to be asked are fundamental, yet oftenavoided. At a Neolithic site, can separate assemblages of

bioarchaeological data be securely locked together into a

single annual cycle of site use? This is what is assumed.

If there is evidence for activity at a site from each season

of the year, does each set of evidence come from the same

individual year? Can the intense precision that we employ

in our retrieval and recording activities permit us to

answer these questions? If not, do we have any right to

ask about sedentism and mobility? If not, is it not equally

possible that the record we piece together represents a

much more chaotic culmination of unpatterned sets of

activities that, for example, might have occurred over a

period of five or ten years during which winter activitiesmight not have alternated so smoothly with summer ones

as so often presumed?

There are other assumptions that need similar scrutiny.

Why is it commonly accepted that the presence of a built

environment (that is, the presence of what we call

architecture) is a proxy for sedentism and residential

permanence? What if architecture represents nothing

more (nor less) than claims for, assertions of, residential

occupancy when actual residence was not possible or not

desirable? Evans (chapter 12), Halstead (chapter 5),

Hodder (chapter 13), Mills (chapter 9) and Bailey (chapter

10) all question in different ways the common-senseassumptions about Neolithic building and settlement

which limit the current study of the Neolithic in central

and eastern Europe.

In a crucial contribution about the complexity of the

settlement record in northern Greece, Halstead uses his

deep engagement with faunal data to argue that settlement

tells were not continuously occupied by all residents at

all times and that flat sites, such as Makriyalos, were

probably occupied continuously but only for a few years

at a time. At a stroke, Halstead destabilises two of the

major assumptions about Neolithic site typology and

recognitions of sedentism/mobility: the widely held

assumptions that tells equal long-term sedentism and that

caves and flat-sites represent group mobility.


3/7

Unsettling the Neolithic 3

In a similarly incisive questioning of the taken-for-

granted, John Evans investigation of tell settlements

draws our attention to the implicit conflict that tells

present: how could it be that the growth of a tell was so

purposeful and yet so incremental as to be invisible to

adjacent generations? Evans asks basic, but criticalquestions: why do tells emerge where they do and when

they do while they have not emerged in other times and

places where environmental, social and economic con-

ditions were similar? How do we tackle issues of intent

when thinking about tells?

Evans thinks through the visuality of tells in the

landscape, provoking us to struggle with the ways in

which the place of the tell would have been tempered by

the surrounding woodland environment. Drawing on

psychoanalysis and evocations of the unconscious, he

investigates relationships between woodlands and sites.

Evans focuses on woodlands and woodland clearings asarenas of the unfamiliar, as places away from the usual

and away from the familiarity of the settlement and the

tell. These stimulations move the debate towards an

archaeology of the gaps, a consideration of the periphery

and marginal, of negative landscapes in which the strong

personalities of a community (as often supposed, its

leaders) are absent. It is the rise of illogical worlds,

without trends in relations of power and directedness.

Evans provides a critically valuable and extremely non-

economic view of the landscape and its elements, far

removed from discussions of locations of soil types for

farming or access to water sources.

At their simplest, Evans and Halsteads contributionshighlight the over-simplified way in which most

archaeologists have seen tell settlements as centres of

agricultural production and distribution, as centres of

control, or as the creations of social identity. As Evans

argues, the contrast between tell and flat-site is

unhelpful because it sets up the tell as special. There is

no reason to see tells as endowed with greater senses of

place then flat-sites, nor that a greater sense of place was

a part of tell meaning and function. It may be more

important to see alteration in the landscape as a dialectic

of continuity and change within an unconscious world.

Evans tempts us to think about the healing of a communalpathology through transference and, in this way, to re-

address issues of abandonment or change in settlement

locations over short distances. Fundamentally, he

suggests that when we excavate a tell we engage past

social and unconscious worlds.

Not dissimilar are Hodders arguments (chapter 13)

that the anatomical order of a tell is a part of the social

order (and not merely a reflection of that changing order),

that the tell is, itself, a social matrix. Hodder picks apart

the vertical and spatial relationships embedded in the tell

at atalhyk and, in doing so, sees how the anatomy of

the tell can inform us on the nature of social relationships.

Hodders attention focuses not only on the effects of a

large agglomeration of people living packed against each

other, but also on the construction of memories, as well

as on the transmission of rights and properties in a small-

scale house-based society. What did it mean to live in

these houses? How much time did people actually spend

inside them? If the house was an important location for

socialisation into roles and behaviours at atalhyk,did the house unit grow at the expense of the community

at large? Hodder argues that practices within houses

established specific sets of memories that were con-

sciously passed down through time. Specific archives of

memory were constructed within specific houses or

groups of houses; the politics of commemorative memory,

like the politics of habituated practices, were primarily

house-based. Continuity was the product of the

habituation of practices and a shift from myth to history

within commemorative memory. Houses appropriated

generalised myth and transformed it into history, while

dominant houses were particular guardians of the archiveof memories. Having proposed this for atalhyk,

Hodder pushes on: can we see subaltern or contested

memories in these places?

These contributions of Halstead, Hodder and Evans

make us look at a fundamental part of the Neolithic in

radical and provocative new ways. Mills (chapter 9) asks

us to listen to the Neolithic in similarly challenging

fashion. Mills argues that the association of acoustic

information with Neolithic settlement tells is a significant

component of understanding their use and location in the

landscape. Stimulated by work on auditory scene analysis,

Mills redefines parts of a Neolithic river valley landscape

in terms of the amount, range and density of acousticinformation. The result is a new and otherwise invisible

understanding about how people, animals, and the

landscape itself are manifest in various ways. Bailey

(chapter 10) also asks us to follow unusual avenues of

approach to the Neolithic built environment. He suggests

that we have been looking at Neolithic architecture at the

wrong scale, that we have been sucked into hyper-detailed

recovery and documentation and, in doing so, that we

have missed the environmental effect that buildings,

houses and villages may have had on people. Drawing on

debates over specific objects, negative volume,

repetition and seriality, he argues that in a sense it maynot matter what any one house or village contained or

what its function was. Rather the meaning of a Neolithic

house or village may rest in understanding the ways in

which houses were themselves specific objects which

forced people to continually (re)assess who they were

and what were their relationships with others.

Taken together, all these papers urge us to move

beyond the search for sedentism or mobility as a

characteristic of a community or society. Halstead argues

that sedentism (as a concept) is restrictive as it sets up a

binary opposition to mobility; we know that life (Neolithic

or otherwise) is not so simply defined and categorically

bounded. In the end, notions such as mobility and

sedentism may not be of much use to us as independent


4/7


or bounded concepts. Even with the most securely

assumed monuments to sedentism (tells) there is increas-

ing evidence that reconstructions of static, permanent,

sedentary life are misguided. It may be much more likely

that the construction of a built environment represents

claims for residence in situations where actual physicaloccupation was not always possible, though even here we

are generalising at an unacceptable level.

Generalised definitions and classifications of sites such

as tells or flat-sites may do more damage than good;

the difference between the two may only reflect a

difference in Neolithic peoples attitudes to the material

with which they lived their lives and to their practices of

disposal, curation, hoarding, hiding and displaying.

Indeed, perhaps we need to look beyond even the concept

of site as an unsupportable generalisation that may

deform our understanding of Neolithic existence. While

it is not acceptable to equate a site-type with a degree ofsedentism or mobility, it is profitable to address each

place on its own; perhaps it is better to speak not of sites

but of traces of the human and material engagement

across dynamic and shifting landscapes. Halstead prefers

to think of spectra of movements within a landscape.

Beyond economies and food production

In addition to unsettling sites, settlement, sedentism and

mobility, these papers also question a second fundamental

component of traditional definitions of the Neolithic: the

shift from food gathering to food production. Kotsakis

urges us to abandon the still dominant Childean tradition

that conceptualises differing ways of life directed by

economic subsistence strategies. The call is to avoid

thinking about foragers, hunter-gatherers, and farmers

(or Mesolithic and Neolithic groups) in terms of essential-

ist, dichotomous, economic concepts. Indeed, as Kotsakis

makes clear, we know so little about the earliest

agriculture that using it to define the Neolithic is a purely

verbal exercise. Food producing activities need not be the

privileged domain in our understanding of the earliest

Neolithic groups. The argument throughout is that we

should not privilege food producing strategies when we

engage the Neolithic. If food is important, then itsimportance may best be found in the role(s) that it (and

many other materials) played in constructing identities

through the processes, consequences and significances of

consumption: shared or private, open or restricted,

cautious or carried to excess.

Bartosiewicz argues (chapter 6) that it is no longer

acceptable to speak of a single economic strategy such as

domestication as a homogenous, coherent phenomenon.

Nor can we assume that the same attitudes to animals

(domestic and wild) prevailed throughout the Neolithic.

On the one hand, relationships between people and

animals vary though different parts of the Neolithic. Thus,

one could generalise about an early Neolithic defined by

the predominance of sheep/goats with few pigs or large

game, about a middle Neolithic when cattle and pig

gained importance, and about a late Neolithic when

sheep/goat became much less important while large game

became more so. On the other hand, one could see general

variation in patterns across different regions, such as the

long recognised distinctions between the north and southBalkans in which the former contain a dominance of

bovids and the latter a preference for sheep/goats.

Perhaps most critical is Bartosiewiczs demonstration

that the range of species present at a site is at least as

much a factor of faunal assemblage size as the result of

behaviour or diet preference. Understanding the relation-

ships between hunting and animal keeping at Krs

culture sites rests on recognising that larger, better

recovered assemblages more reliably reflect sheep/goat

keeping, while smaller assemblages, less rigorously

recovered, have given the impression of a false impor-

tance of hunting. There is further relevance for attemptsto compare smaller middle Neolithic assemblages with

larger ones from either earlier or later parts of the period

and, most critically, to our attempts to identify significant

trends in human/animal relationships. Furthermore,

when comparisons (between regions or phases of period)

rely on the pooled data from several sites (or phases

within sites) then subtle inter-species relationships are

smoothed into generalisation.

If we are to continue to exploit faunal material from

Neolithic sites, we would do well to follow Mills

suggestions (chapter 9) that we consider animals (either

wild or domestic, or perhaps beyond these restrictive

categories) in terms of different significances. Millsattention to acoustic information provokes us to think in

radically different ways about the bones that we dig up

and which usually disappear into species frequency charts

and MNI statistics. To take one example, Mills suggests

that Neolithic people may well have placed a high

premium on birds and mammals with respect to their

contribution to the acoustic fabric and form of places.

Birds, mammals and their sound were integral to ways

that those places were acoustically defined. Variation in

the contribution of birds to ambient sounds and noise is

likely to have been unconsciously embedded in under-

standings of daily cycles; similar arguments can be playedout through the seasons. Thus, although they may only

be a minor element in the archaeological record, birds

may have been of major significance in Neolithic

understandings of the distribution of key resources, daily

and seasonal cycles and the identities of place.

Beyond materials

If unsettling the Neolithic involves unbalancing accepted

ideas about sedentism and economies, then it also requires

new thinking about the materiality of life in central and

eastern Europe after 6500 cal BC. For Hodder, one of the

most basic aspects of the Neolithic was the massive

increase in the amount of enduring materiality that came


5/7


to surround people. From the settlement mounds them-

selves, to the houses within them, to the pottery and

groundstone objects, people became encumbered in a

world they had made. Hodder understands a significance

of this materiality as the creation of memory that is

indistinguishable from the object world; this type ofmemory is only possible when attached to an object, or a

name.

In the Neolithic, the increased constructed materiality

of life provided a whole new arena for social manipulation

and engagement: that of the material past and the

memories embedded within the objects of daily and ritual

life. Hodder sees the mound at atalhyk as a vast

archive of highly selected memories. Some events were

to be institutionally forgotten; they were stored away

through the processes of infilling and abandonment.

Some things such as cattle scapulae, some obsidian

points, and some burials were to be left, filled in and notseen again. For Hodder, it was a politics of memory that

determined what was retained in an archive (and thus

made available for consultation) and what was hidden

away so that it was not available. Specific archives of

memory were constructed within specific houses or

groups of houses.

There are other, similarly provocative ways to think

about Neolithic material culture. Thissen provides an

excellent example in his discussion of pottery (chapter

8). In his treatment of early and middle Neolithic material

from southern Romania, Thissen directs his attention not

at typology and technology as much as at the feel of the

sherds, and the weight and sound of fragments. He raisesissues of ambiguity in surface decoration, and questions

potential consequences of mistakes made while painting.

In his argument, Thissen is not interested in chronology

or in style or even in issues of identifying pottery

workshops. Instead he writes about how craft-persons

were able to insert ceramics into society, about the degree

of a communitys willingness and readiness to embrace

innovation, and about how innovation existed alongside

existing practices. Thissen proposes that, for society in

the early Neolithic of southern Romania, initial pottery

use can be linked to the preparation and boiling of foods

that employed pre-Neolithic practices. Most provocativelyof all, he asks us to think about pottery in new ways, to

consider how a pot felt in a persons hands or against

their lips.

Beyond boundaries and origins to the flow of

life

Equally important to re-think are the ways in which

boundaries and origins are deployed in traditional

archaeological thinking about the period. In his con-

tribution, Duan Bori (chapter 3) asks us to break down

the dichotomy of Mesolithic versus Neolithic. Boris

request is that we question the boundaries of the Neolithic

and that we explore their potential for porosity and

permeability. Kotsakis sees the metaphoric border become

a territorial frontier, similar to the boundaries of

colonisers (such as in the case of Hellas and the East). As

Bori and Kotsakis expose the sources of the boundary

and frontier metaphors, the long secure distinction

between Mesolithic and Neolithic (as well as that whichseparates Neolithic from Early Bronze Age) loses its

assumed stability. Equally important is Kotsakis argu-

ment that the direction of movement across boundaries

and borders is essentialised. All temporality is suppressed,

and what predominantly are the historically contingent

results of agency are perceived as one decontextualised

entity, within a framework of stability. Kotsakis makes it

clear that, in reality, directions (like frontiers) can be

many and conflicting, and can reflect variable tempor-

alities. At times they can be stable, at other times shifting,

reversed or eclipsed. The call is to move beyond the

barriers of boundaries and the assumption of essentialdirectionality.

Kotsakis proposal (to think of multiple local frontiers)

offers insight on the interaction that is active on the

borders, not only between hunters and farmers, but also,

and perhaps more frequently, among farmers of different

social groups. The call is to look at the strong and

dynamic processes that occur in the border zone and thus

to re-examine the creation of a Neolithic that was clearly

distinct from what had come before. Provocatively,

Thissen argues that we should see the Mesolithic-early

Neolithic as a single historical trajectory: the early

Neolithic as incipient and implicit in the Mesolithic.

Thus, the predominance of cattle in favour of sheep/goatsin the record of StarevoCri occupations (and in the

subsequent Dudeti phenomenon) should be considered

in the contexts of pre-Neolithic practices, ideally to be

explored along Mesolithic dealings with bovids.

Furthermore, Thissens assessment of early Neolithic

cooking pots that may have used boiling stones fits in

with pre-Neolithic food processing patterns. Though the

adoption of pottery within StarevoCri culture was full-

hearted, Thissen suggests that its use was no more than

an addition to existing ways of life. Within a semi-

sedentary setting such as StarevoCri communities,

possibly a range of techniques of cooking continued to beused simultaneously. People may have used the old ways

of cooking (in non-ceramic containers) while groups were

mobile and used the new method of cooking (in pottery

vessels) only while resident. From these perspectives, the

use of pottery can be explored fruitfully within a

framework of continuity and incorporation, and it can be

set off against, but more significantly perhaps treated as

an addition to, existing traditions of non-ceramic

containers in the Mesolithic period. In his discussion of

skulls from Lepenski Vir, Bori agues for the use of

human bones as relics that bridged the Mesolithic/

Neolithic border. Thissen suggests that the use of red

ochre in StarevoCri communities is proof of un-

changing ritual practice.


6/7


Kotsakis asks us to think of the Neolithic in terms of

a dynamic place of mutual exchange, where fluidity must

have been prevalent and where identities and accom-

panying material culture expressions were constantly

reformulated. Instead of the usual picture of a Neolithic

culture winning over the Mesolithic, this process mighthave happened in a fluid landscape with multiple frontiers

and conflicting directions, in a constant process of

creating hybrid identities. All of these arguments blur

the traditional boundaries between Mesolithic and

Neolithic.

If we can no longer assume that food production was

simply a better, more efficient way of living or that

buildings were inherently valuable because they provided

shelter from the elements, then what are we to do?

Alasdair Whittles suggestion (chapter 7) is that we think

about the creation and practices of social values through

which daily social existence is carried out. This is aninvitation to investigate values, emotion, and lived

experience. Whittle seeks an understanding of being in

the Neolithic through considerations of conviviality, of

the informal and the performative. To do this requires

that we look at social groups in new ways, specifically

not seeing them as villages or camps or even cultures,

each of which is locked to a place, a set of architectures

or a shared set of material forms. Rather, Whittle wants

us to look at alternative possibilities for affiliation and

choreographies of social existence, to generate models

of lived experience, and to engage the mood of the people.

In these terms, the Neolithic can be a willed creation of

a distinctive form of social existence and not theinexorable spread of one way of life.

As important as fresh thinking about the creation and

practice of social values is the need to explore other

dimensions of the complex lives of the Neolithic. In her

contribution on the complexity of the destruction of

Neolithic buildings by burning, Tringham (chapter 11)

focuses on fire and its manipulation. To think about fire

is to move beyond simple and static definitions of hearth,

oven, kiln or thermal structure and to confront the

phenomenon of burning. Tringham demonstrates not only

that the burned house horizon is far from ubiquitous or

homogenous but also that the human engagements,understandings and (mis)uses of fire range through

diverse motivations, scales and stages. Fire is creative,

inspiring and emotional; it is cunning, unruly, alive,

exciting, sexual, and sensual. Dramas of house burnings

evoke passion and fear and stimulate the senses, par-

ticularly with respect to colours and sounds. Furthermore,

fires have life-histories and can be the sources of renewal

and rebirth as well as of death and destruction. While fire

can clean, heal and revitalise, its products are often

considered dirty: soot, charred wood, ash.

Tringham urges us to think about social memory and

of the shocking and memorable event that a house killed

by fire would have been. Using the terms domicide and

domithanasia and writing about euthanising houses, she

forces us to think about the performances and con-

sequences of a house killing carried out by residents or

their friends (and not by invading or warring hordes).

Domicide may result in the destruction of a place of

attachment and refuge, the loss of security, the partial

loss of identity, the de-centring of place, family andcommunity, the loss of historical connection, the weaken-

ing of roots and the partial erasure of sources of memory,

dreams and nostalgia. If the house has multiple meanings

then so do acts of its destruction.

Tringham constructs a picture in which the burning of

a Neolithic house was not only dramatic and sensual but

also traumatic. If the purpose of the conflagration was to

ensure a continuous place, to create social memory, to

strengthen identity of community, and to incorporate

social reproduction, then the performances that took place

before, during, and after the fire ensured that burning

events fulfilled these purposes. Tringham argues thathouse burning was a ritual performance that marked the

end of a house (or household) in social memory and

coincided with the death of a significant person (who

was not burned or buried in the house). Both house

burning and human burial within houses were strategies

for ensuring the continuity of place and the construction

of social memory. House killing bound people together,

nurtured memories and contributed to the continuity of

place.

Moving forward

In presenting these papers and making calls for a radical

re-thinking of central issues, we do not want to separate

ourselves from previous practice and literature. For a

start, the contributors disagree among themselves on

many issues, and it remains to be seen how for example

dramatic events such as the house burnings just discussed

relate to patterns of residence. Both Halstead and Andrew

Sherratt in his elegant digestif(chapter 14) pick up on

and turn the motif of unsettling, preferring notions of

resettling and settling. Many others may prefer the same.

We recognise the difficulties of our enterprise. As

archaeologists working with archives of older excavations

as well as with the results of colleagues currentfieldwork, we are faced with clash of scales: between the

types of evidence that we collect (and their temporally

coarse resolutions) and the types of things that we want

to talk about in the Neolithic. If we are to heed Whittles

call (and those of others in this book), then we also must

listen to Halsteads concerns that we may be replacing

the traditional Neolithic package with a more fashionable

but equally unfounded orthodoxy of gradual piecemeal

adoption of domestication, sedentary life and Neolithic

material culture. We note also Thissens warning that if

we agree that it is better to characterise the early Neolithic

commitment to land in terms of semi-sedentism, then we

must be careful in our interpretations of what we find but

more importantly of what we do not recover. Thus, the


7/7


near absence of hunting and fishing evidence in the faunal

record of a site in southern Romania (i.e. the Starevo

Cri site Teleor 003; Adrian Blescu pers. comm.),

may indicate that these activities were carried on off-site,

or even off-area and, furthermore, that these might well

relate to different seasons. We recognise that there isdiversity and that we cannot always correctly predict the

outcomes of our research. Thus the investigations at

Ecsegfalva on the Great Hungarian Plain (discussed in

chapters 6 and 7) were started with the hopes that it

might prove possible to document occupation restricted

to certain seasons of the year and by fine recovery methods

to chart in more detail the apparent major contributions

of hunting, fishing, shellfishing and fowling to sub-

sistence practices. As those chapters will describe, the

outcome has been rather different.

In acknowledging all these problems and the likely

diversity of styles of existence in central and easternEurope between 65003500 cal BC, we do maintain the

need for re-thinking, re-aligning and broadening present

practices of interpretation. As Steve Mills notes (p.80), it

is the nature of the world that things are always changing,

beginning and ending, in cycles of life, death, seasons

and rhythms. We need attention to the flow of life, its

choreographies and socialities, its sounds and un-

conscious undertow, its links with shifting pasts and

memories. We must embrace all this in our investigations;

instability, the unsettled nature of the world, is often the

norm. To unsettle the Neolithic we must move beyond

essentialised concepts. To rewrite the Neolithic we must

not generalise; we need highly detailed studies from many

particular contexts. To rethink the Neolithic we must not

assume the homogeneity of human behaviour orarchaeological phenomena; the value is in the particular.

Acknowledgements

These papers are the first outcome of a conference held in

Cardiff University in May 2003. We are grateful above

all to The British Academy for financial support, as well

as to Liz Walker, Aled Cooke and Ian Dennis in our

department for administrative and technical help. Vicki

Cummings has contributed not only in the running of the

conference but also in the editing of these papers. Many

thanks to David Brown and Clare Litt at Oxbow andespecially to Sarah Monks who greatly improved the final

version of this volume. Not all those who spoke at the

conference are represented in this volume; a second

collection, focused on individual projects and specific

analyses, is in production.

School of History and Archaeology

Cardiff University

February 2005

ch1_douglass bailey&alasdair whittle

Documents