LBK
Dialogues. Studies in the formation of the Linear Pottery Culture, eds A. LUKES & M. ZVELEBIL
2004. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series 1304. Archaeopress. 205 pp text, 91 figures, 12 tables. ISBN 1 84171 654 5 (Ł36)
This important volume illustrates well what BAR does best – the rapid
publication of a conference session, with the responsibility for full editing
given to two fully responsible editors! The conference was the 8th Annual
Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, at Thessaloniki, in
September 2002, the session was entitled ‘The origins of the LBK’ (with this
reviewer acting as a discussant) and the editorial duet a dream team of the
ever-youthful Marek Zvelebil and his then PhD student, Alena Jukes.
The editors’ aims were to summarise recent developments in research and
fieldwork in the eastern part of the LBK distribution and to present it to a
broader archaeological community. This meant research from Hungary, Slovakia,
Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. Almost all of the speakers in the
session are represented in this volume; the key omission concerns what was
perhaps the best paper in the session, on LBK archaeo-botany, by Amy Bogaard –
part of her excellent PhD now itself fully published (Bogaard 2004). The papers
are structured into three broad themes: Part 1 – theoretical constraints on the
understanding of the LBK; Part 2 – the Earliest LBK and what came before; and
Part 3 – perspectives on the Early LBK – life and times. The underlying
rationale for the session and this volume is the task of moving on the agenda
for the emergence of the LBK from the traditional Childean diffusion across the
loesslands of Old Europe, reiterated byAmmerman and Cavalli-Sforza and still
believed by the majority of European prehistorians, to a more complex and
nuanced picture acknowledging the various contributions of both local foragers
and intrusive agriculturalists to the spread of the ‘Neolithic’. The result is
a LBK hardly recognisable from that of two decades ago, when Zvelebil was still
maintaining the migrationist model for South East and Central Europe (Zvelebil
1986): indeed, Zvelebil’s sole reference to the Availability Model (p. 187)
seems in itself so outmoded as to be out of place in this volume.
Not that all of the participants have suddenly rushed out and bought tickets to
post-processual theme parks in Prague or Budapest. There are still vigorous
traces of colonialist archaeology, whether in Neustupný’s defence of the
migrationist model, Pavúk’s identification of Hoca Çesme as an Anatolian colony
or Budja’s characterisation of Gura Baciului as a White-on-Red painted ware
primary colony. And the same two authors, together with Pavlu and even Lukes
(p. 21!), are unfortunately only too happy to give priority to typo-chronology
over AMS or conventional 14C dates. With the greatest of respect to Juraj
Pavúk, his opinion that the white-on-red painted ware at Hoca Çesme is earlier
than that of Karanovo I is contradicted by the 14C dates, that clearly show the
opposite! There is still a tendency amongst old LBK hands to assume a material
analogue to indicate chronological parity, when we have to demonstrate duration
of traits, not assume their contemporaneity. Budja’s invocation of a
Milojcic-like early Monochrome – Impresso stage in Balkan foraging circles and
prior to the development of painted ware is also subject to this criticism.
One major advantage of the volume is the near-total absence of environmental
determinism, with the sole exception of Eszter Bánffy’s use of the Sümegi –
Kertész Agro-Ecological Barrier model to ‘explain the northern limits to Late
Starcevo settlement in Western Hungary’ (ie, Transdanubia) when a more useful
alternative, following on from her otherwise excellent paper, is a moderate to
high density of foraging settlement, some of whom were exploiting the Szentgál
radiolarite for exchange to both North and South.
So what’s new? Surely not the reliance on points South and East for the source
of domestic plants and animals? Yet the Czech environmental archaeologist
Jaromir Beneš makes the startling observation that the suite of weed seeds
found growing in cereal fields in Bohemia is little different from that
discovered from far earlier arable fields next to Tell Abu Hureyra, in the
Upper Euphrates valley. What does this mean for the spread of agriculture
through Anatolia and the Balkans? Are we to infer the spread of an integrated
suite of cereals and their weeds across huge areas and several
ecological zones? I am not sure but this is surely a vital point for us all to
address in future research. A related question emerges from the high-quality
report by Berovec et alii on the large worked bone assemblage from
Vedrovice, in which the conclusion is that there is a common way of choosing
which bone tools to make for the whole of the European Neolithic. If this claim
is true, what does it mean for cultural transmission on such a wide scale?
The key research on the emergence of the Earliest LBK is Bánffy’s work in
Transdanubia, where interactions between (recently-identified) foraging groups
and Starcevo-pottery-using communities, whose distributions can now be shown to
extend further North and West than hitherto recognised, led to innovations,
dated to the middle of the 6th millennium cal BC, that Bánffy terms ‘the
earliest LBK’. Lenneis reports 14C dates for sites in Lower Austria, indicating
coeval pottery and houses in the Danube valley. It is important to recognise
that these communities have made only a partial selection of the total material
culture assemblages available to them in the Starcevo–Körös distribution,
ignoring many Balkan type-fossils, such as most of the figurines and lamps,
pintaderas and labrets, bone spoons and slotted antler sickles, and also
painted pottery. Thus we have what we could term a ‘Balaton filter’ – parallel
to Jim Lewthwaite’s older idea about a Corse filter for the westward diffusion
of the Impressed Ware assemblage (viz., only those elements of the
Neolithic package that Corsican settlers accepted from their Italian forebears
would have been available for further transmission westwards). While we may not
have identified a reason for this radical simplification of material culture in
Transdanubia itself, the Balaton filter would explain why so few of the classic
Balkan material traits were found in Central Europe and points north west.
What is found further north and west – a long way further NW - indeed as far as
the Rheinland – is the red radiolarite from Szentgál, in the Bakony Mountains
North of Lake Balaton. It is the merit of Inna Mateiciuková to have synthesised
the results of much chipped stone analysis so as to demonstrate exchange
networks based on exotic lithics were vital not only to the Earliest LBK but
also to Late Mesolithic foragers in Central Europe. Three lithic raw materials
were basic - Szentgál radiolarite, Tokaj obsidian and Kraków Jurassic flint –
but the first was the key material for the transition. Her experimental,
technological and typological studies reinforce this basic raw material
perspective of strong elements of lithic continuity across the forager – farmer
‘divide’. Clearly, one of the key materials underpinning their exchange
relations were exotic lithics. But Neolithic exchange preferred a supply of
novel resources and to exotic lithics was added a diversity of materials for
polished stone tool and ornament production. Finally, a puzzle for over 50
years appears to have been solved by the discovery of amphibolite quarries in
the Jizerské Mountains, in North Bohemia, securely dated to the Early Neolithic
and from which 12 kg blocks were moved to nearby settlement sites.
Fundamentally new also is the analysis of Earliest LBK houses in Austria, where
Lenneis presents some exciting results. Some of the earliest structures are the
largest, such as House 1 at Mold, 37.5m in length and covering a floor area of
40,000 m2. The LBK long-house is as monumental and as fundamental a structuring
element as any artifact created by any early farmers in Europe - as Marciniak
observes, both a link to the ancestors and a place for creating current social
identities. These identities would appear to be grounded in independent
households, as Lenneis finds large gaps between the houses of the Earliest LBK
settlements. If these are not gardens, the gaps may be places reserved for
communal feasting, as proposed on the basis of animal bone deposition by
Marciniak, as a way of integrating neighbours from ‘separate’ houses.
Marciniak’s idea that domestic animals are used to create links with the
ancestors, much like long-houses, is intriguing and underlines the symbolic
importance of cattle and pigs for feasting, as distinct from sheep and goat for
everyday consumption. As with Lukes for pottery, Marciniak emphasises
deliberate and rapid deposition of animal bones, as a way of creating and
maintaining the habitus. However, the idea of the habitus is taken too far when
Marciniak claims (p. 132) that ‘the everyday routines of LBK communities
remained almost frozen, leaving very little room for individual reflexivity and
independence’. This is to commit the sin of relying on only half of what Pierre
Bourdieu has written (viz., the stable, unchanging habitus), omitting the
negotiations over power and resources that constituted his other main object of
research. Nonetheless, Marciniak’s contribution is an excellent example of the
social practices that can be inferred from animal bone deposition.
The other contributor who makes creative use of Bourdieu and the habitus is
Lukes, who elaborates migrationist, indigenist and integrationist models on the
basis of social action taken by the major contributors. An example is the
integrationist model, where Mesolithic lifeways were integrated into the
farming habitus established as a result of leapfrog colonisation. The farmers
were dominant because they were able to use their symbols in public (houses,
pottery, stone axes), while the foragers emulated the farmers in public
discourse but expressed their ancestral identities and individual personhood in
private, habitus-based practices.
Lukes wisely avoids a specific interpretation relying on patrilocal or
matrilocal residence rules, that are notoriously difficult to justify.
Mateiciuková is not so cautious, proposing breeding networks involving the
movement of forager women into farming settlements (and occasionally the
converse). Apart from the availability of many alternatives to this breeding
scenario, as noted by Zvelebil, it is equally unwise to rely upon recent
isotopic sourcing analyses by Price or Bentley, since their technique
explicitly fails to identify a positive source for people but
is more reliable for stating where they did not come from.
Mateiciuková is also brave to invoke the Mesolithic and LBK psyche in
her claim that the effect of Neolithic lifeways was felt on the Mesolithic soul
before they impacted on Mesolithic material culture. This is a beautiful, if
untestable, hypothesis for a lithics analyst, perhaps ultimately related to the
germ of a Cauvin idea that ritual domestication precedes economic
domestication. It deserves to be quietly dropped into the Vltava.
If there is a field of study where this volume lacks direction, it is, perhaps
surprisingly, pottery (remember Krukowski’s description of the Neolithic as
‘pot prehistory’!). In this volume, two contributors (Pavlu and Tichý) suggest
that Early LBK pottery is essentially homogenous, while a third (Nowak) uses
ethnographic analogies for domestic production to argue for very marked
variability. Indeed, Nowak concludes by denying any general ceramic evolution,
positing, instead, a series of local stylistic developments supporting a
leapfrog colonisation by a number of different small groups. It is pertinent to
ask how specialists have measured local, regional and inter-regional ceramic
variability, taking into account all of the relevant taphonomic issues. If we
are to develop a fully integrated view of the Earliest and Early LBK, we shall
need ceramic studies to match the quality of the lithic research.
Otherwise, this is a fine volume that admirably achieves its aims. It is clear
that the emergence of the LBK is now unthinkable without significant
contributions from local foragers, whether through pre-existing exchange
networks of mates, artifacts and raw materials, or through the intimate
knowledge of places and areas. Lukes and Zvelebil should be congratulated for
assembling a group of researchers most of whom have a real contribution to make
to the humanist, anthropological archaeology that is Zvelebil’s touchstone.
This volume marks a significant contribution of Central European scholarship to
European prehistory and I look forward to further excellent research from this
group of scholars.
John Chapman
Durham University
References
Bogaard, A., 2004. Neolithic farming in Central Europe. London:
Routledge.
Zvelebil, M., (ed.), 1986. Hunters in transition . Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Review Submitted: September 2005
The views expressed in
this review are not necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews
Editor.
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