Living Well Together? Settlement and Materiality in the Neolithic of South-East and Central Europe

1. Living well together? Questions of definition and scale in the Neolithic of south-east and central Europe

Douglass Bailey and Alasdair Whittle

Together with its companion volume (un)settling the Neolithic (Bailey et al. 2005), the present book strives to set a new agenda for investigating the processes, events and styles of living that emerged from 6500 cal BC in south-east and central Europe. Originally stimulated by a meeting of specialists in Cardiff, in many ways the two volumes move in different directions and to different rhythms. The first collection challenged many of the traditional ways in which the Neolithic is studied; the present volume takes forward many of the issues raised there and works them through case-studies and key sites, but does so without the detailed theoretical discussion that was at the core of (un)settling. Both books take a common object of study and both attempt to widen the agenda for the direction in which future research can productively proceed.

Why Living Well Together? We have taken the idea of the title for this volume from the important concept of conviviality, fundamental in Amazonian ethnography for understanding how people get along together, and seek to get along peacefully and harmoniously, in their daily lives (Overing and Passes 2000a; 2000b; Overing 2003). One of us has explored this in some detail in (un)settling the Neolithic (Whittle 2005) and elsewhere. In many ways, this concepts chimes well with (and provides an attractive theoretical underpinning for) prevailing opinion among archaeologists that the period from 6500–3500 cal BC in south-east and central Europe is best defined in terms of co-operation and collaboration, of success in community cohesion, of collaboration in large-scale activities such as field agriculture, and of a level of success developed enough to support specialised craft activities and the expansion of population in numbers and across regions. For our present purposes, without in any way wanting to abandon such an appealing concept as conviviality, we want to continue in the spirit set by (un)settling the Neolithic, and to re-examine widely held assumptions. If we take it as read that people normally lived together, what were the forms of this existence? At what scales can we best see Neolithic life, and where should we, if anywhere, draw boundaries between and among people, animals, places, landscapes and identities? Although it is not in the end a question which this volume will answer directly, did people live well together in the Neolithic?

The contributors to Living Well Together? provide case-studies and analyses through which continuing questioning of many of our assumptions about this period can proceed. Many of these contributions mark first or interim reports of important projects or first English-language presentations of significant recent work: Roodenberg and Alpaslan-Roodenberg on Ilıpınar and Menteşe; Raczky and Anders on Polgár-Csőszhalom; Schier on Uivar; Trick, Andreescu and Mirea on the Southern Romania Archaeological Project; and Greenfield and Jongsma on Foeni-Salaş. Others investigate beginnings and movements of people: Bánffy on the LBK of Transdanubia, Lenneis on the LBK in Austria, and Chapman on founder communities. The remaining make important contributions to the study of material culture and subsistence: Spataro on early Neolithic pottery; Starnini on material culture traditions; and Bogaard, Bending and Jones on crop husbandry. Cutting across all of the chapters are key debates and redefinitions: the origins of the Neolithic (e.g. settling, colonising); the distinctions between tells and flat sites (e.g. spatial, social and political distinctions, and the essence of physical and symbolic boundaries within and between communities); the appropriate scales of analysis and interpretation (e.g. general, regional, specific and individual); the importance of recognising variability at all levels of interpretation; and the (in)appropriateness of existing terminology and definition (e.g. house, household, tells). Similar debates were at the core of (un)settling the Neolithic and we encourage readers to work back and forth between the two sets of essays. Together, these chapters and those in (un)settling the Neolithic call for new and critical work on the existing body of knowledge as well as within a new research agenda for the study of the Neolithic.

First farmers, settlement, colonisation, and origins of the Neolithic

In many chapters, the authors critique and question existing understandings of the beginning of the Neolithic. Eszter Bánffy reminds us of important recent work which has cast doubt on the traditional arguments that Neolithic communities (in her case the Starčevo culture; cf. Bartosiewicz 2005; Whittle 2005, for the Körös culture) arrived in empty areas and has shown that some early Neolithic communities did not rely on farming as heavily as traditional reconstructions argue. As Bánffy suggests, we can no longer ignore the presence of local pre- or non-Neolithic groups when we investigate the origins of the Neolithic.

Bánffy reviews the data for a Mesolithic presence in Transdanubia, and puts forward the important argument that the archaeological record of forager groups in the Balaton Basin would have been submerged by mid-sixth millennium cal BC rises in the water levels of the lake. Bánffy’s re-examination of earlier surveys and archive material from this area reassigns some of the material to an earliest Neolithic located near the lake-edge which would have been ideally situated for a hunting-fishing-gathering lifestyle. For Bánffy a key task is to review the evidence both for Mesolithic populations at the time of the beginning of the Neolithic and the presence of transitional sites which possessed features of both local forager and Neolithic (e.g. Starčevo) groups. As she argues, the surviving late Mesolithic foragers were living in their traditional biotope, were in contact with Starčevo people, and were adopting some Starčevo innovations. Bánffy suggests that in Transdanubia (as in many other parts of central and south-east Europe) the beginnings of the Neolithic did not coincide with the beginnings of intensive agriculture. She presents the site of Pityerdomb (at the westernmost edge of the Starčevo and LBK areas) as an important transitional site where evidence from flint sourcing, pottery and architecture suggests that the site represents the integration of local populations with people of Balkan origin.

Almost every contributor wrestles with the traditional distinctions and debates over the appropriate interpretation of the appearance of new technologies and resources. Most reject (or at the least qualify) the common division of populations into incomers and locals. Some, like Spataro, see homogeneity of ceramic technology as strong evidence for common origins and single dispersals of knowledge with a diffusion of people. Lukes and Zvelebil investigate three models for the origins of the LBK (migrationist, integrationist and indigenist) which mix and match varying degrees of contact and interaction between two distinct groups (hunter-gatherer locals and agro-pastoralist incomers). There are important questions raised here. Can we work at such general levels of argument? Did such persons as ‘agro-pastoralists’ exist in the Neolithic or were senses of identity and activities much more subtly blended and less rigidly contained? The critical element which underlies these distinctions and the resulting questions is a Mesolithic presence in the region (as demonstrated by Lukes and Zvelebil). Perhaps the way in which one understands that earlier presence in relation to changes in material culture, economy and the built environment (that become apparent in the sixth millennium cal BC) depends on the reader’s philosophical preferences: whether one is at ease with a high level of generalisation or whether one is happier in the less comfortable fragments of the particular.

Discussing the emergence of the early Neolithic in Austria, Eva Lenneis stresses the importance of local soil, rainfall and altitude in any understanding of the early Linearbandkeramik farmers. Chapman takes a similarly traditional approach, arguing for the recognition of founder communities. In doing so, he raises vitally important questions. What does it mean to posit the existence of a ‘founder community’? Can we recognise such entities and, if so, what are the consequences for our understanding of the start of the Neolithic? How do we approach the question of why an entity such as a founder community would have appeared at this time in these places? In their chapter, Roodenberg and Alpaslan-Roodenberg note that one of the goals of the Ilıpınar and Menteşe projects in Anatolia was to investigate who the first farmers of that region were, to examine how pioneer farming communities developed during the first centuries of their existence, and to debate the routes which early agriculture took towards Europe. Borić (2005) and Kotsakis (2005) engaged these issues in (un)settling the Neolithic and we recommend that the reader consider Roodenberg and Alpaslan-Roodenberg’s and Chapman’s proposals in the context of their arguments.

Bogaard, Bending and Jones approach the debate over early agriculture by using information on crop husbandry to clarify the different routines of crop growing that were practised in the Neolithic and the types of societies that such routines would have shaped. Using information about the modern ecology of weed species and the high-resolution evidence from the recent excavation of a Körös culture occupation at Ecsegfalva 23 on the Great Hungarian Plain,¹ they argue that the most useful information comes from an examination of arable weed seeds and not (as is so often the case) by simply noting the occurrence of particular crop remains. Bogaard et al.’s work addresses key questions relating to Körös culture crop husbandry. Was cultivation based on shifting- or fixed-plots? What was the intensity of cultivation, and what was the timing of sowing? Bogaard’s team concludes that cultivation involved fixed-plots which were intensively managed (by manuring, middening, careful tillage and weeding) and that some of the crops were sown in the autumn. Critically, these authors push their conclusions forward, considering contemporary patterns of animal exploitation in order to link the use of Neolithic crops for feeding cattle. They conclude that for Ecsegfalva 23, at least part of the community was more or less sedentary, that people settled near their crop-growing areas, and that the development of these areas played a major role in the creation of place, with the home best seen as a place of dwelling and of related household plots of land. Broadening these conclusions, they suggest that for the initial spread of farming in central Europe, the evidence allows them to argue for intensive, fixed-plot cultivation.

In their work on Foeni-Salaş, in contrast, Greenfield and Jongsma argue for short-term occupation of the site with little evidence for intensive agricultural activity, grain processing or long-term storage. Any grain processing probably took place away from the site with plant remains brought on to site. The fact that the majority of fauna are of species able to move or be moved around the landscape (cattle, sheep and goats) convinces them that the Foeni-Salaş community was a mobile one and that settlement was temporary. In these terms Foeni-Salaş does not fit into the traditional perspective of the Neolithic as an economic or architectural revolution. More accurate, in their view, is a reconstruction of mobile pastoralist communities that were not dependent on domestic plant cultivation. A similar conclusion is reached by Spataro in her analysis of ceramics from the Romanian early Neolithic sites of Gura Baciului and Şeuşa La-Cărarea Morii; she argues that the organic tempered wares of these communities make better sense within lifestyles which relied more heavily on pastoralism than on agriculture. Additional, high-resolution excavations of early pit-feature sites similar to these as well as to Foeni-Salaş will further clarify the situation. Greenfield and Jongsma draw parallels between the spatial organisation of Foeni-Salaş and that found at Mesolithic sites in other parts of Europe. The picture that emerges is similar to the one that Bánffy suggests in her contribution: local hunter-gatherers adopting the material culture of agriculturalists. A word of caution is in order, however, as we need to be sure that the samples from different projects (Ecsegfalva 23 and Foeni-Salaş) were collected in comparable ways.

Issues of scale

Running through all of the chapters in this volume as well as those in (un)settling the Neolithic are questions of the spatial, temporal and interpretive scales of analysis. At what scales do we set our research goals and at which scales do we seek to form our conclusions? For many studying the Neolithic in central and south-east Europe, work has remained at an uncritically general level of analysis with discussion progressing no further than vague reconstructions of amorphous groups of faceless people moving out of one place and into another or making and using one type of object or style of tool. One goal for future research must be to get beyond this level of generalisation, and to take on the challenges of individual contexts in individual places.

In his chapter, John Chapman tries to get to this more specific level with his search for small, single household dwellings; his work stimulates us to look again at the ephemeral and small-scale in an archaeological record which is so often understood to have been dominated by large social institutions such as villages or regional culture groups. Greenfield and Jongsma’s report on work at Foeni-Salaş draws attention to the potential for information that comes from high-resolution excavations of short-term pit-feature sites that have limited spatial spreads. Andreescu and Mirea suggest the potential for this approach in their discussions of multiple-locus, contemporary, small-scale activity areas at and around late Neolithic Vităneşti in southern Romania. The reports on the vital work at Polgár-Csőszhalom, by Anders and Raczky, and at Uivar, by Schier, are of the greatest value here. These authors force us to combine the apparently contradictory spatial scales of activities, of dwelling and of thinking which were clearly present in equal measure at both sites. At Polgár-Csőszhalom, for example, the external, non-tell area can only be fully understood in relation to the internal, tell area. Spatially distinct, with contrasting patterns of behaviour and deposition, the two areas of this single site must be understood together in terms of intra-site variation.

Other authors make similar claims. Bánffy urges us to appreciate the variability in the types of migration and adaptation in western Transdanubia. Eva Lenneis underlines the importance of the presence of differing patterns, types and sizes of settlements within individual micro-regions of central Europe and reminds us that variation of settlement organisation appears contemporaneously within the limits of individual early LBK sites. In all of these examples, the contributors offer the strongest arguments against simplified schemes which map developments of site types, sizes or organisation either through time or across regions. As more and more sites are excavated with increasingly refined attention to detail and high-precision recovery, the arguments for complexity and variability grow stronger and more unavoidable. The consequences are clear; long-standing generalisations about the evolution of site typologies or proposals of culture-specific ‘type-sites’ can no longer retain the exclusive authority that they have enjoyed.

Strongest among the calls to recognise variation is Souvatzi’s appeal to examine differing scales of interpretation. Souvatzi pushes us most strongly to move beyond the big models for change and to come to terms with diversity of scale in explanation. She argues for the need to recognise that household form, activity and the use of space do not remain unchanged at any one site throughout its existence. She urges us to accept and respect variability if we are to move beyond the limitations of abstraction and normalisation. Souvatzi’s solution for the Neolithic built environment is to view the household as the combination of practices, social relations, routines and records of the engagements of the individual and the community. For Neolithic life in Greece, she suggests that rather than reconstructing prehistoric stability and regularity, it is more accurate to recognise the significant internal variability and social complexity within sites, across sites and through time. Souvatzi argues that variability is widespread: in site locations (flood plains, caves, lakesides); in site morphologies (flat sites and tells); in degrees and rates of duration of occupation (hiatuses and tight repetition and rebuilding); in fixity to place (anchored and shifting); in building sizes and ground-plan morphologies (square and elliptical); and in building techniques (wattle-and-daub, mudbrick, pisé). Variability is also readily recognisable in systems of production, divisions of labour, diversities of activities, and in the physical and social reproductive strategies of individual households.

Not all contributors agree. Against the trend emphasising variability and the importance of the specific run Spataro’s arguments about the similarities of ceramic technology in early Neolithic sites in Romanian Transylvania, and Lukes and Zvelebil’s discussion of inter-generational transmissions of culture in the context of the origins of the LBK. For Spataro, the similarity in pottery production systems throughout the Starčevo-Criş culture is evidence for a shared tradition over a wide area and supports arguments for a rapid spread from the south-east of a single wave of diffusion. Even if this is the case (and many of the other contributors to this volume and to (un)settling would argue otherwise), the need to recognise variability within larger systems still emerges as the most striking feature of analysis and conclusion. Individual elements of life (such as ceramic recipes and technique) may reveal similar patterns and technologies; others, though contemporaneous and local (such as patterns within the built environment), may vary widely. For Lukes and Zvelebil, material culture is implicitly tied into identity construction and maintenance. However, in their examination of three models for understanding the origins of the LBK in the Czech Republic, Lukes and Zvelebil separate out public from private domains in order to understand the combinations of local and external influences. Again, it is variation that must be accommodated to make the higher-level models work.

Souvatzi’s call for us to recognise the prominence of variability urges us to question the parameters of temporal as well as spatial scales and to recognise the over-emphasis that archaeologists have laid upon long-term structural change when we think about households in the Neolithic. The value of all of these contributions is that they raise more questions than they answer. Are we justified in thinking about historically conscious decisions and sequences in the Neolithic? Was there a shared Neolithic concern for making links with what had come before or a concern with enabling future links to be made with future groups/people? Are we justified in asking the questions, as Chapman does, about the ‘growth of single-family settlement to a hamlet after the end of the initial occupation’ and from hamlet to village? Indeed, Chapman is correct to emphasise the variation in sequence at the sites that he analyses. Perhaps the lesson to take from his analysis is that no one definition holds (nor should hold) for individual, historically specific sets of activities.

From almost every contribution emerges a call for future work to focus on the evidence for short-term activities and temporary settlement. Thus, Greenfield and Jongsma suggest that the importance of Foeni-Salaş lies in its ephemeral nature: the unsettled Neolithic. Even with the more durable structures of the later tells, the emphasis, by Souvatzi for example as well as by Chapman, is on the event of limited duration or the intangibly fleeting nature of processes and shifting uses and meanings over insubstantial durations. Future work must wrestle with the difficulty of recovering and understanding the significance of the ephemeral within the Neolithic.

Attention to variation along the temporal dimension emerges in other forms as well. Roodenberg and Alpaslan-Roodenberg show how Ilıpınar is a good example of the unexpected directions which otherwise logical, sequential, technological developments can take (the appearance of semi-subterranean pit-huts that follows the use of surface-level structures made of wattle-and-daub and mud-blocks) and of the contemporaneous presence of different techniques that are often understood as logically sequential (e.g. both mud-slab and wattle and daub architecture in the same phase of Menteşe).

Definition/terminology

The more questions that we ask of our perspectives on this period, the less certain we become. Are we justified in continuing to use, often unthinkingly, our conventional terminologies? Does our common, unquestioning use of familiar and much repeated terms assume a homogeneity of form, of function, and of meaning that restricts understanding? Might we be better served if we abandoned our shared, simplified terminology and agreed to no longer simply assume the validity of implicit (but unproven) homogeneity? At the very least we must recognise these assumptions of homogeneity to be factors of our shared tradition of trying to explain common sets of patterns of events and materials. Should we continue to work with terms such as village, hamlet, pioneer site, and founder settlement? Should we be satisfied in placing sites (itself an oversimplification in terminology) into such analytical units?

Both Chapman, and Greenfield and Jongsma, tackle some of these problems (especially relating to pit-feature sites) and show how difficult it is to break long-entrenched traditions. Souvatzi argues that households are a much more fluid and changeable entity then has been traditionally thought; for her, households are processes with fluid boundaries. When we talk about tells or tell villages, are we certain of the limits of both Neolithic boundaries and our modern understanding of the terminology? For the site of Polgár-Csőszhalom, Rackzy and Anders argue that the space of the tell had a distinct character which (together with its ditch-system) formed a coherent unit consisting of two distinct, but integrated, elements: an external settlement area and the ditch-enclosed tell. They suggest that the latter was a special place that contained one or two long-lived buildings of special function (perhaps the location for ritual grinding events), furnished with special finds (figurines and Spondylus) and decoration (one with a bucranium relief).

As well as in the contributions by Schier, and by Raczky and Anders, the important issues of the limits of tells (social, political and conceptual) are taken on in new directions by Trick and by Andreescu and Mirea. Why did tell settlements appear when they did and where they did? By reconstructing patterns of visibility across the landscape from tells in their particular landscape settings, Steve Trick offers new information that may help us to understand why tells developed where they did in the Teleorman valley in southern Romania. Trick argues that tells may have emerged at points in the landscape from which large parts of the surrounding river valley could be seen. Critically, however, Trick’s viewshed analysis suggests that the regular spacing of tells along one edge of the Teleorman valley may be a factor of the amount of landscape that was visible from the tell. Equally provocative is the possibility that the abandonment of these tells may have occurred when the area visible from one tell started to overlap with the area visible from the neighbouring tell. Trick’s work is important because it produces new data that force us to expand our thinking beyond simplistic measurements of a site’s proximity to a particular soil type or water resource.²

The combination of chapters addressing tells provides a compelling case for a new style of analysis of this type of site and sets up a new agenda for fieldwork. Clearly, tells do not exist in isolation within the larger landscape. Attempts to locate physical boundaries to sites and to use simplistic measurements of site circumference must give way to a fuller appreciation of the complexity of the off-tell landscape. The chapters by Trick, Schier, Raczky and Anders, and Andreescu and Mirea, amount to an unavoidable call for more work on landscapes beyond tells. Raczky and Anders at Polgár-Csőszhalom, and also Schier at Uivar, applied large-scale geophysical investigations around these sites (28 ha at the former site; 11 ha at the latter) with spectacular results. The consequences are fatal for the generations of reconstructions of Neolithic landscapes which have focused exclusively on the dynamics of tells themselves with little effort devoted to recovering the less permanent (but perhaps equally important) activities that occurred around these sites and which may reveal as much about daily life at this time as study of the floor-plans and layouts of the more permanent (and rebuilt) tell-centre buildings.

Boundaries

Much of the new work on tells has substantially questioned the character (indeed the validity) of boundaries that define the spatial and social limits of communities in the Neolithic. Many of the new questions emerge from investigation and analysis of sites such as Polgár-Csőszhalom and Uivar. Both sites have impressive systems of concentric ditches and palisades. For Uivar, Schier describes a gateway and the extraordinary fills of the ditch-ends near the gateway (containing concentrations of large animal bones including skulls, aurochs horn cores and large fragments of red deer antler). Is this, as Schier provocatively argues, a record of special activities related to thresholds and boundaries or is it linked to butchery from hunted animals and the disposal of extremities?

At these sites (as has been well established for some time at Sesklo with Sesklo A and Sesklo B: Kotsakis 1994), there are important dynamics in the relationships between the areas, activities and buildings within the topographic limits of the tell and those which existed beyond those limits. At Polgár-Csőszhalom, the evidence for non-tell activities (even for the 4.5 ha of the 28 ha that have been excavated) is stunning: 62 houses, 64 outbuildings, 68 wells, 328 pits and 124 burials. Most intriguing are the distinctions between activities and buildings from the area of the tell and from the external area. In the tell area, buildings are arranged in a concentric radial pattern with their long axes oriented towards the centre of the site; in the external area, buildings are oriented south-east–north-west and do not have any other special pattern to their layout. On the tell, buildings were regularly burnt down, levelled and rebuilt; in the external area only 2 of the 64 buildings had any evidence of burning. On the tell were found almost all of the spouted vessels which may have been used to administer narcotics. All of the copper objects (beads and rings) were found on the tell. The fauna from the tell was dominated by wild animals, while that from the external area was dominated by domesticates.

How do we understand these stark differences between tell and non-tell? Rackzy and Anders conclude that in the external settlement the fundamental structuring unit was the house, pit or burial, and that the basic social unit was the family; they suggest that this represents a heritage linked to the Alföld Linear Pottery culture. On the other hand, the tell represents the mobilisation of the entire population for high labour construction projects (in an area for special, non-residential and non-mundane activities); and thus the tell was a place of communal-ritual behaviour with a heritage found in a synthesis of the two major Neolithic cultural units in the Upper Tizsa valley (Tisza-Herpály and Lengyel). Raczky and Anders argue that the tell is a monument of symbolic significance at the regional level. At Polgár-Csőszhalom, the inner, tell zone is the most exotic and external (with copper objects and wild animal remains–things that would have been brought in from the outside and perhaps from afar). Regardless of the interpretation (and one might also, for example, position the site comfortably within Ian Hodder’s arguments for domus and agrios: Hodder 1990), it is clear from the example of Polgár-Csőszhalom that there existed two very different (but contemporary and co-inhabited) worlds at the same site. As Rackzy and Anders put it, Polgár-Csőszhalom illustrates two distinct concepts of time within one community: the time-scale of the houses of the external settlement (representing single generations), and the time-scale of the tell (offering long-term memory).

Where are the people?

Issues of multiple scales, re-definition and permeable boundaries cut across all the contributions, and while some authors discuss movements of people, the chapters in neither this volume nor in (un)settling the Neolithic really get to grips with the individual people whose lives, boundaries, dwellings, burials, animals, and things are the substance of our study. The people of the Neolithic emerge only in glimpses: in the burials at Polgár-Csőszhalom and at Menteşe, or in the figurines and the mask from Uivar.

Perhaps it is in Trick’s work (and in Mills’ chapter in (un)settling) on the southern Romanian landscapes that we get closest to the experience of being in the Neolithic. Trick and Mills attempt to engage dimensions of the landscape that people would have seen or heard when they looked out or listened from a tell across the floodplains of southern Romania. This type of work makes it possible for us to begin to recover the experiences (or at least the parameters of those experiences) of the people who lived in these places in these times.

Even with these efforts to get beyond repetitions of traditional generalisations about settlement and economy, we need to know more. What did people think about the areas that they could see, about the sounds that shaped their subconscious understandings of their worlds? We are not convinced that the full answer is to be found in conclusions about new strategies for controlling resources such as plants and animals. In the landscapes that Trick studies, can we begin to think about visual conceptualisation (perhaps contested mappings) of territories that were related to individual tells? If so, then new questions emerge. How should we understand the encounters that occurred every day in the areas between tells where these visual territories overlap? How should we think about the areas of this river valley that were out of sight of any of the tells? On its own, Trick’s work does not answer these questions; however, it does indicate a direction which might lead to fundamental rethinking of what it meant to live in this period in this region. Perhaps most importantly, Trick’s work combines the specific with the general and the comparative; it situates individual tells in their particular locations with their topographic specificities and then provides a way to make quantitative comparisons between different tells located in different parts of these and other river valleys.

In Rackzy and Anders’ discussion of Polgár-Csőszhalom, we find clear expressions of the distinctions between an area of external settlement and the tell itself. Here we also begin to get a glimpse of people: in terms of a space of personal or family life (the external area) and of a space of the communal (the tell). Can we put faces to these individuals? Perhaps this task is unachievable not because of any methodological or explanatory limitations but because of the role and representation of the individual within Neolithic communities at sites such as Polgár-Csőszhalom or Uivar. Schier describes the extraordinary discovery of the life-size mask at Uivar and its similarities to contemporary figurine heads (taken as probably the representations of masks). Here we have clear evidence of mechanisms employed to prevent the recognition of any one individual’s particular facial features. Schier’s reference to Olaf Höckmann’s hypothesis (now 40 years old) that anthropomorphic figurines were deliberately destroyed³ reminds us that perhaps we should understand that the biological particularities of the human body (both in miniature ceramic form and perhaps in social and political senses) were broken down in very literal ways, and that it was Neolithic efforts to forget, cover and destroy which in part prevent our recovery of recognisable personal identities. A similar argument could be made for the destruction by burning of individual buildings at Polgár-Csőszhalom and elsewhere.⁴

Future research

In (un)settling the Neolithic, contributors debated fundamental questions of concepts, boundaries and origins. They argued over forms of identity, experience and memory, the significance of settling down and the difficulties of establishing seasonality, and they showed how important it is to base interpretations on reliably recovered evidence. The papers in this companion volume have engaged with particular case-studies, key sites and methodologies, and we have sought to bring out in this introduction recurring issues of definition, terminology and boundaries, centred on fundamental questions of scale and variability.

It goes without saying