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celtic studies publications
series editor: John T. Koch
celtic studies publications i
The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe and Early Ireland and Wales, ed. John T. Koch with John Carey (Four th
Edition, revised and expanded, 2003) Pp. x + 440
isbn 978–1–891271–09–0
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A Celtic Florilegium: Studies in Memory of Brendan O Hehir, ed. Kathryn Klar, Eve Sweetser, and †Claire Thomas (1996) Pp. xxxvi + 227
isbn hc 0–9642446–3–2 pb 0–9642446–6–7
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Landscape Perception in Early Celtic Literature, Francesco Benozzo (2004) Pp. xvi + 272
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Cín Chille Cúile—Texts, Saints and Places: Essays in Honour of Pádraig Ó Riain, ed. John Carey, Máire Herbert, and Kevin Murray (2004)
Pp. xxiv + 405
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isbn 978–1–891271–14–4
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Ireland and the Grail, John Carey (2007) Pp. xxii + 421
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Tartessian: Celtic in the South-west at the Dawn of History, John T. Koch (Second Edition, revised and expanded, 2013) Pp. xii + 332
isbn 978–1–891271–17–5
celtic studies publications XIV
Moment of Earth: Poems & Essays in Honour of Jeremy Hooker, ed. Christopher Meredith (2007) Pp. xvi + 313
isbn 978–1–891271–16–8
celtic studies publications XV
Celtic from the West: Alternative Approaches from Archaeology, Genetics, Language and Literature, ed. Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch (2010;
2012) Pp. xii + 383
isbn 978–1 –84217–475–3
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Celtic from the West 2: Rethinking the Bronze Age and the Arrival of Indo-European in Atlantic Europe, ed. John T. Koch and Barry Cunliffe (2013) Pp. viii + 237
isbn 978–1 –84217–475–3
celtic studies publications XVii
Memory, Myth and Long-term Landscape Inhabitation, ed. Adrian M. Chadwick and Catriona D. Gibson (2013) Pp. viii + 350
isbn 978–1–782973935
Editorial correspondence: CSP-Cymru Cyf., Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies,
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, sy23 3hh Wales
An Offprint of
Memory, Myth and Long-term
Landscape Inhabitation
edited by
Adrian M. Chadwick and Catriona D. Gibson
ISBN: 9781782973935
© OXBOW BOOKS
www.oxbowbooks.com
CONTENTS
List of contributors
vii
Foreword – spacing time and timing space
Richard Bradley
xi
1. “Do you remember the first time?”A preamble through memory, myth and place
Adrian M. Chadwick and Catriona D. Gibson
1
2. Narrating the house. The transformation of longhouses in early Neolithic Europe
Daniela Hofmann
32
3. Memory, myth, place and landscape inhabitation:
a perspective from the south-west peninsula
Andy M. Jones
55
4. Mounds, memories and myths: ancient monuments and place
in the Leicestershire landscape
John Thomas
76
5. Out of time but not out of place.
Tempo, rhythm and dynamics of inhabitation in southern England
Catriona D. Gibson
99
6. Landesque Capital and the development of the British uplands in later prehistory:
investigating the accretion of cairns, cairnfields, memories and myths in ancient
agricultural landscapes
Andrew W. Hoaen and Helen L. Loney
124
7. Re-building memory, identity and place:
the long term re-use of prehistoric settlements on the Isles of Scilly
Gary Robinson
146
8. The significance of goats and chickens?
Iron Age and Roman faunal assemblages, depositional practices
and memory work at Wattle Syke, West Yorkshire
Adrian M. Chadwick, Louise Martin and Jane Richardson
165
9. Telling tales? Myth, memory, and Crickley Hill
Kirsten Jarrett
189
10. The MTV generations: remixing the past in prehistory –
or forgetting to change old habits
Gareth Chaffey and Alistair Barclay
208
11. ‘Landscape is time materialising’: a study of embodied
experience and memory in Egypt’s Eastern Desert
Anna Garnett
226
12. Moving through memories: site distribution, performance
and practice in rural Etruria
Lucy Shipley
240
13. Castelo Velho and Prazo (Vila Nova de Foz Côa, Portugal):
the oral tradition
Alexandra Vieira
258
14. Land, myth and language: the preservation of social memories
Mara Vejby and Jocelyn Ahlers
276
15. ‘Memories can’t wait’ – creating histories, materialising memories
and making myths in Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes
Adrian M. Chadwick
291
16. Granny’s old sheep bones and other stories from the Melton landscape
Chris Fenton-Thomas
315
Index
334
Cover images
Front cover, upper image. Bronze Age roundhouse at Merrivale, Dartmoor, with medieval,
post-medieval and modern boundaries, buildings and quarrying also visible – re-use, slighting,
memories and forgetting on a landscape scale. (Source: A.M. Chadwick).
Front cover, lower image. Early Bronze Age two-phase double or bi-lobate barrow with later
inserted burials, Old Sarum, Wiltshire. (Source: © Wessex Archaeology and C. Gormley of SkyMast UK, courtesy of Persimmon Homes).
Rear cover. Series of intercutting or juxtaposed Bronze Age, Iron Age, Romano-British and Saxon
ditches and pits, Springhead, Kent – where memories and practice also intersected. (Source: © Wessex
Archaeology and Aerial-Cam, courtesy of Countryside Properties and Land Securities plc.).
Cover design by Adrian M. Chadwick.
List of contributors
Jocelyn Ahlers is Associate Professor of Linguistics at
California State University, San Marcos, and is a linguistic
anthropologist specialising in the documentation and
revitalisation of Native Californian languages. For the
last sixteen years, Ahlers has worked with a number of
tribes in California, including the Hupa, the Elem Pomo,
and the Kawaiisu, in revitalisation and documentation
projects. She has also worked with a number of state
wide organisations such as the Advocates for Indigenous
California Language Survival and the California Indian
Museum and Cultural Centre. Her collaborations with
tribes have resulted in the development of teaching
grammars, a semantic dictionary and language teaching
materials. She has also helped to lead a number of
language camps and has been involved in training
language teachers and learners, under the auspices of
the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program
and the Breath of Life, Silent No More Language
Restoration Workshop. Ahlers’ recent research has
focused on the role of Native California languages as
semiotic resources in the performance of multiple and
overlapping identities among Native Californians, and
her published work includes a consideration of the role
of non-fluent language use in public identity work, as
well as an examination of conflicting interpretations
of gendered language use in the context of language
revitalisation. She is currently editing a special edition
of the journal Language and Gender focusing on this issue.
E-mail: jahlers@csusm.edu
Alistair Barclay is a Senior Post-excavation Manager
for Wessex Archaeology, and has been involved in the
writing of publication reports for over 20 years, where
he has produced papers and articles on prehistoric
monuments and pottery. A former Head of Publications
at Oxford Archaeology, he has a PhD from the University
of Reading, an interest in prehistoric chronology and is
currently involved with the Cardiff University/English
Heritage ‘Times of their Lives’project, working as part
of a team with Alasdair Whittle and Alex Bayliss. E-mail:
a.barclay@wessexarch.co.uk.
Adrian M. Chadwick is a Research Associate at the
University of Leicester, part of ‘The Deposition of
Metalwork in the Roman World’ project. For over 20
years he has worked for British commercial archaeological
units, most recently as Senior Project Officer for AC
Archaeology. Graduating from Sheffield University in
1990, he has also worked on research projects in France,
Germany, Iceland, Lebanon and Turkey. In 1999 he
completed a part-time MA in Landscape Archaeology
at Sheffield, and a part-time PhDat the University
of Wales, Newport, where from 2000-2005 he was a
Lecturer in Archaeology – he has also been a part-time
lecturer at the Universities of Bristol and Sheffield. His
thesis focused on Iron Age and Romano-British field
systems and rural settlement, and his research interests
include landscape archaeology, later prehistoric and
Roman Britain, field systems, human-animal relations,
and archaeological theory and practice. He previously
edited Stories from the Landscape: Archaeologies of Inhabitation
(2004), and Recent Approaches to the Archaeology of Land
Allotment (2008). E-mail: adrianchadwick@yahoo.co.uk
Gareth Chaffey is a Senior Archaeologist for Wessex
Archaeology. After graduating from University of
Wales, Lampeter in 2000, he has worked almost solely
for Wessex Archaeology, as well as several seasons of
fieldwork with the Çatalhöyük Research Project. For the
last six years he has been associated with the ongoing
excavations at Kingsmead Quarry, Horton, Berkshire,
from running the fieldwork through to being lead author
on publication texts. As a result, his research interests
centre on the development of the Middle Thames Valley,
particularly within the Bronze Age. E-mail: g.chaffey@
wessexarch.co.uk
Chris Fenton-Thomas worked for On-Site
Archaeology, excavating and publishing Neolithic houses
at Sewerby Cottage Farm, Bridlington before directing
and writing up the Melton excavations between 2004
and 2010. This was also where he met his wife, Claire.
His PhD was with Andrew Fleming and Mark Edmonds
at the University of Sheffield, and was a long-term
landscape history of the Yorkshire Wolds, subsequently
published by Tempus as The Forgotten Landscapes of the
Yorkshire Wolds (2005). He has also worked for Trinity
College Carmarthen, Dyfed Archaeological Trust, the
Open University and the University of Hull. After 20
years engaged with landscape archaeology, Chris moved
to pastures new to south-east Bulgaria in 2010, where
he and Claire now run a smallholding and eco-guest
house in a small Bulgarian village. They grow vines and
rear pigs to make their own wine and sausages. E-mail:
chrisfentonthomas@hotmail.co.uk
Anna Garnett is currently a Curatorial Trainee in
Egyptology in the Department of Ancient Egypt and
Sudan at the British Museum and Manchester Museum,
as part of the HLF-funded Future Curators programme.
She is also a doctoral student in Egyptology at the
University of Liverpool, where she graduated with a BA
(Hons) in Egyptian Archaeology in 2007 and an MA
in Egyptology in 2008. Her doctoral thesis focuses on
constructed space and religious expression in Egypt’s
Eastern Desert during the New Kingdom (1550-1069
BC). During the course of her academic career she
has undertaken archaeological fieldwork in the UK,
Egypt and Sudan, focusing on the analysis of pottery,
particularly from New Kingdom settlement sites. Anna
also co-designed a touring exhibition of Egyptian
objects and archaeological archive material from the
excavations of the British Egyptologist John Garstang as
part of an MLA-funded ‘Effective Collections’ project
from 2009-2010. Her research interests include New
Kingdom architecture and royal statuary programmes,
the development of Egyptian ceramics during the 18th
and 19th Dynasties (1550-1189 BC), and the archaeology
and social history of Cumbria. E-mail: agarnett@
thebritishmuseum.org
Catriona D. Gibson is a part-time commercial
archaeologist, and part-time Research Fellow at the
University of Wales, where she is involved with the
‘Atlantic Europe and the Metal Ages Project’ (AEMAP).
Since graduating from Edinburgh University, she has
spent over 20 years in archaeology, working for many
commercial units in Britain, but predominantly for
Wessex Archaeology. She has excavated extensively in
Britain and abroad (France, Portugal, Cyprus, Turkey,
Jordan and Egypt), including co-directing excavations at
the Chalcolithic West Mound of Çatalhöyük in Turkey
with Jonathan Last. Her PhD at Reading University
focused on the later Bronze Age of western Iberia, and
her research interests include exploring evidence for long
distance interaction throughout Atlantic Europe during
later prehistory, and building further links between
academic and commercial archaeological sectors. She
is currently finalising the publication for the West
Mound excavations and completing work on a book on
Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Atlantic Europe. E-mail:
c.gibson@wales.ac.uk
Andrew W. Hoaen has a BSc in Archaeological
Sciences from the University of Bradford, and a PhD
in Archaeology from the Department of Archaeology
at the University of Edinburgh. He has a long standing
interest in the later prehistory and Roman periods of
uplands. He currently teaches at the University of
Worcester. E-mail: ahoaen@worc.ac.uk
Daniela Hofmann is currently a Lecturer at the
University of Hamburg. She has previously researched
and taught at the Centre for Lifelong Learning and the
School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University,
from where she also obtained her PhD on the Neolithic
of Lower Bavaria in 2006. Recently, she held a Leverhulme
Early Careers Fellowship at Oxford University to write
a monograph on the Linearbandkeramik culture. Her
research focuses on the Neolithic of central Europe; in
particular, she studies past bodies and the representation
of identity in funerary rites, Neolithic art, domestic
architecture and the routines of daily life. E-mail: daniela.
hofmann@uni-hamburg.de
Kirsten Jarrett is a freelance archaeological researcher
and educator, currently undertaking post-excavation
analysis on the late pre-Roman Iron Age to early medieval
period material from Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire,
writing-up volume 6 in the series of reports on the site.
She has taught part-time courses for the Continuing
Education Departments of the University of
Nottingham, Keele University, and University of Oxford,
and for the WEA. After graduating from the University
of Nottingham’s Department of Archaeology in 1997,
and completing an MA in Archaeological Research in
the same department in 1999, she went on to undertake
a part-time PhD in the Department of Archaeology at
the University of Sheffield, which was awarded in 2010.
Her thesis examined ethnic, regional and local identity
in south-west Britain from the late Iron Age to the early
middle Ages; and her research interests include Roman
and early medieval south-west Britain, and domestic
archaeology and social identity in early 20th century
Britain. E-mail: archaeology@kjarrett.com
Andy M. Jones is Archaeologist Team Leader with the
Historic Environment Projects Team, Cornwall Council.
He graduated from Sheffield University’s Department
of Archaeology and Prehistory in 1991. After graduation,
he worked for a number of contracting units, and went
on to undertake a part-time PhD at the University of
Exeter, which was completed in 2005. This focused on
the Earlier Bronze Age ceremonial monuments and
barrow complexes in Cornwall and south west Britain.
His research interests include the Neolithic, Bronze Age
periods, as well as the archaeology of the uplands and
coastal areas of western Britain. He is also interested
in the regional variation between communities in
prehistory. He recently co-edited a volume with Graeme
Kirkham entitled Beyond the Core: Regionality in British
Prehistory (2011), and published the results of large-scale
excavation with Sean Taylor in a volume called Scarcewater,
Pennance, Cornwall: Archaeological Excavation of a Bronze Age
and Roman Landscape (2010). E-mail: andjones@cornwall.
gov.uk
Helen L. Loney is a Lecturer in Archaeology at the
University of Worcester, and collaborates with Andrew
Hoaen on the Matterdale Archaeological Project, as well
as pursuing a long standing interest in the development
of western Mediterranean pottery production and
organization. E-mail: h.loney@worc.ac.uk
Louise Martin is a Project Manager at Archaeological
Services WYAS, where she has worked since graduating
from the University of Bradford in 1996. As the
most senior member of the excavation team, Louise
is responsible for the initiation and management of
archaeological fieldwork projects from conception
to publication. She has directed and managed a wide
range of archaeological fieldwork projects, including
the year-long, multi-phase landscape excavation at
Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire. Her recent publications
include contributions to a volume on the extensive Iron
Age and Roman ‘washing-line’ settlement at Wattle Syke
near Wetherby. She is also responsible for the outreach
and community projects undertaken by Archaeological
Services WYAS. E-mail: lmartin@aswyas.com
Jane Richardson was awarded a PhD in faunal analysis
from the University of Sheffield in 1997 before joining
Archaeological Services WYAS, where she is currently
a Senior Project Manager. Here Jane specialises in
post-excavation project management and has produced
numerous faunal reports, desk-based assessments and
excavation reports for clients and for publication.
Recent publications include the extensive Iron Age and
Roman ‘washing-line’ settlement near Wetherby with
Ian Roberts and Louise Martin, excavations in advance
of the construction of the Langeled Gas Receiving
Facilities at Easington in Holderness for Yorkshire
Archaeological Journal and a Bronze Age burial at Stanbury
for Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society with Blaise Vyner.
A paper on the excavation of deeply stratified deposits
from a Roman well with Hilary Cool will be published
by Britannia in 2013. E-mail: jrichardson@aswyas.com
Gary Robinson is a prehistorian specialising in the
Neolithic and Bronze Ages of Britain and Ireland, and
he has a key interest in the archaeology of seascapes in
western Britain. Since 2005 he has lectured in archaeology
at Bangor University. He is currently directing a multi
disciplinary research project exploring the prehistory
of the Glaslyn Estuary in North Wales. Forthcoming
publications include a co-edited volume (with Dr Tanya
King of Deakin University, Australia) that explores
anthropological and archaeological approaches to the
inhabitation of the sea. E-mail: g.robinson@bangor.ac.uk
Lucy Shipley is an AHRC-funded postgraduate student
at the University of Southampton. She completed her
BA in Archaeology there in 2008, and her MA in Social
Archaeology in 2009. Her PhD research is focused on
pre-Roman Italy, particularly Villanovan and Etruscan
archaeology. Thematically, she is interested in the
integration of archaeological theory into interpretive
practice, which she explores both through her doctoral
research on gender and sexuality, and in her wider
research, which is predominantly landscape based and
which formed the focus of her MA thesis. Lucy has
worked at the site of Poggio Civitate for two seasons,
and has recently conducted a field-walking survey
there, tracking paths of movement across the landscape
through an intensive survey of Mediterranean scrub
forest. She is also interested in the wider European Iron
Age, particularly the interaction of Mediterranean and
northern European cultures in the pre-Roman world.
She co-edited TRAC 2009: Proceedings of the Nineteenth
Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (2010). E-mail:
ls805@soton.ac.uk
John Thomas is a Project Officer with University of
Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). He has over
25 years experience in British commercial contract field
archaeology, and has worked extensively in the English
Midlands. He has a particular interest in later prehistoric
landscape archaeology, and has undertaken studies of
pit alignment boundaries and aggregated settlements
in the East Midlands as part of MA research at the
University of Leicester. He is currently co-director of
the Burrough Hill Project, a major research excavation
and landscape study centred on the Iron Age hillfort at
Burrough on the Hill, Leicestershire. His publications
include Monument, Memory and Myth: Use and Re-use of
Three Bronze Age Barrows at Cossington, Leicestershire. (2008),
and Two Iron Age ‘Aggregated’ Settlements in the Environs of
Leicester. Excavations at Beaumont Leys and Humberstone
(2011). E-mail: jst6@leicester.ac.uk
Mara Vejby took part in the Pomoan Language
Preservation and Documentation project at the California
Indian Museum and Cultural Centre, Santa Rosa. As the
project manager she conducted and recorded interviews
and created a Pomoan language database, which she
then used to generate an online language-learning
program. She was also heavily involved in the museum’s
California Missions project, and ran their tri-annual
newsletter. Vejby has developed a new GIS project that
aims to connect local place names in California with
Native histories of the area. Vejby recently received her
PhD from the University of Reading’s Archaeology
department. Her thesis was an investigation of the
Iron Age and Roman re-use of megalithic tombs in
Atlantic Europe, which she is currently reorganising as
a forthcoming monograph. She hopes to continue her
archaeological and anthropological work on both sides
of the Atlantic. E-mail: mdvejby@gmail.com
Alexandra Vieira is a Junior Investigator, part of the
‘Prehistoric Spaces and Territories’ Group at the Centro
de Estudos Arqueológicos de Coimbra e Porto – Campo
Arqueológico de Mértola (CEAUCP/CAM). She
graduated from the University of Porto in 2001 with
a degree in History (Archaeology), and subsequently
worked in commercial archaeology until 2003, before
becoming a lecturer at the Department of Arts and
Humanities, at Mirandela Campus (EsACT – School
of Public Management, Communication and Tourism),
Polytechnic Institute in Bragança. She returned to Porto
in 2008 to undertake part-time doctoral research, and
her research focuses on landscape archaeology and
collective memory in later prehistoric Portugal. Other
research interests include the relevance of oral traditions
in archaeology, and she has published several articles
relating to her doctoral research. E-mail: alexxandra.
vieira@gmail.com
Foreword – spacing ime and iming space
Richard Bradley
ince the nineteenth century archaeologists have tried
to measure time. Excavators shared the same concerns
as antiquarians. They wanted to arrange their material in
sequence and to establish its age. That process remained
important as new methods were devised, whether they
were typology, stratigraphy, seriation or radiocarbon
dating. Chronological schemes were introduced, modified and often abandoned. But in most cases they
under pinned wider interpretations of the past.
Space was studied on an extensive scale, so that the
distributions of artefacts and monuments were discussed
and mapped over entire regions, but this work rarely
featured intra-site analysis. Where it did happen, it was
more characteristic of field survey. Early excavations
were generally small but deep – sections through burial
mounds provide the obvious example – and large areas
of ground were rarely exposed. The open air excavations
for which Pitt Rivers and Bersu receive the credit actually
took the form of trenches, dug and refilled in sequence.
By the 1970s all that had changed. There was a greater
interest in settlement excavation. The same period saw
the development of ‘rescue archaeology’ which profited
from the stripping of topsoil in the course of mineral
extraction. Now it was possible to consider time and
space together, but in practice it rarely happened. Even
today it is difficult to integrate chronological and
spatial information, so that entire landscapes are divided
into phases which would have been meaningless to the
people who lived in them. The priorities of 20th century
archaeology are imposed on 21st century fieldworkers. It
S
results in an unstable relationship.
One reason for saying this is that chronologies can
now be measured by radiocarbon dating – provided the
samples are sufficiently numerous and are selected and
analysed with care. Another is that this process shows
that traditional assumptions may be flawed. Artefacts
or human remains could have been already old when
they were deposited; ancient monuments might be
brought back into commission after a significant lapse
of time; and structures of different ages might be juxtaposed in a way that suggests that their relationship was
significant. Such ideas were first discussed in the study
of monumental architecture, but recent work, much of it
reported here, has shown that they are just as relevant to
less prominent features – to field ditches, middens, flat
graves, and the sites of pits and houses. It is essential
to devise new ways of integrating space and time. That
is possible because of the scale of developer-funded
excavations.
There are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between structures and artefacts formed at different times. Key elements include memory, myth, the
invention of traditions, and the erasure of old ones.
The contributors consider these ideas in relation to a
series of well researched case studies. What they share
are sophisticated ways of thinking about the past in
the past. As in all good archaeology, the lessons of this
research are both theoretical and practical.
That is why this book is so welcome and why it has
so much to teach.
2. Narraing the house. The transformaion of longhouses in
early Neolithic Europe
Daniela Hofmann
Introduction: pasts and futures
emory in terms of the ‘past in the past’ has
recently become an immensely fruitful topic
in archaeology. As in this volume, some authors have
focused on the re-use of monuments or other sites
after a considerable hiatus and the meanings that would
have been ascribed to such traces (e.g. Bradley 2002;
Hingley 1996), while others (e.g. Mizoguchi 1993) have
emphasised the process of cultural transmission over
time. Frequently, the starting point is the broad distinction between memory as ‘inscribed’ in texts or material
traces such as monuments, and memory as ‘performed’
through daily and largely unconscious or unreflected
upon routine activity. The latter is often seen as covering
short-term acts, whilst the former can explicitly aim to
bridge longer timescales (e.g. Connerton 1989: 22–30;
see also Borić 2010a: 3; Lillios and Tsamis 2010; van
Dyke and Alcock 2003: 4; Whittle 2003: 109).
These divisions, however, are not always helpful (for
an insightful critique, see Whittle 2003: chapter 5).
Most importantly for the present study, they initially
established a dichotomy between memory as actively
created – an ‘invented tradition’ in Hobsbawm and
Ranger’s (1983) famous phrase – and memory as largely
subconscious. The former is generally seen to apply
to inscribed memory and to the re-appropriation of
past traces in the present, whilst the latter refers to
quite mindless repetition of habitual acts. In this view,
conscious memory efforts, such as recounting a myth or
replicating a ritual, are passed on as bundles of discrete
knowledge, and the issue to deal with is the accuracy
of such transmission. For example, Bradley (2003: 221–
222) discusses how long memories can be transmitted
‘effectively’ and ‘intact’ in spite of processes of ‘attrition’
M
that render memories unstable, and which are particularly
pertinent to non-literate, oral societies.1 He suggests
that the limits of this kind of memory span perhaps
three or four generations. Conscious re-invention is predominantly applicable where there is no direct link to
the past traces one has encountered (Bradley 2003: 226).
In contrast, habit-memory which resides subconsciously
in the body, is largely devoid of explicit meaning and is
therefore relatively ‘inert’ (Connerton 1989: 102), but can
nevertheless lead to further unwanted change through
the imperfect replication of practices (Mizoguchi 1993).
While such divisions can form useful heuristic
devices, they can also create problems. Firstly, as noted by
Whittle (2010: 35), breaking up memories into different
‘kinds’ removes them from lived experience, whereas
different scales of referencing the past and different
kinds of memories intersect all the time. Secondly, in
such accounts change is often seen as involuntary or
as ‘defective’ memory. For example, Connerton’s view
of rites of commemoration (1989: 44–61) centres on
their formalisation, and since such practices draw
their salience from claiming to be re-enactments of
past events, there is no scope for creativity. Finally, the
notion of habit-memory as ‘unconscious’ has also been
critiqued (Ingold 2011: 60).
In contrast, several recent contributions stress that
all memory work is to a certain extent creative, although
this may not always be reflected upon discursively. In
this sense, continuity of the discursive meaning of a
given item or practice – in any case hard to establish
archaeologically – is not necessarily the main concern.
Remembering is akin to reconstruction, always involving
partial forgetting, and this therefore ensures the
relevance of memory for the present, as pointed out by
Borić (2010b: 61–62) on the basis of works by Ricoeur,
narrating the house
Heidegger and Bergson. This is also true for traditions,
here defined as shared ideas concerning accepted ways
of ‘going about in the world’ which are explicitly seen as
rooted in the past. Far from passively inherited cultural
baggage, they are a kind of collective referencing which
draw on the past to gain relevance for the present, and
not just in the case of obviously ‘invented’ traditions
(Osborne 2008: 285; Robb 2008: 333)2. All traditions
are historical forces, guiding but not determining the
actions of people involved in them (Robb 2008: 348–
349). Similarly, Borić (2010c: 49–52, 61) concentrates
on the ‘event’, a conjunction of processes at various
scales, which foregrounds the indeterminacy of a past
consisting of situations in which outcomes are not fixed
(see also Carsten 2007: 4). In order to negotiate their
way through such situations, people have to make use
of their memories, drawing on them as they encounter
changing contexts. Memory is therefore more than exact
recall, and tradition more than unthinking repetition.
Rather, their purpose is to adapt the past to furnish
motivations and know-how in the present (q.v. Jones
2007: 53; Waterson 1990: 232–247; Whittle 2003: 111).
For Lowenthal (1985: 210), the “...prime function of
memory…is not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as
to enrich and manipulate the present” and one may add,
also influence the future by reworking the potentialities
of the past (Borić 2010a: 10; Carsten 2007: 18).
The notion of memory as narrative is crucial here
(Borić 2010a: 13, 2010c: 63).3 People know how to ‘go
about in the world’ because they know how to react in
relation to each other and to their surroundings – in
Ingold’s (2011: 56) example, we know how to use a saw
because we place it in relation to stories which invoke
its past use. We can then go on to enmesh this artefact
in a new narrative, which, for instance, contains a
plank, ourselves, and our present need for yet another
bookshelf. Such ‘stories’ are not simply transmitted
from the past, but are revealed to practitioners who,
faced by a particular set of circumstances, draw upon
them for guidance on how to proceed. The significance
of stories is “...recognised through the alignment of
present circumstances with the conjunctions of the
past” (ibid.: 57), and invoked for projects which will
have repercussions in the future. This applies to memory
both in terms of the adjustment of habit-memory to
the demands of a current task, and to the making
[ 33 ]
relevant of traces from the past in a changing present.
By becoming part of evolving stories, memories are not
transmitted unaltered, but their implications are drawn
out in the course of people’s lives, making flexibility
and adaptability central (Ingold 2011: 161). Stories from
the past are continuously “[woven] into the texture of
present lives” (Ingold 2011: 164, addition in parentheses).
This means that to an extent, people are always partly
open to the past as a source of possibilities which could
be re-incarnated in the present (Connerton 1989: 62).
This does not imply a ‘free-for-all’, in which the past
can be entirely manipulated without recourse to shared
notions of what occurred, or without keeping a sense
of authenticity. Sahlins (1985: xii) describes how even
within the same society, change can either be explicitly
recognised or subsumed as a re-instantiation of the
past. The Maori, for instance, see themselves as moving
through time backwards, with the panorama of the
past in the form of myths and historical recollections
stretched out in front of them. From this, they select
the parts most appropriate to guide them in their
present situation (ibid.: 56). This implies at least partly
shared ideas about the event which is being referenced
and its explicit re-enacting, but the present context of
the speaker also influences the way this recollection is
implemented and will guide its future recall. This also
contrasts with the general Western post-Enlightenment
notion of the past as a separate, closed time receding
behind us.
Alongside myths and stories, objects are also crucial
in such enterprises. As discussed by Jones (2007: 62–77),
the sensory qualities of artefacts and their involvement
in practices evoke memories at a tangible, experiential
and emotive level. Since artefacts are part of constantly
changing constellations with other items and people,
however, new juxtapositions are possible. Memory is
no longer replication, but re-creation (Jones 2007: 81–
87). Artefacts frame, guide, shape and enable human
experience, and in this sense can be seen as possessing a
kind of agency in orienting people towards the world in
a certain way (e.g. Gosden 2005). These are fundamental,
non-conscious aspects of material culture, making it an
indispensible prerequisite of human social life (Olsen
2007). This same emotional and ontological salience,
however, also renders artefacts, including houses, as
potential sites of contestation, or foci for alternative
[ 34 ]
Daniela Hofmann
versions of possible futures.
More recent theoretical approaches therefore stress
that memory is a process of constant re-actualisation
of the past in a changing present. So far, however, they
have had little impact on interpretations of the central
European Linearbandkeramik culture (circa 5500–4900
cal. BC),4 largely because this period is often regarded
as dominated by a concern with the long-term, explicitly recalled and venerated past (a criticism also voiced
by Robb and Miracle 2007: 113 and Whittle 2010:
35; see Bradley 2001; 2002; Jones 2007). To date,
Linearbandkeramik (hereafter LBK) domestic architecture
has been interpreted mostly in terms of the static
replication of ancestral traditions. Instead, in what
follows I concentrate on the regional and chronological
variations in the appearance of buildings, examining the
social strategies in which they were enmeshed in order
to reveal how houses became ‘enstoried’ in ever more
divergent narratives. This demonstrates that change was
at the heart of even the allegedly conservative LBK. The
architectural changes of the central European Middle
Neolithic emerge as explicit selections from a series
of competing trends, as conscious efforts to re-create
valued ways of inhabitation. This also allows a critique
of some recently proposed models that have suggested
that the end of the LBK was connected to a profound
social crisis.
Linearbandkeramik houses
The LBK was the first Early Neolithic culture over
much of central and western Europe (Fig. 2.1a and b).
Probably developing in western Hungary or eastern
Austria between 5600 and 5500 cal. BC (Bánffy 2004;
Bánffy and Oross 2010), at its maximum it extended
across an area from the Ukraine in the east to the Paris
Basin in the west, and from south of the Danube well
Merzbach v.
Bylany
Bavaria
after Midgley 2005, 14
earliest LBK
maximum extent of LBK
Fig. 2.1a. Map of LBK distribution. (Source: D. Hofmann after Midgley 2005: 14).
narrating the house
[ 35 ]
that this placed the symbolic
properties of wood, and perhaps
the forest, centre-stage (Whittle
1996: 163). It is clear that this
almost over-structured internal
space had a large impact on how
houses could be used, but also on
how they cultivated certain sensory
Nuremberg
experiences and ways of dwelling
for their inhabitants. Such aspects
cannot be addressed in detail in this
paper, and remain highly contentious
Harting
* Lerchenhaid
(but see Hofmann 2006a: chapters
*
Danube
Stephansposching
*
Lengfeld
3–4; forthcoming: ch. 3; Last 1998).
Otzing *
*
LBK house floors are virtually
Isar
never preserved, and activity patUntergaiching
*
terns have to be reconstructed
from finds in the adjacent ‘loam
Munich
pits’, assumed to have provided the
N material for wattle and daub walls
and which then slowly filled with
refuse. Similarly, the above-ground
appearance of LBK structures is less
well understood than the generally
similar reconstructions in open0
50
100 km
air museums might suggest (e.g.
Rück 2009). For example, posts
Fig. 2.1b. Location of main Bavarian sites mentioned in the text. (Source: D. Hofmann).
may have been elaborately carved,
although none survive in the loess
into the northern European Plain. Longhouses are soils of central Europe. There is limited evidence that
a key part of this cultural phenomenon. It has been walls might have been painted, with daub at several sites
estimated that about 10,000 of these have now been preserving traces of pigments such as red or brown on
excavated (Petrasch 2012: 53), and this number is rising a white background (e.g. Novotný 1958: 12 ; Schadeconstantly. An exact figure remains elusive, due to the Lindig 2002: 177). Yet such instances are rare, and
fact that so many sites are still unpublished or only decoration was probably more likely on the inside of the
reported in regional journals. Nevertheless, houses have structure, as most colourants could not have withstood
generated a vast literature (e.g. Bradley 2001; Coudart the elements for long.
1998; Modderman 1970; Rück 2009; von Brandt 1988)
Routine experiences and the memories they created
and are seen as having been central to LBK life and were a strong force in shaping people’s memories of
social reproduction (Bickle in prep.; Jones 2007: 91–121; houses and how they could be taken forward, and these
Whittle 2003: 134–143).
are potentially fruitful avenues to explore further elseLBK houses are generally reconstructed as sturdy where. This paper, however, will focus on the details
structures (Fig. 2.2) with large oak posts dividing the of the timber post settings and the overall dimensions
interior into recognised ‘modules’ (see below). The of the house, which are accessible archaeologically but
first impression upon entering such buildings is over- relatively understudied in terms of their social impacts
whelmingly of timber (Fig. 2.3), and it has been suggested (though see Whittle 2003: 134–143).
[ 36 ]
Daniela Hofmann
Fig. 2.2. Exterior impression from a reconstructed LBK longhouse at Straubing
Zoo, Lower Bavaria. (Source: D. Hofmann).
It is generally accepted that LBK houses fall into two
main chronological groupings – those belonging to the
earliest phase of the culture (until about 5300 cal. BC)
and those from middle and late phases, c. 5300–4900 cal.
BC (Fig. 2.4). The former generally did not exceed 25m
in length and had large, post-free spaces at the centres
of the houses. External wall trenches may have functioned
as additional roof supports or held a second set of walls.
Some of the better-preserved examples also show groupings
of more closely-set posts placed on either side of this central
space, and these are often interpreted in analogy to the
better understood later buildings (Stäuble 2005: 150–165).
Although the differences with later examples are obvious,
some characteristics of the middle and late Bandkeramik
building were already present in these earliest examples. For
instance, although not strictly rectangular in plan (some have
been reconstructed with rectangular ‘extensions’ either side),
they were generally longer than they were wide. In the interior
they featured posts arranged into regular transverse rows
of three (called Dreierpfostenreihe in German – ‘three-post
row’, hereafter abbreviated as DPR). Earliest LBK houses
were generally very similar across the earliest Bandkeramik
distribution.
In contrast, middle and late LBK houses were rectangular
to trapezoidal in shape, more varied in size and contained
many more internal posts. Archaeologists generally divide
these later buildings into three parts or modules, according
to typological criteria defined by Modderman on the basis
of Dutch examples (1970: 101–109) (Fig. 2.4). Thus, all
buildings had a central part, and a variety of post settings
could occur there (see below). Mostly, the spaces between
transversal post rows were slightly larger in these areas
than in the remainder of the buildings, and there is some
evidence that the buildings’ single hearths were located here
(Modderman 1970; Stäuble and Lüning 1999). In addition,
most houses had a north-west part, named in accordance
with the dominant house orientation in the Netherlands and
generally applied to other regions, even if the terminology
does not correspond to the house orientation there. This
part of the house was often marked by an external wall
trench and on the inside was divided off from the centre by
two transversal post rows set closer together and forming
a ‘corridor’. Spaces between DPRs tended to be narrower
in the north-west than in the centre (Modderman 1970:
101–103). Finally, some buildings also had a south-east
part, again often demarcated internally by a corridor, but
not normally marked on the outside. The south-east area
could be characterised by DPRs consisting of double
posts, or by very closely set DPRs, perhaps supporting
a raised upper floor for storage (Modderman 1970: 106107). Although there is no exact correlation between the
number of modules and the overall length of a house (e.g.
von Brandt 1988), tripartite buildings reached greater
maximum lengths than bipartite ones. Middle to late
LBK buildings had an average length of about 20m, but
they could be as short as 5m, or 50m or more in length.
Fig. 2.3. Interior impression from a reconstructed LBK longhouse at
Straubing Zoo, Lower Bavaria. (Source: D. Hofmann).
[ 37 ]
narrating the house
EarliestLBK
Developed
MiddleNeolithic
Middle/lateLBKhousetypes:
1b
2
3
N
N
North-West
N
N
Corridor
Centre
N
Corridor
Elsloo57
Bylany2200
South-East
Frankfurt-Niedereschbach19
Zwenkau1
Lerchenhaid5
Fig. 2.4. Modderman’s scheme for the partition of LBK buildings. Buildings not to scale. (Source: D. Hofmann; Frankfurt-Niedereschbach (26.4m) after
Hampel 1992: 113; Lerchenhaid 5 (37m) after Brink-Kloke 1990: 58; Elsloo 57 (14m) after Modderman 1970: plate 22; Bylany 2200 (c. 9m) after
Pavlů 2000: 211; Zwenkau-Harth 1 (36m) after Quitta 1958, as reproduced in Riedhammer 2003: 483). Note reconstructed posts are shown in outline.
Houses of the middle and late phases were generally
less uniform than those of the earliest LBK. Regional
patterns in the preferred post arrangements in the centre
of the house exist, and on occasion houses from the
German Rhineland and the Netherlands were entirely
surrounded by a wall trench. In contrast, houses in
eastern areas such as the Czech Republic or Slovakia
often lacked trenches even around the north-western
part, or were built with a south-east instead of a northwest module, a combination absent further west (e.g.
Hofmann forthcoming: ch. 3; Modderman 1986; Pechtl
2010: 43–46). Over time, in many regions houses became
increasingly trapezoidal, the distances between posts
increased, and small roofed porches open to the outside
were often added to south-eastern ends (e.g. Modderman
1970: 119–120). These modifications prefigure the architectural changes of the post-LBK Middle Neolithic
cultures5, when more open spaces, porches and trapezoidal
or naviform ground plans were more widely adopted (e.g.
Coudart 1998: 51–53; Hampel 1989, fig.2e).
This article examines how and why the innovations
of the middle and late LBK house led to a range of ways
in which architectural features could be manipulated,
and this relates to how they were ‘re-membered’ at each
rebuilding. Within the general parameters of a LBK
building – rectangularity, the idea of three posts in a
row and modularity (Bickle forthcoming; Coudart 1998:
55) – there were now possibilities to introduce change.
But before investigating these in more detail, I will
briefly introduce the perceived ancestral dimensions of
the Bandkeramik house and discuss their relevance for
interpretations of architectural change and for the roles
of memory in long-term settlement development.
The past of LBK houses
The similarity of LBK architecture across a wide
distribution and through long periods of time is
certainly not illusory – Modderman’s typological scheme
[ 38 ]
Daniela Hofmann
could be applied with relatively little modification from
the Netherlands in the west to the Czech Republic and
beyond in the east (Modderman 1986; Pavúk 1994). As
Pechtl (2010: 39) noted, however, since the aim of this
typology was to systematise a rapidly increasing corpus
of excavated examples, similarities between buildings
may have been overstressed at the expense of more
variable elements. Coudart (1998: 26–33) expanded the
original typology by classifying each constructional
element separately, defining different types of wall
construction, centre post arrangement, north-west
or south-east parts and so on. Although to an extent
limited by a focus on more westerly areas of the LBK,
Coudart showed the variations inherent in some aspects
of architecture, and her type lists can be expanded
with additional constructional traits for each region
(Hofmann forthcoming: ch. 3; Pechtl 2010).
In temporal terms, Coudart’s work confirmed
Modderman’s main developmental sequence that proposed a trend towards less obviously partitioned
houses with fewer internal DPRs and a greater tendency towards trapezoidal buildings. Whilst this
characterised the transition between LBK and Middle
Neolithic architectures (Fig. 2.4), similar trends can
also be identified within the LBK. Greater regularity
and openness of the internal spaces in the late LBK
are generally noted, and are often thought to reflect the
greater ‘efficiency’ of later architecture (e.g. Modderman
1970: 107, 119; Pavlů 2000: 197–198, 219), although
similar-sized or bigger open spaces were already
achieved in the earliest LBK. For instance, the centre of
the earliest LBK building at Frankfurt-Niedereschbach,
House 19, had a post-free space of 7.5 metres, while the
spaces between DPRs inside Zwenkau House 1, dated
to the Middle Neolithic, were only 4.7 metres (see Fig.
2.4). In addition, houses grew increasingly trapezoidal,
and occasionally featured doubled outer wall posts,
implying that these supported a greater portion of the
weight of the roof.
Nevertheless, this recognition of regional and
chronological differences did not lead to a concerted,
in-depth discussion of how architectural tradition
was transmitted. One exception was Sommer’s (2001)
article, which suggested that in the earliest LBK change
was actively resisted, and exact replication favoured
by those in power (Sommer 2001: 258–261). Although
rarely expressed in such terms, these ideas also inform
archaeological narratives concerning middle and late
LBK buildings. What is increasingly stressed here is the
way in which architecture was bound up with the mythical
ancestry of the LBK as a whole, providing a powerful and
revered unifying symbol of cosmological significance.
Bradley (2001) proposed that house orientation,
which became angled increasingly to the west the further
the LBK spread westwards across Europe, may have
mirrored the mythical origin of LBK settlers in each
particular region and that the sometimes more sturdily
built north-west part could have been considered an
ancestral area (for discussion see Pechtl 2010: 46). This
latter point was echoed by Lüning (2009), and is also
argued on the basis of child burials found near the
north-west parts of some houses, although this was not
uniform across the LBK (e.g. Thévenet 2009; Veit 1996).
Similarly, in his thoughtful discussion on the importance
of memory in LBK society, Jones (2007: 96) argues that
LBK settlement sites reflected an idealised ancestral
village, and that this was the reason behind the very
consistent choice of site location as well as architectural
uniformity. In spite of characterising houses as a process,
Jones (ibid.: 92) sees LBK communities as steeped in ties
explicitly concerned with the long-term past, and hence
encouraging a timeless view of society. By living among
the physical traces of the past such as the remains of
older buildings rather than re-enacting memory in ritual
and other events, the tempo of change in the LBK was
artificially slowed (ibid: 119).
It is likely that elements of these ideas did indeed
play a part in LBK house construction. Newly-built
houses spatially referenced their predecessors, sometimes
in apparently regular ways. At Schwanfeld in northern
Bavaria, Lüning (2005) suggested that new houses were
built either adjacent to their immediate predecessor (the
‘father principle’), eventually forming a line of houses
extending in one direction, or with reference to their
predecessor’s predecessor (the ‘grandfather principle’),
alternating from one end of the row to the other in
subsequent generations. This idealised model has
also been identified at other sites (ibid.), and if more
widely confirmed might suggest an explicit connection
between new houses and their past (Fig. 2.5)6. Whether
narrating the house
4
2
1
3
5
‘grandfatherprinciple’
5
4
3
2
1
‘fatherprinciple’
Fig.2.5. Schematic representation of Lüning’s suggested models for house
replacement sequences at Schwanfeld, northern Bavaria. (Source: D.
Hofmann after Lüning 2005: figs 59 and 60).
‘ancestral’ qualities can be as easily pinned to a particular
architectural module is another matter. This focus on
the ancestral ‘pedigree’ of LBK houses, however, whilst
highlighting one important aspect, has led to a neglect of
others. Because the house is regarded by archaeologists
as having been a powerful and revered symbol to its
LBK inhabitants, the largely implicit assumption is that
it must also have been precisely replicated in order to
express this reverence. To an extent, all these schemes thus
gloss over the available variations and discuss an ‘ideal’
LBK house (e.g. one with an explicitly marked north-west
section), but this only ever describes part of the evidence7.
In addition, as noted by Whittle (2003: 130, 2010:
35), the focus has been on just one aspect of the house’s
temporality – its roots in an immutable past8. Yet LBK
houses were also renewed on a regular basis. It is generally
estimated that houses were abandoned every 20–25 years,
long before they became structurally unsound, and that
new buildings were erected nearby (Stehli 1989). The
method by which this estimate is arrived at has come
[ 39 ]
under increasing criticism (e.g. Lanting and van der
Plicht 1994; Rück 2012; Stöckli 2002: 9), but to date
without a viable alternative emerging9. The duration of
a human generation could sometimes be exceeded, but
given evidence from overlapping house plans and ceramic
phasing, most houses probably did not stand much
longer than that, or indeed may have been abandoned
even more quickly (see also Zimmermann 2012). The
implication is that houses, despite their monumentality,
were built with knowledge of their abandonment in
mind. The household as a unit was constantly renewed
through the refashioning of buildings at specific intervals,
and this created an important rhythm in LBK social life.
Renewal, however, implies change as much as continuity.
The focus on the ancestral dimension of LBK longhouses has also been critiqued from a broadly phenomenological point of view (Barrett 2006). Although mostly
concerned with Hodder’s (1990) work on the longhouse
as reflecting the concept of sedentism, Barrett reacts
against the idea that any ‘meaning’, social structure or
other abstract concerns would be ‘reflected’ in a building
at all. Instead, he regards a house as a perspective from
which to explore the world through practice. Houses
empower people to enter the world from certain points
of view, replicating forms of authority and social
consensus without conscious ‘meaning’ ever needing
to be attached to them (Barrett 2006: 15). Similarly,
for Ingold houses “...arise within the current of people’s
[sic] involved activity, in the specific relational contexts
of their practical engagement with their surroundings”
(Ingold 2000: 186).
This perspective is powerful because past worlds are
appreciated as experienced totalities. Material culture is
accorded a central place in the creation of values through
the way it structures the practices of past agents (Barrett
2006: 22–23). This allows us to focus on the key aspect
of actually inhabiting a house and how this would
have oriented people’s expectations towards the world,
including any further domestic structure they were
involved in building or inhabiting. Nevertheless, there
is a tendency for such arguments to sideline processes
of change. In a very broad conceptualisation, change
can take place by people re-orienting themselves to
developments in their surroundings, but this is rarely the
focus of phenomenological accounts. Such approaches
therefore still encourage a view of changes as largely
[ 40 ]
Daniela Hofmann
implicit processes, semi-conscious ‘adjustments’ or
drift, with the house as an ‘orienting’ artefact retaining an
element of agency that sometimes seems denied to people.
In a similar vein, Coudart (1998: 91–92) regards LBK
society as relatively egalitarian, with the low indices of
variation she observes in the house reflecting this social
ideal. People were simply not trying to create differences
between houses, and where this did occur – for instance
at a regional level – it was the result of unintentional
cultural ‘drift’ over time. Such views have far-reaching
implications. Seeing change as an unwanted by-product
problematises any episodes of more rapid transformation
which are seen as ruptures or ‘crises’, and external reasons
must be sought for them. This particularly applies to
the changes taking place at the beginning of the Middle
Neolithic. Whilst house architecture was only one of
several social elements which underwent sudden change
– alongside ceramics and burial ritual – it adds to the
sense of a sudden breakdown of the stable LBK system,
either climatically induced or in response to a form of
cultural malaise (e.g. Gronenborn 2006, 2010; ZeebLanz 2009).
Yet if we see houses as ‘enstoried’ in Ingold’s sense,
we can begin to explicitly discuss the idea that it
was possible to tell different stories about them. The
longhouse was replete with a mixture of pasts operating
at different rhythms, which could be called upon to
resonate with wider changes, particularly since it was
regularly renewed (q.v. Whittle 2010: 44). At such times
of reconstruction, memories could be creatively invoked,
both those concerning a long-term or ancestral past, and
those more intimately connected with the household and
the way people lived together. These memories would be
drawn upon with the explicit aim of perpetuating that
household into the future in the most suitable way.
In their work amongst the Betsileo of Madagascar,
Kus and Raharijaona (2000) highlight the role played
by poetics of practice and creative re-interpretations of
well-articulated rules on the location and construction
sequence of a new building. Thus, the construction
of each house starts by digging six holes with a spade
never used for burial, and wielded by a person with
many living kin in order to emphasise the wish for
the longevity and prosperity of the future occupants.
Houses should also not be orientated towards a tomb,
abandoned village or valley opening, as this would
drain their life force; nor face the highest hill, since no
further growth is possible in this direction (Kus and
Raharijaona 2000: 137–138). House construction is
supervised by semi-specialised ritual experts who ensure
that these rules are observed. Crucially, this work is not
merely the rigorous repetition of past performances,
but adapts to changing situations. For example, the six
initial holes to instigate the house can begin in the most
sacred northern part, or in the eastern section in order
to harness the power of the sunrise. The digging of the
holes can be arranged to mimic local topography for
a strong ‘grounding’ of the house, or placed in such a
way as to help the integration of the male and female
occupants. This represents continuous attentiveness
to the requirements of a particular situation, a poetic
skill central to sustaining ‘the traditional ways of the
Betsileo’ which must resonate with those witnessing
the ceremony. To remain alert to the world, rules must
be constantly adapted (ibid.: 140–141), but such reinterpretations are judged according to their perceived
success, including an element of power relations in the
way ‘accepted’ solutions can be perpetuated (Osborne
2008: 287). Yet what the example of the Betsileo shows
is the importance of creative re-imagining in bringing
forward the past, and the flexibility this introduces even
in a context where buildings are strongly instilled with
cultural meanings.
While houses are built and inhabited according to
people’s expectations, these expectations can come to
differ, in spite of people being orientated towards the
world in very similar ways. Through re-fashionings
and the associated judgements, faultlines can appear
in people’s perceptions and dispositions. While this
may initially be confined to ancillary details such as
the sequence in which holes are to be dug, but not the
fact that there should be six, there is potential for the
narrative trajectories in which houses were embedded
to start diverging. Changes are thus an inherent part of
inhabitation rather than a by-product. I would argue
that it was also change which ensured that the LBK house
remained a central concern in people’s lives, developing
with differing pre-occupations. For the house to play a
dynamic role in our archaeological narratives, we must
begin to identify such potential faultlines which might
have opened up possibilities for divergence, contradiction,
or lack of fit between expectations and new situations.
narrating the house
This could have led to more rapid transformation, all
while remaining embedded in a continuous tradition
and without necessarily openly rejecting the venerable
past of the longhouse.
‘Enstoried’ houses: monumentalisation and
complexity
There is archaeological evidence that Bandkeramik houses
were indeed not simply replicated. In her landmark study,
Coudart (1998: 55) distinguished sets of traits that were
relatively stable and hence probably rarely questioned,
from elements that seemed more open to variation.
Among the first category, she listed the basic longitudinal
shape of houses, either rectangular or trapezoidal, as
well as the tendency to include more internal posts
than structurally necessary and the partitioning into
two to three modules. In contrast, the precise spacing
and arrangement of the interior posts, the absolute
length of the building and the relative size of its parts
exhibited greater flexibility. Transverse rows of posts
or the fact that regardless of house length, a minimum
number of DPRs were added, were ‘representations with
which the Danubian community thought the world’
(Coudart 1998: 85). Yet while the house incorporated
such relatively fixed aspects that created the specific
style and aesthetic of LBK buildings, there was also the
possibility of explicit experimentation with details. It is
here that faultlines could be recognisable. Builders may
not have challenged everything at once, but there were
aspects which could be manipulated, where different
expectations could come to be created within the same
tradition and where it became possible to draw on the
past for a range of different futures.
In the LBK this kind of experimentation took two
main forms, which are not mutually exclusive. One was
the internal complexity of buildings. Additional post
rows could be added or removed, and post settings
deviating from the traditional three-post row could be
created. The contrast between the resulting interiors
could have been quite dramatic, from veritable post
forests (e.g. Bylany House 2210; Pavlů 2000: 211) to
quite open spaces (e.g. Bylany House 2198; Pavlů 2000:
207) (Fig. 2.6a). The most variable post configurations
were found in the central part of the house, and a
[ 41 ]
variety of typological schemes exist to characterise
them. In plan, posts could be arranged in a Y- or
J-setting, in diagonal rows or in rows comprising only
two or, very rarely, just one post (Coudart 1998: 29;
Hofmann forthcoming; Jeunesse 2009: 157–159; Pechtl
2010: 40) (Fig. 2.6b). Furthermore, posts and stakes in
addition to the three-post rows could further subdivide
the interior (e.g. Stein House 11 in the Netherlands;
Modderman 1970: plate 184). Corridors could also be
elaborated, through an additional internal trench (the
so-called ‘extended’ corridor in Coudart’s scheme, e.g.
Hienheim House 2, Lower Bavaria; Modderman 1977:
14). Alter natively, the building could be simplified by deemphasising modularity through a lack of corridors and
an even spacing of DPRs throughout. These alternatives
affected how the building was experienced from the
inside and how everyday life was undertaken, and were
thus part of different possible stories of inhabitation
and of building household relations.
The second main strategy can be loosely characterised as monumentalisation. Buildings either became
exceptionally long, in some cases exceeding 50m (e.g.
Lengfeld-Dantschermühle House 1, Lower Bavaria;
Burger-Segl 1998), or exceptionally sturdy, as in the case of
the Type 1a houses found mostly in the Rhineland, which
were entirely surrounded by wall trenches (Modderman
1970: 111). In contrast to internal complexity, which
would have been routinely experienced by the inhabitants
of the house, monumentalisation had a pronounced
impact on the surroundings of the building. A house is
exceptionally large only in relation to those around it.
Similarly, while the significance of Type 1a buildings is
debated – interpretations range from a ‘chiefly’ residence
(van de Velde 2007) to a storage house with planked walls
to facilitate ventilation (Masuch and Ziessow 1983: 250–
254) – its construction would certainly have marked it
out from others around it. Interestingly, it was often the
north-west part which saw the greatest experimentation
with architectural aspects that could be appreciated from
the outside, most notably wall construction, which often
involved trenches and trenches reinforced with external
posts. Such aspects of the house imply an audience beyond
its inhabitants, playing on the larger stage of relations
at the site level. Here too, houses could come to enable
different forms of engagement.
Although internal complexity and monumental-
[ 42 ]
Daniela Hofmann
isation were not exclusive strategies, these varied both
regionally and chronologically. In terms of geographical
patterning, the importance of elaborating the northwest part became more pronounced to the west. In
contrast, at Slovak sites such as Štúrovo, wall trenches
were all but absent and at Bylany in the Czech Republic,
the north-west part was occasionally entirely omitted in
favour of a south-east module (Modderman 1986; Pavúk
1994). There were also regional preferences in terms of
which internal post settings were most likely to have
been chosen, or how many DPRs were erected in each
module (Hofmann forthcoming: ch. 3). These details of
architectural evidence were not simply incidental. They
show that the narratives in which houses were enmeshed,
and the ways that they made sense in people’s lives,
differed over time and from place to place.
a)
Such patterns of diversity went beyond a mere
east LBK – west LBK split, as different architectural
strategies existed within each region. In Lower Bavaria,
extremely long houses (defined by Pechtl 2009a: 188 as
those over 33m in size, or the longest 10% in the range)
varied in frequency. Monumentality seems to have been
particularly stressed in western Bavaria, as at the site
of Harting near Regensburg, where 11 out of 83 houses
were over 30m in length, and the largest house was 50m
long. In contrast, further east in the Deggendorf area,
houses rarely exceeded 30m – at the largest excavated
LBK site, that of Stephansposching, only three out
of 103 buildings did, and all remained under 33m in
length. However, the Deggendorf houses had the lowest
incidence of standard, three-post DPRs in Lower Bavaria
and instead people seem to have preferred J- and double
b)
Bylany2198
Bylany2210
normal
classicY
singleJ
pseudoY
doubleJ
single-postDPR
N
N
10m
Fig. 2.6a. House Bylany 2198, showing a relatively open interior, and house Bylany 2210, which has a higher density of posts. (Source: D. Hofmann after
Pavlů 2000: 207, 211). Fig. 2.6b. Some of the possible post settings in the central modules of LBK houses. (Source: D. Hofmann, modified and expanded
from Coudart 1998: 29).
[ 43 ]
narrating the house
J-settings (Hofmann forthcoming: chapter 3; Pechtl
2010). Similarly, sites that were perhaps more remote,
such as Pfarrkirchen-Untergaiching near the southern
edge of the LBK distribution (Engelhardt 1992), tended
to elaborate their houses internally rather than through
size, perhaps outwardly downplaying distinctions
between households. Even within a LBK region like
Lower Bavaria therefore, the house could come to work
in different ways, as a focus for competition or for
creating an impression of increased uniformity without,
whilst maintaining difference within.
Sometimes buildings could be employed to stress
differences between households on the same site, with
a few structures reaching truly massive proportions. At
Harting, these enormous sizes were only ever attained by
some of the buildings, mainly clustered in the southern
part of the site, and it is tempting to see a kind of
inter-household competition here whereby the exploits
of noted forbears were replicated or exceeded to gain
kudos for their present inhabitants. This is perhaps
clearest in the case of Houses 9 and 10. In contrast to
what was typical for the LBK, these buildings directly
overlapped, and their internal layouts right down to
the distances between DPRs were virtually identical,
albeit slightly off-set (Fig. 2.7). There may have been a
hiatus of a generation or so between the abandonment
of House 9 and the erection of House 10 (Herren
2003: 184–188), but the fact that both buildings were
so similar implies that this was either of quite short
duration, or that significant parts of the older house
were still standing when the new house was built.10 The
peculiar longitudinal features on either side of the house
could thus have been created through the removal of
remaining older posts, although they appear far more
elaborate than in other such instances where this has been
identified (e.g. Krahn 2006: 23–27). Instead, they could
represent an earlier episode of repair to House 9 (Herren
2003: 187), perhaps implying a longer than normal use-life.
Alternatively, they may have been settings for structures
propping up the walls of House 10, which might have
become destabilised due to subsidence into underlying
older features such as pits. In either case, it is clear that
considerable effort was invested to establish a direct link
with a known past, most likely to gain some advantage in
the present.
On the other hand, the potential for expressing differ-
N
edge of ex
cavation
0
feature of House 9
20m
feature of House 10
loam pit
Figure 2.7. Simplified plan of Houses 9 and 10 at Harting, Lower Bavaria.
(Source: D. Hofmann after Herren 2003: Beilage 1). The two structures have
overlapping walls and wall trenches, which are not separated out in this drawing.
ences between houses through size could be downplayed,
and this was evident in eastern areas of Lower Bavaria.
Observable differences here are relegated to the interior
of buildings, where diverse and sometimes regionally
specific post settings came to be favoured. The issue of
post settings is interesting. Much ink has been spilled on
the Y-post formation, which has been variously seen as
necessary for creating more free room (Pavúk 1994: 59), a
lighter kind of roof construction (Masuch and Ziessow
1983: 249), or a side entrance (Meyer-Christian 1976).
It has also been argued that it was a symbolic device
used to recall Mesolithic tent interiors (Modderman
1985: 51; Whittle 2003: 138), or even that it represented
an ‘architectural critique’ of the fundamental LBK value
system embodied by straight DPRs (Jeunesse 2009:
165). While there may have been discursive or broadly
‘inscribed’ meanings attached to specific post settings, it
is worth bearing in mind that these also created different
affordances within the main living space of the house
(see Hofmann 2006b). In addition to any divisions such
as mats or curtains, different post settings allowed either
more or less visual interaction with different areas and
perhaps groups of people, or they facilitated the creation
[ 44 ]
Daniela Hofmann
of ‘rooms’ of various shapes which could be used to
categorise and frame people or tasks. If post settings
were about the different possible ways of drawing the
household together and negotiating routine interaction,
then replicating or changing them at each reconstruction
could be connected to how the prospective inhabitants
envisaged the development of the household and of
their relations to each other.
The houses in eastern Lower Bavaria were thus
more focused on regulating the interactions of the
inhabitants, although it is worth stressing that these
concerns were not entirely absent further to the west.
Here we seem to be seeing preferences in which aspects
of the house were elaborated, not a presence or absence
of traits. In contrast, at the regional level ditched
enclosures surrounding LBK sites were, on current
evidence, limited to eastern Lower Bavaria (Hofmann
2006a: 512–517, 687; Pechtl 2009a: 188–191). In the
LBK as a whole, enclosures took a variety of forms (e.g.
Kaufmann 1997; Meyer and Raetzel-Fabian 2006), but
generally fall into larger examples of an irregular oval
shape which enclosed contemporary houses, and smaller
often more trapezoidal examples outside settlements.
In both cases, there could be multiple ditch circuits
or stretches of palisade. Often, the ditches had very
varied profiles, with deeper and shallower stretches and
narrower and wider sections occurring within the same
earthwork, as at Stephansposching in Lower Bavaria (Fig.
2.8). Here, a single ditch with short stretches of internal
palisade was partly revealed by excavation and enclosed
an area of roughly 110 by 100 metres, with evidence for
several entrances. Prior to erosion, the ditches were on
average 2.7m wide and 2.1m deep, although both these
figures varied widely for different ditch sections (Pechtl
2009b: 430–445). Recently, it has been argued that in
many cases, not all stretches of the ditch were excavated
or even stood open at the same time, but were added
piecemeal to an agreed outline circuit (Jeunesse 2011).
Other enclosures were apparently not re-dug and may
have been more short-lived. In either case, however, such
enclosures did represent a communal effort, whether as a
one-off effort of construction or as a large-scale project
to return to time and again.
In other LBK regions too, it appears that the
construction of extremely long houses on the one
hand and of enclosures on the other remained spatially
exclusive, with one or the other option chosen (Pechtl
2009a: 191–193). Yet, neighbouring sites in a settlement
cluster often had enclosures (e.g. Langweiler 3, 8 and 9
in the Merzbach valley in the Rhineland, Stehli 1994;
Darion and Waremme in Belgium, Jadin and Cahen 2003;
or Stephansposching and Otzing in the Deggendorf
region, Pechtl 2009b; Schmotz and Weber 2000). It is
hence tempting to see this as expressing competition
at an inter-site rather than intra-site scale. In areas
where the house was not used to differentiate strongly
between households, the village community, as opposed
to other possible communal identities, may instead have
been the focus of monumentalisation (see also Pechtl
2009a). In this context, it would be interesting to collect
more data for a comparison of the relative longevity of
such adjacent monuments at a regional level. Where
enclosures were frequently re-cut or added to, they
were another arena for constant, physical memory work
that helped to carry a sense of community forward in
a certain way. Elsewhere the silting ditches of shorterlived examples may have become the focus for different
kinds of activities and different enstoriments. At
Stephansposching, for instance, domed ovens were often
cut into the sides of abandoned ditch segments, and
some people were also buried there (Pechtl 2009b: 443).
More research is needed into any potential patterns in
such re-use, and how this compares to the arguments
made here for houses.
We do not need to agree with Pechtl’s (2009a: 194)
identification of two ‘types’ of social organisation
– lineage-based societies building large houses or
‘Big Men’ building enclosures – to appreciate that
the choice between monumentalising single buildings
or constructing earthworks was significant. In most
societies the house does not stand alone, but instead
aspects such as the focus on size resonate with other
architectural endeavours and concerns. The house forms
part of a wider story. Therefore, with LBK buildings
the aspects which were ‘remembered’ to be taken forward
at each new reconstruction were not limited to a set of
more or less exactly recalled rules. Instead, there were
sets of possibilities, all of which the house ‘traditionally’
embodied, including competition with other households,
the ordering of social relations in specific ways and the
carrying out of daily life within the structure, ideas
of the long-term past, or the creation of a village
narrating the house
community which could show unity of purpose relative
to others. From within these possibilities, the most
salient narrative in a particular situation was selected.
Such situations might have included the decisions
made by other households past and present, as well as
relations between inhabitants or between sites. Without
breaking with tradition, alternative ways of narrating
the house could have come into being, the roles of
houses were ‘remembered’ with different emphases, and
this in turn influenced the further trajectory of LBK
domestic architecture.
Transitions
The above discussion has shown how LBK houses were
enmeshed in a variety of different narratives. Since many
social and temporal concerns – from the regulation of
immediate daily tasks to the long-term past – were
manifested in these structures, this is perhaps not surprising. At any one point in time, then, contemporary
sets of middle to late LBK buildings were not the
same. Remaining for the moment with the example of
Lower Bavaria, we can investigate how this influenced
architectural changes throughout the LBK and into the
Middle Neolithic.
In his detailed typology of structures from Lower
Bavaria, Pechtl (2010: 41) identifies four main groupings
for the middle and late LBK, based initially on the
material from Stephansposching (Fig. 2.8). Group A
was characterised by rectangular houses with a variety of
central post settings. Groups B and C had trapezoidal
north-west parts, lacked doubled posts in the southeast and had more regularly spaced DPRs across the
building, although the earlier Group B retained slightly
greater variation in this. Group D houses were more
strongly trapezoidal, were elaborated with south-east
porch structures and doubled wall posts, and had very
regularly spaced internal DPRs (see also Hofmann 2006a:
appendix 6). Whilst they partly reflected chronological
trends, Groups A–D effectively overlapped in time.
Group A structures were predominant earlier on, but were
actually present throughout the site’s sequence in ever
decreasing numbers. Group B and C buildings emerged
a little later and largely overlapped chronologically, but
with Group B beginning slightly earlier. Only Group D
houses were confined to the latest phases, where they
[ 45 ]
occurred alongside the other types (Pechtl 2010: 42).
This scheme can be simplified to suggest two main
trends in domestic architecture which were practised
concurrently over extensive time frames. Some buildings
apparently stressed internal partitions (Group A), while
others steadily decreased in elaboration through time,
resulting in ever greater uniformity. It was these more
standardised Group D structures that eventually became
the dominant form in the Middle Neolithic (Pechtl
2009b: 376, 388–390). In the main, houses also became
more similar in size over time.
The trend towards more open interiors had long been
established (see above) and applied in all LBK regions
to greater or lesser extents. It effectively foreshadowed
the characteristics of Middle Neolithic buildings, which
generally became shorter and less elaborated internally.
Both the demarcation of different modules of these
later houses and the variability of post settings were
much reduced, and the size of the internal ‘rooms’
created by DPRs also tended to become less variable
during this time (see also Coudart 1998; Hampel 1989;
and specifically for Lower Bavaria Hofmann 2006a: 98–
105, 2006b: 192–194) (Fig. 2.4).
Middle Neolithic houses therefore privileged some
features already emerging in LBK architecture over
others. In general, the variety of sensory experiences and
the possibilities of classifying space which were available
in the LBK buildings with their distinct modules became
suppressed in the later houses. The more open spaces in
these later dwellings enabled a greater reliance on visual
cues when navigating within buildings (see Hofmann
2006b), and this was concurrent with other changes.
For example, enclosures became increasingly common in
the Middle Neolithic, both those surrounding villages
and the architecturally more complex and standardised
Kreisgrabenanlagen or roundels, with their circuits of
multiple concentric V-shaped ditches and occasionally
palisades enclosing a circular interior mostly devoid
of cut features. Entrances often exhibited astronomical
alignments (e.g. Petrasch 1990, forthcoming; Whittle
1996: 187–92). This suggests the same relatively reduced
efforts concerning the construction of houses and the
greater energy expended in creating enclosures which
were already present in some LBK sub-regions such
as eastern Lower Bavaria, although this contrast was
perhaps now heightened by building more standardised
[ 46 ]
Daniela Hofmann
Stephansposching
Deggendorf, Lower Bavaria
B
C
A
E
D
F
H
G
K
P
O
J
I
N
V
M
L
T
Q
R
Y
U
S
X
W
0
25
50m
N
undated
Phases 1 and 2
Phase 3
Phase 4
Phases 5 and 6
after Pechtl 2009a, figure 167
Fig.2.8. Plan of Stephansposching, showing groups of successive houses (circled) and the village enclosure. Houses of typological Group D are more common
in the late phases 5 and 6. (Source: D. Hofmann after Pechtl 2009a: fig. 167).
[ 47 ]
narrating the house
and labour-intensive roundel enclosures, devoid of
internal settlement. There were also changes in material
culture, most notably in pottery styles and burial ritual.
With ceramics, dot-based decoration now played a
greater role than linear-based styles of ornamentation.
With funerary traditions, in some regions such as Lower
Bavaria there was comparatively less formal burial
(Hofmann 2006a: chapter 6). In other areas, such as the
Hinkelstein and Großgartach cemeteries of the Rhine
valley, there was much greater standardisation in the
position and orientation of the dead than had been the
case during the LBK, although there was still a wide
spectrum of grave goods (e.g. Hofmann and Whittle
2008; Müller 2003; Spatz 1999).
In spite of all these changes, however, it would be
inappropriate to claim that there was a complete rupture
with what had gone before, and domestic architecture
was key in how links with the LBK past were to an
extent explicitly maintained. It has been argued that the
more common trapezoidal ground plans still stressed
modularity to some extent by creating a greater contrast
between the enlarged front of the house and the back
(Bickle 2008: 150), and similarly the naviform structures
of other cultural groupings might have emphasised the
centre of the house. What seems important is that these
divisions were not additionally marked on the inside of
structures through corridors or similar strategies, but
could still be visible on the outside. One example is the
early Stichbandkeramik Culture (SBK; Stroke-Ornamented
Pottery, c. 5000/4900–4600 cal. BC) House 7 at
Straubing-Lerchenhaid in Lower Bavaria (Brink-Kloke
1992: 62) (Fig. 2.9). Here, there were still areas within
the house where DPRs were set more closely together,
something which would soon disappear. Yet what is
striking is that these internally differentiated spaces
no longer corresponded to external markings, in this
case the trenched wall. The south-east part was not
marked internally any more, but appears to have had a
less substantial outer wall consisting of only a single
row of posts. Apparently, it was more important to
express modularity on the outside than it was to recreate
these divisions faithfully on the inside. Admittedly,
the use of differential wall construction to mark off
the south-east remained extremely rare, but in general,
elements such as trenched walls in the north-west zones
of houses persisted long after the interior spaces were
disturbance
House7
House6
House5
0
N
20m
pit
Fig. 2.9. Detail of the excavated area at Straubing-Lerchenhaid, Lower
Bavaria. Note how in structure 7, the double wall posts give way to single
posts at the southern end of the house, while the area of more closely spaced
posts in the north does not correspond to the outer wall trench. Houses 5 and
6 appear connected by three large posts. (Source: D. Hofmann after BrinkKloke 1992: fig. 1.8).
almost completely standardised, whilst the former
south-east parts were effectively ‘externalised’ through
the construction of open porch-like spaces.
At Straubing-Lerchenhaid, there was an added
dimension. As at other early SBK sites in Bavaria (see
Hofmann 2006a: 142–144), there were pairs of houses
with similar internal layouts that appear to have
succeeded each other over time. These were constructed
far closer together than had been the case with most
successive LBK buildings, which were often set several
tens of metres from their precursors. Such references
to immediate predecessors could have been another way
to anchor the buildings in a remembered past, to stress
commitments to tradition at a time when only selected aspects of a former repertoire were being carried
forward. Perhaps the row of posts connecting the
Middle Neolithic House 6 to the earlier LBK House
5, the remains of which may still have been visible (Fig.
2.8), was a further mnemonic practice, although the
postholes have not been dated.
[ 48 ]
Daniela Hofmann
In Middle Neolithic contexts therefore, there
seems to have been a continued concern with the past,
despite a greater overall stress on standardisation and
conventionalisation especially in domestic architecture.
Whilst the different Middle Neolithic culture groupings
which succeeded the LBK exhibited clear differences
amongst them, within each new culture there was less
variation than in the LBK.11 In terms of house building,
selected tendencies of LBK architecture were isolated
and almost magnified in Middle Neolithic structures;
whilst of the many possible variations simplification and
standardisation were chosen. This was not the invention
of an entirely new way of doing things, but the selective
carrying forward of the potentialities of the past,
a past that continued to be referenced as salient. The
newly dominant ways of building and dwelling had in
fact already been prefigured during the LBK, part of a
remembered and perhaps venerated past which seemed
to most adequately address the concerns of the present,
and the narrative it made sense to recollect and re-create.
This view has repercussions for the idea that the end
of the LBK was some form of dramatic crisis. Instead,
what we might be witnessing was an acceleration and
selection of changes which were to an extent already
prefigured in earlier architectural strategies. Similarly,
although trends in burial practices and pottery were
cumulatively different from what had gone before, they
were not complete ruptures with the past. Even at the
larger scale, the end of the LBK was a mosaic process.
Areas in the upper Rhine had already shifted to what
archaeologists now call the Hinkelstein and Großgartach
cultures at a time when LBK houses were still being built
at Cologne-Lindenthal further downstream (Eisenhauer
2002: 128–148; Spatz 1996: 473–479), and the SBK was
well-established in the Czech Republic when the late
LBK enclosures were constructed at Eilsleben in SaxonyAnhalt (between c. 5000 and 4900 cal. BC) (Einicke
1995). Although it is unclear how long this process of
co-existence lasted, several human generations are usually
suggested (Einicke 1995: 30; Eisenhauer 2002: 128–148;
Spatz 1996: 473–479). This is not to say that locally the
impact may not have been large – the Merzbach valley
in the German Rhineland for instance, was seemingly
abandoned for several generations (Zimmermann,
Meuers-Balke and Kalis 2005: 34) – but this was not the
overall picture. Instead of an ‘out-and-out’ revolution, a
process of increasingly rapid re-alignment seems a much
better explanation for areas such as Bavaria. The eventual
widespread acceptance of new ways of decorating
pottery, burying and building was partly rooted in its
reference to valued aspects of a shared past, albeit with
some of these now more highly valued than others.
In terms of long-term trajectories of architectural
changes, it is clear that these were intimately tied to
other aspects of material culture. Almost all aspects of
earliest LBK life seem to have emphasised homogeneity
and similarity,12 whereas the middle and late LBK saw
a proliferation of different ways in which architecture
was manifested, and this coincided with increasing
regionalisation in material culture and burial practices
(Hofmann forthcoming, chapters 2 and 3). In the
Middle Neolithic, difference was once again suppressed,
at least within the new culture groupings, although it was
stronger at an inter-cultural level. The beginning of the
Middle Neolithic did mark an acceleration of changes,
but we should resist becoming overly deterministic.
Rather than stressing an LBK ‘crisis’, we should further
investigate the faultlines that already existed in the way
buildings were ‘enstoried’ within the middle and late LBK.
This process of Middle Neolithic selection, of
narrowing down potential architectural choices, is
harder to explain than the earlier tendency towards
divergence and would benefit from further research. One
suggestion may be that for a time at least, new discursive
meanings became attached to the house, something
hinted at by Spatz (2003) in his characterisation of the
Hinkelstein culture as a ‘sect’, and that these meanings
were then replicated accurately (for an anthropological
discussion of similar processes, see Whitehouse
1992). Alternatively, in areas such as Bavaria, domestic
architecture may have been less elaborated because
some of the associations of the LBK house, especially
those that aimed to impact on the wider community,
had shifted to new contexts such as roundels and other
enclosures. These provided settings for a different,
wider scale of social interaction. In contrast, narratives
focused on the house now continued within an overall
framework in which domestic architecture was no longer
appropriate for creating difference at the inter-household
level. Domestic architecture still kept changing, but the
trend was towards increasingly smaller and eventually
archaeologically invisible buildings.
narrating the house
Conclusion
The past formed a central dimension to the way LBK
domestic architecture developed over time, but not in
the sense of stifling innovation and leading to identical
replication. Different and valued aspects of houses –
their potential for social competition, for ordering
daily activities and much else besides – were selectively
drawn on in specific and therefore not identical local
contexts. This created faultlines, different ways in which
architecture could come to be entangled in the narratives
of people’s lives and aspirations. Therefore, at different
times and places in the LBK, a house did not ‘mean’ the
same or ‘work’ in exactly the same way. At the same time,
the many shared aspects of LBK architecture show that
this potential for variation was not limitless and that
common ideas of what made a house did exist – for
instance, the idea that it should be longer than wide,
have internal rows of three posts and be replaced at
regular intervals. But we cannot limit ourselves to this
aspect of the data alone.
Material culture, including houses, had the potential to
be drawn into the narratives of people’s lives in different
ways at particular times and places. Houses are complex
artefacts. At one level houses are a taken-for-granted
aspect of existence that mould people’s expectations and
orientate them to the world in certain ways, but they can
also be explicitly thought about as displays of wealth
or as ancestral places. Both more and less consciously
articulated memories involving many spheres of past life
thus accumulated in and around houses, and they were
drawn upon in diverging stories, resonating with other
trends and changes. Over the longer term, periods in
which houses were relatively more standardised contrast
with other times in which there was greater potential for
divergence, and these architectural patterns coincided
with trends in other aspects of material culture. Middle
Neolithic people carried forward only some aspects of
LBK architectural tradition, resulting in buildings which
were far more standardised. The past was quite selectively
drawn upon to create different possibilities of social life in
their present.
To appreciate these aspects more fully, archaeologists
must move beyond seeing memory purely as the replication of an ideal, standardised and ancestral way of
life. By focusing on memory as repetition and stasis we
[ 49 ]
create an artificially timeless ‘LBK culture’, which then
requires dramatic outside agencies in order to be able to
explain change at all, much as was the case with earlier
interpretations. Such ideas can be challenged. The
builders of LBK houses had the potential to re-member
them in divergent ways, drawing upon those aspects
which seemed most salient at that point in time. It is
here that the roots of change lay. This was not ‘faulty
memory’, but a process in which the past was actively
used to negotiate the present – in other words, memory
work was part of the narrative of people’s lives.
There was more than one route house development
could take, and houses came to be ‘enstoried’ in ways hat
differed subtly across time and between regions. This
shift in interpretational emphasis has a profound impact
on how we see the role of domestic architecture, and
material culture more generally, in processes of Neolithic
cultural change. Rather than shackles binding people to
a timeless past which they were condemned to repeat in
perpetuity, or at least until the next crisis, buildings were
dynamically implicated in imagining different possible
futures. In this way, memories of the past were central
to the textures of people’s changing lives.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
Ideas of memories as faithful imprints have a long pedigree
in Western thought, going back at least to Socrates and
Aristotle (Borić 2010a: 5).
Osborne (2008: 285), following Bell (1992: 120), sees
‘custom’ as the stock of shared knowledge and action on
which to selectively draw, and tradition as something to
be followed more explicitly, albeit permitting for variation.
These concepts are not separated here.
The discussion in Borić (2010a: 12) here draws mostly on
volume 3 of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1988), which sees
narrative as a central aspect of how people experience life.
It is through narrative that events, agents and objects are
rendered as meaningful parts of a larger whole in the lived
experience of people. Through this kind of emplotment,
situations are made intelligible and time is humanised.
Memory is a way of telling stories whereby the elements of
the plot are recollected – i.e. rearranged to make sense in
terms of the known outcome.
Absolute dates for the LBK are a matter of debate (e.g.
Lanting and van der Plicht 1994; Lüning 2005; Stäuble 2005;
Stöckli 2002; for the end of the LBK see note 5 below). A full
discussion of these issues is beyond the scope of this paper,
[ 50 ]
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Daniela Hofmann
but in the light of the arguments discussed in Bánffy and
Oross (2010, with further references), a shorter chronology
is preferred here. The beginnings of the LBK in western
Hungary/eastern Austria are hence informally estimated
as between 5600 and 5500 cal. BC, while Dubouloz (2003)
suggests that at its western extremity, the LBK ended between
4900 and 4800 cal. BC.
The dating of these post-LBK cultures varies regionally,
as the end of the LBK was not simultaneous across the
area of its distribution, and its successor cultures were of
varying duration. For example, the late LBK of the Paris
Basin (Rubané récent du Bassin parisien, RRBP) was still
in existence when the Middle Neolithic Hinkelstein culture
developed in western Germany at around 5050 cal. BC
(Dubouloz 2003; Eisenhauer 2002; and see discussion below).
In Bavaria, the Stichbandkeramik and related cultures lasted for
roughly half a millennium after the end of the LBK between
5000 and 4900 cal. BC (Nadler and Zeeb 1994; Pechtl 2009b:
110–114). Absolute dates are also problematic because many
chronological arguments rely almost exclusively on ceramic
typologies and seriations (e.g. Nadler and Zeeb 1994; Spatz
1996). These issues cannot be treated in greater depth here.
This raises the question of how long ruined houses remained
visible. It is often assumed that LBK houses were left to
decay, forming mounds of rotting wood and clay which
then inspired later western European long barrows (e.g.
Hodder 1984). However, some houses at least appear to have
been dismantled and others were perhaps burnt (Hofmann
forthcoming: chapter 3), suggesting that not all remained as
physical traces to the same extent. This aspect would repay
further study in terms of its impact on memory, but a more
comprehensive assessment on how frequent burning and
dismantling actually were is still necessary.
While Jones (2007: 98) explicitly recognises architectural
variation, for him this remains limited to the building types
identified by Modderman. Regional and chronological
variations of other architectural traits are not discussed.
Whittle (2003: 136–143) describes the many timescales
intersecting in a LBK house, from long-term traditions
to generational replacements and the faster rhythms of
individuals’ taskscapes, but is not explicitly concerned with
architectural change.
These estimates rely on studies of LBK settlement in the
Merzbach valley in the German Rhineland. Here, the basic
sequence was established through a typological seriation
of ceramics from pits attributed to individual houses
(for a critique of this, see Rück 2012). Stehli (1989) then
selected 14C dates obtained on material from these pits,
mostly charcoal, summarised them per ceramic phase and
wiggle-matched them to the calibration curve, assuming
variously a house length of 20, 25 and 30 years. A duration
of 25 years seemed the most satisfying, and indeed the
figure corresponds to that obtained if one simply divides
the overall known duration of the LBK in the Rhineland (c.
350 years) by the number of Merzbach ceramic phases (14).
However, in some phases at Bylany for instance, a 20-year life
span fits the calibration curve better (Stehli 1989), suggesting
there may be more diversity across the LBK. In addition, this
method is too coarse-grained to identify any acceleration or
slowing down in building activity, although Lüning (2005)
has recently suggested that phase length fluctuated. Further
methodological problems such as the old wood effect, or
grouping dates from features with different fill histories, also
mean that the results should be treated with caution.
10. Indeed, dating at Harting is less than secure, as many loam
pits were intercutting, making it difficult to assign pottery
assemblages – on which the dating relies – to particular
houses and to assess their degree of admixture.
11. Although this impression may be partly the result of the
much reduced amount of data available, especially for
Middle Neolithic settlements (e.g. Ganslmeier 2010). Also,
in some areas, this tendency was eventually reversed again.
In the Rössen culture, which succeeded Hinkelstein and
Großgartach in parts of western Germany around 4600 cal
BC, some houses again became truly monumental, exceeding
50m in length (e.g. Lönne 2003: 50–51). Again, the way houses
could be enstoried in the Middle Neolithic could come to
differ over time.
12. This is not to deny that there was variation in the earliest LBK
architecture, for instance in the elaboration of the northwest part and in the lengths of loam pits and additional
wall trenches (see Stäuble 2005: 34–125), simply that this was
relatively minor compared to middle and late LBK buildings.
Partly, this may also be connected to the constructional
details of earliest LBK houses, which mean that these tend
to be less well preserved than later examples, hindering the
identification of variations. Earliest LBK pottery has long
been shown to vary regionally to an extent (e.g. Lenneis
2004; Pechtl 2009c).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Catriona Gibson and Adrian Chadwick for
inviting me to speak at their TAG session and for the opportunity
to publish this paper, much improved by their careful editing. In
addition, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme
Trust, whose award of an Early Careers Fellowship in 2009/2010
enabled me to carry out the research on which this paper is based.
Thanks are also due to Penny Bickle, Dušan Borić and Alasdair
Whittle for their insightful comments on an earlier draft.
Remaining omissions, bad grammar, obfuscations, inconsistencies
and all other possible faults are of course my responsibility alone.
narrating the house
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