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(UN)SETTLING THE NEOLITHIC EDITED BY D. BAILEY, A.WHITTLE AND V. CUMMINGSOxbow: 2005; x + 149pp, 77 b/w figures, 9 tables; ISBN 1 84217 179 8 (30)

The Neolithic of south-eastern Europe, as traditionally conceived, is the kind that archaeologists spent muchof the 20th century looking for in Britain - sedentary farming communities living in well-defined settlements,clearly distinguished in their ways of life from the preceding Mesolithic. The failure to find such remains inBritain, however, has led to the deconstruction of the Neolithic package and called into question the natureof being Neolithic. In the light of this we might wonder whether the archetypal European Neolithic is quite asstraightforward as it might appear. The international contributors to this volume would suggest not -unsettling here refers both to disturbing those taken-for-granted norms and, specifically, questioning thedegree (and definition) of sedentism in the region.

The conceptual and interpretative papers collected here are the outcome of a conference held in Cardiff in2003 and a second volume of case-studies is planned. The research areas of the contributors spanHungary, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey. Sadly two of the authors, Andrew Sherratt and John Evans, areno longer with us: their thoughtful papers here are a measure of our loss.

One welcome element of the volume is the recognition that, as Sherratt puts it, Europe as a prehistoriccultural entity begins at the Taurus. Anatolia, all too often seen merely as a bridge (orevena gap) betweenEurope and the Near East, needs to be recognised as a key part of the mosaic. Sites of the seventhmillennium BC, like atalhyk, were the medium by which the Neolithic of the Fertile Crescent wastranslated into a European phenomenon and there is much to be learnt from how communities were createdhere. Ian Hodder makes a persuasive case that the house unit at atalhyk grew at the expense of thecommunity at large, particular households being able to trade on their accumulated stock of history andmemory, materialised primarily in the form of human burials. The development of town life may thereforebe related to new houses clustering around dominant or ancestral ones: the community of the tell less adeliberately planned society and more a by-product of the assertion of rights through repetition and memoryconstruction in the house.

Two papers focus on the significance of houses in the Balkans, but from very different angles. DouglassBailey argues that we are good at studying Neolithic houses but bad at understanding what they mean(t).His response to this perceived failure is, intriguingly, to draw comparisons with 20th century minimalistsculpture by artists like Robert Morris, and particularly the way such artworks activate the surrounding spacerather than drawing attention only to themselves; Neolithic buildings could be approached similarly as non-referential structures, serving to position people in space. The paper serves as a reminder that architecture,whatever it may be taken to symbolise, is primarily experienced physically. Such conceits, Bailey argues,push us away from the search for asingle, closed meaning of the Neolithic built environment.

In Ruth Tringhams paper the focus is on fire, which was both central to the life of buildings in south -eastEurope, through the oven or hearth, and implicated in their death, through house-burning events. Tringhamcites various lines of evidence that house-burnings were deliberate and planned rather than accidental, andpart of a ritual performance rather than the result of aggression. Her emphasis on the affective, eventraumatic nature of such events, the idea that ash and burnt objects are reminders o f the cumulative

biographies [that] fill a place with memories, complements and contrasts with Baileys minimalism andHodders household politics. There would seem to be scope for a further volume devoted simply to workingthrough thesediverseapproaches to Neolithic houses.

As well as the nature of domestic architecture, traditional site typology is also called into questionthroughout the volume, particularly the significance of tells. Whittle and Bailey set up a key issue in theirintroduction - the over-simplified way in which most archaeologists have seen tell settlements as centres,whether of production, control or the creation of identity. In northern Greece, as Kostas Kotsakis explains, itis only recently that the excavation of flat, extended sites has shown that there are other kinds ofsettlement in the region; moreover Paul Halsteads analysis of faunal remains from one of these,Makriyalos, shows a similar seasonal range to those from the tells.

However, it is John Evans who really addresses the nature of tells. He too suggests the contrast with flatsites is unhelpful: physical prominence should not be assumed to equate with a greater sense of place,

since sites only periodically revisited could have had a deeper meaning than those imbued with thefamiliarity of continuous residence. Moreover, the visual aspect of tells would have been tempered by thewoodland environment, woodland whose management and clearance was itself a medium of social

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agency. This de-emphasis of the visual is mirrored by Steve Mills consideration of the auditory significanceof places: in their early phases, he suggests, tells would have been heard before they were seen (Millsattempts to reconstruct the acoustic form of different parts of the landscape seem speculative, however - tooreliant on present-day data to convince as a Neolithic soundscape).

Evans goes on to suggest that there is, nevertheless, something special about tells: after all, there are manyearlier sites where practices involving the accumulation of materials did not lead to significant moundformation. He argues that agency relations do not completely explain the specific form of the tell and itsseeming directionality of growth and draws instead on psychoanalysis, suggesting that the significance oftells resides in peoples engagement with their enduring materiality, whether digging into them in order tomake sense of the past (the physical environment as analyst) or deliberately creating theirmonumentality as a remembrance of past lives. This contrasts, of course, with Hodders view of atalhykas an unintended consequence of household-based practices and should again fuel further debate.

Material culture is less in evidence, but Evans touches on the role of pottery in creating identity and thissubject is picked up by Laurens Thissen. Thissen argues that because the Early Neolithic pottery of theStarcevo-Cris culture was fully accomplished from the start it must have its origins in the precedingMesolithic. Suggesting that we cannot understand the meaning of assemblages found in secondary contexts(though I would argue that is not wholly intractable) he focusses instead on technology, interpreting thethick-walled, fibre-tempered pots as suited to heating with stones, akin to earlier cooking methods in non-ceramic containers. Similarly, the use of red ochre in pottery decoration recalls older ritual practices.Ultimately, however, Thissens seems unsure whether to see ceramics as no more than an addition toexisting ways of life, perhaps with the simple advantage of increased durability, or as an innovation relatedto the preparation of new vegetable foods and therefore intimately linked to the emergence of farming.

This dilemma is really part of a bigger issue concerning the distinctiveness of Neolithic ways of life fromthose of the Mesolithic. Usually, of course, they have been contrasted in terms of sedentism and mobility.However, Kotsakis shows that the consequence of realising that not all Greek Neolithic sites are long-livedtell sites like Sesklo or Argissa is a blurring of this distinction: we know so little about the earliest Neolithicagriculture that using it to define the Neolithic is a purely verbal exercise. Hence we need to avoidconstructing Mesolithic and Neolithic as essentialist, dichotomous concepts. Duan Boric explores thismore deeply through the physical evidence for supposedly Mesolithic and Neolithic groups in the Balkans.The frontier model of Mesolithic-Neolithic transitions, he argues, is rooted in the Orientalist thinkingcritiqued by Edward Said. There do appear to be distinct Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, as measuredby their skeletons, but in terms of practices and culture it is much harder to see a difference: for instance,the material traces of a Mesolithic past, in the form of human bones, became part of the Early Neolithi cpresence at Lepenski Vir. This strikingly inverts the common view that lifestyles rather than populationsdistinguish the two periods, and would also repay a fuller treatment.

A group of papers focusses on animals as markers, or otherwise, of sedentism in the Neolithic. NickyMilner deconstructs both the notion of sedentism, particularly the lack of a clear definition, and the illusion ofseasonality studies as a reliable indicator, when even at a site as well-researched as Star Carr (in England)there is no consensus on the season of occupation. Her conclusion is that sedentism (i.e. year-roundoccupation) is difficult to demonstrate but that it may not anyway be a useful marker of an agriculturalsociety: we should think rather in terms of permanence (long-term occupation) and a spectrum ofmovements within a landscape.

Paul Halstead argues that the Neolithic of Greece needs resettling not unsettling: the recent discussion of

mobility has been muddied by the conflation of different analytical scales. Like Milner he stresses thatsedentism does not preclude daily or seasonal mobility, but is more optimistic about the potential ofassessing seasonality. None of the excavated tells in Thessaly positively demonstrate year-roundoccupation but that may just reflect the nature of the data. Moreover, on this basis the non-tell sites havejust as much indication of year-round occupation - at least that is the most parsimonious interpretation.However, Halstead argues that this kind of analysis does not in itself explain settlement systems; it is just asimportant to consider environmental data as evidence of how relationships were maintained between sites,e.g. the social significance of consumption attested by the wealth of fine pottery is supported by faunalevidence for feasting at sites like Makriyalos.

The social role of animals is also touched on by Lszl Bartosiewicz, who argues that the first Neolithicpeople in the Carpathian Basin (Krs culture) were incomers bringing a herding regime, dominated bysheep and goat, that was ill-suited to the local environment. In the middle and late Neolithic, however, moresuitable strategies developed, focussed on cattle and pigs and including some hunting. Bartosiewicz

suggests that the earlier livestock monoculture was mirrored in the undifferentiated settlements; here werepeople under stress not because the Hungarian Plain was a marginal environment in the traditional sensebut because it was cognitively marginal to the Krs pastoralists. The re-emergence of hunting in the

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context of a more balanced later Neolithic economy can then be interpreted as reflecting social perceptionsof the challenges of this environment.

Alasdair Whittle also considers Krs society, but in the broader context of understanding the nature ofpeoples engagement with their world. Like Evans, he suggests that much social theory applied to prehistorylacks a sense of what motivates people. Rather than using psychoanalysis, however, he turns toapproaches from social anthropology, especially the ideas of conviviality (the nature of peoples socialities)and choreography (forms of social interaction). Whittle constructs a model of lived experience on theHungarian Plain but while this succeeds in conveying something of the complexity of social life, ultimatelyone wonders how far it distinguishes the Krs people from any other Neolithic group. Things could havebeen different, it is true, as they were later in the Neolithic, but those differences are characterised intraditional archaeological terms (more cattle, larger structures, etc) rather than in terms of the aesthetics ofliving. Whittle argues we need more complicated narratives but these will also require fuller exposition.

Andrew Sherratts concluding digestif presents some typically elegant reflections on the key themes ofsettlement and sedentism at a pan-European scale. He suggests that we need to see settlements as anactive marking of the landscape, recording the foci of activities that may still be relatively mobile. We might,for instance, conceive Neolithic enclosures of central and Atlantic Europe as ersatz tells, a tokenpreservation of the communal aspirations of tell-dwellers. In other ways, however, Neolithic populationscarrying crops and livestock with them were more mobile than Mesolithic groups tied to static resources.Such counter-intuitive thinking reminds us that the Neolithic is a complex set of processes; if the settlingtheme were to mean an emergence of consensus, Sherratt argues, then it would signal a failure of ourimagination.

Whittle and Bailey, following Halstead, make a similar caveat at the outset, warning against simply replacingan old orthodoxy with a new, gradualist one. While this volume is not a comprehensive overview, thediversity of ideas and approaches provides, in effect, a new research agenda for the Neolithic of south-eastEurope. We now need detailed studies from a variety of contexts: if that is what the companion volume willprovide then it is eagerly awaited.

Jonathan LastEnglish Heritage

Review Submitted: June 2006