Alföld Linear Pottery seettlements

This paper focuses on shifts in settlement configurations as they relate to the spatial and temporal aspects of socioeconomic transformations on the Great Hungarian Plain during the Neolithic (6000-4500 B.C.E.). The perspective applied here utilizes the outcomes of recent studies on urban scaling processes that have convincingly argued for similar mechanisms in the formation of agricultural villages and urban settings. The presented case studies incorporate multiple geographic scales and illustrate the long-term development of early farming settlements in the central and northern parts of the Great Hungarian Plain. The analysis reveals organizational principles that vary over time in relation to the interplay of the changing spatial and social modules of these settlements. The results highlight various interaction mechanisms and associated cycles of nucleation and dispersal, along with the emergence of polities of various types and scales.

Hernád/Hornád Valley was an important green corridor, exchange route and communicational channel in prehistory, such as in the Neolithic. There were known two important sites, Košice-Červený rak and Novajidrány-Elkerülő út in this valley from the beginning of the Alföld Linear Pottery Culture or Eastern Linear Pottery Culture. In this short summary, some newly discovered settlements of the first phase of this culture from the Hungarian section of the valley are introduced, first Kéked-Hosszúföldek and Fony-Telek-dűlő in greater detail. Based on these new sites, some notes can be made on the settlement patterns of early agrarian communities of the valley and on the relative and absolute chronology of the period.