Dynamics of Neolithisation in Europe

Studies in honour of Andrew Sherratt

Angelos Hadjikoumis, Erick Robinson, Sarah Viner-Daniels, Erick Robinson, Sarah Viner

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781842176696
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Dynamics of Neolithisation examines the development of early agriculture in Neolithic Europe, drawing on the work of the late Professor Andrew Sherratt. His untimely death coincided with an important period of research that moved beyond searching for singular causal mechanisms behind the "neolithisation" of Europe in favour of developing a better understanding of the complex interrelationships of cultural, ecological, economic and social factors. Andrew Sherratt's work is significant because it developed models for integrating the different evidential components and analytical scales involved in the prehistoric development of European agriculture. The essays in this volume examine such significant factors as plant and animal domestication, social organisation, the development of monumental architecture, exchange and social identity and the cultural transmission of technology.

1

Grand narratives and shorter stories

Alasdair Whittle

What we talk about when we talk about time

When Andrew Sherratt arrived in Oxford in the early 1970s to take up his post at the Ashmolean Museum, I was in the middle of my doctoral thesis. Andrew brought with him from Cambridge the excitement of the ‘new archaeology’, in his case a whole series of ideas played out on a canvas of global change in prehistory and history. One of his favourite topics at that time was the structure of chronologies across Europe, and I owe a great deal to the broadening of my horizons that this brought, in conversations under the neo-classical portico of the museum, when Andrew would be out of his office for the inevitable cigarette and myself from the library for air, or over cups of mid-morning coffee in the Playhouse Theatre across Beaumont Street. No one else that I know has been able to condense so much of European and other prehistory literally on to the back of an envelope.

This desire to seek order in the data across both space and time was not just a personal enthusiasm, informally conveyed with both learning and a sense of performance. Andrew’s broad perspective soon manifested itself in his publications, and can be followed in his work on, for example, exchange systems, the secondary products revolution, Neolithic settlement in the Carpathian basin, and megaliths (Sherratt 1976; 1981; 1982a; 1982b; 1983; 1987; 1995b; 1997). His model for a secondary products revolution relied on a sense of chronological relationships, at the big scale, between the Near East and Europe, and later, as he brought alcohol into the account, between the Mediterranean and Europe (Sherratt 1981; 1995b; 1997). No matter that chronology is also the undoing of parts at least of the model, since it has now been shown that the use of dairy products in Europe long precedes the late fourth millennium BC initiation from the Near East proposed by Andrew (Copley et al. 2003; Craig et al. 2005; Evershed et al. 2008), and the jury is still out on when ploughs were first used. Even in his pioneering, more detailed work on Neolithic and Copper Age settlement on the Great Hungarian Plain, there was a strong sense of connection with wider areas and trends, such that the focused survey and limited excavation around Dévaványa were used to generate a model of dynamic change at a regional scale (Sherratt 1982a; 1982b; 1983).

Although Andrew knew the evidence of individual sites and areas intimately, they were not usually his main focus. His normal units of currency were big areas, continents or swathes across them, often with bold, connecting arrows on his beloved maps, and sequential blocks of time, a few centuries or more at a time. But there are other ways of thinking about human existence. I have adapted the heading of this section of my paper from the American short story writer, Raymond Carver (who died, also before his time, in 1988). His stories have little narrative in them, the spare prose style evoking instead particular situations and moments, which nonetheless manage to evoke universal themes of longing, comfort and alienation within the intimacy of personal relationships, set against the context of an often bleak outside world. At the close of the eponymous story in the collection, ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’, the four protagonists sit silently together, and the narrator recalls the moment thus:

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

How much detail do we want or need as archaeologists interested in time and change? The anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983) noted some time ago how his discipline tended to use the contrived ‘allochronism’ of the present to maintain the people it observed as a separate category, and other anthropologists have written recently about the need to escape atemporal ‘presentism’; they wish to move from description of static cultural representations of time to discussion of how notions of time affect action in time (James and Mills 2005). Andrew Sherratt was, with his wide knowledge, well aware of other possibilities for archaeologies of change. At the close of a late paper on lake dwellings in the Alpine foreland, he wrote (Sherratt 2004, 274):

Who could be satisfied by a rough structural sequence of Phases 1, 2 and 3 (a relative ordering of units of uncertain length) when they have become used to noting, say, that an extension had been added to House 5 in the spring of 3752 BC? This is a new and different world, where the precision of prehistoric archaeology out-performs that of classical archaeology, and even of much of Egyptology. Science and art converge when it becomes possible to construct a narrative on the timescale of an individual human life, and when changes can be so precisely fixed in time that we can call them events, and think of how they were actually experienced: the methodology of Collingwood made possible in a dendrochronological laboratory! What a paradox, that archaeological science makes possible an anthropology of the past more comparable to the close observation and understanding of Malinowski than to the homogenized stadial succession of the evolutionists!

Detailed monographs showing just such possibilities continue to emerge from the Alpine foreland, most recently on the Bodensee site of Arbon Bleiche 3, probably occupied for just 14 years (Jacomet et al. 2004). But rather curiously, since this appears to be giving up the notion of dealing with shorter timescales in archaeology before we have really begun, there seems in several other recent archaeological discussions to be a reaction against too narrow a timeframe. John Robb has written of a need to get beyond a kind of ‘ethnographic present’ to accounts of change at much longer timescales (2007, 287, and see further below). Gavin Lucas has argued that ‘when it comes down to it, an event defined from a historical or sociological perspective does not really work well with archaeological phenomena’, and suggests that concepts of palimpsest, evoking the ‘aggregate nature of the record’ are more appropriate (2008, 61). In the Mediterranean field, despite the possession of much tighter timeframes (Foxhall 2000), Christopher Witmore has urged the use for landscape studies, especially those based on survey data, of ideas of ‘percolating time’, which the ensemble of the landscape produces, rather than the other way round (2007, 196). A rather similar position has been expressed by Laurent Olivier; ‘the past itself is not made up of a series of successive temporalities but is basically multi-temporal at any time’ (2001, 69–70).

What I want to do in this short tribute to Andrew Sherratt is to reflect on his most explicit discussion of the grand narrative, to consider one or two other approaches to how we might approach change, and, in contrast to all of these, to advocate the much wider application of formal Bayesian chronological modelling to European prehistory. We have now the means to think at generational and lifetime scales across European prehistory (and any other archaeology), and that provides opportunities to think of telling our stories now in different ways.

Reviving the grand narrative

In view of the 2004 lake dwelling paper quoted above, I am conscious that it may be unfair to go back to a paper published a decade earlier, though there is perhaps still a ‘grand narrative’ approach behind Andrew’s treatment of lake dwellings as a special case. But ‘Reviving the grand narrative’ (Sherratt 1995a) remains an important statement in discussions of the scale at which we should approach change in general, as well as informing on the wide perspective seen in most of Andrew’s published work, as already noted. Its date is significant, since it came a decade or so after the emergence of post-processual or interpretive approaches. Andrew had already reacted to those in other publications (e.g. Yoffee and Sherratt 1993). In the ‘grand narrative’ paper, his discussion of new alternatives is rather brief (Sherratt 1995a, 1–2), and his criticism of the myopia of ‘fine-grained’ studies is implied, rather than explicitly stated, in his own formulation of the ‘big picture’ approach. It is a moot point whether, in the long run, post-processual or interpretive approaches have represented a ‘rejection of large-scale problems’ or the ‘collapse of the dominant meta-narratives’ (Sherratt 1995a, 2). I would rather suggest an evolution from early critique and polemic, accompanied by particularising studies (in the early 1980s), followed by a certain amount of manifesto writing (e.g. Hodder 1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987), in turn followed by longer treatments and more ambitious projects which cannot easily be reduced to the fine grain, though they certainly include them (e.g. Hodder 1990; 2006; Tilley 1996; 2004; Thomas 1999). To be charitable, it is perhaps easier to suggest such trends now with the benefit of hindsight, than in the context of the early 1990s when the ‘grand narrative’ paper must have gestated.¹

‘Reviving the grand narrative’ makes it clear what it is about from its very first sentence; archaeology provides ‘evidence of human behaviour over a timespan of millennia’ (Sherratt 1995a, 1). Having a grand narrative means being able to put ‘events on a historical timescale in their proper perspective’, in ‘a coherent unfolding’ (Sherratt 1995a, 1). Similar phrases are repeated several times in the first three or four pages: ‘the big picture of human development through time, painted on a broad canvas’ (Sherratt 1995a, 1); ‘large structures’; ‘systematic long-term change’; ‘coherent, long-term change’; ‘directional sequence’ (Sherratt 1995a, 3); and ‘the current lack of thinking about the large scale and long term’ (Sherratt 1995a, 4). Archaeology, Andrew argued, ‘needs a grand narrative to articulate its individual understandings’ (Sherratt 1995a, 4).

My contribution does not seek to analyse everything in this paper, and in fact its long middle section covers a lot of other ground, including a rejection of giving primacy to economy or population; this part is more about large scales of explanation than the long term. In the latter section, however, having set out his stall, Andrew developed some examples, covering, briefly but with characteristic brilliance, the urban, Neolithic and industrial revolutions. The most extended example is that of the urban revolution in Mesopotamia. The story is one of linkage, and ‘added value’, exchange systems running on exotic valuables in complementary but intensifying ways; ‘the network precedes the phase of agricultural intensification and urbanisation, and grows in step with it’ (Sherratt 1995a, 18). In one sentence he boldly suggests that this kind of model could fit Egypt, parts of Iran, the Indus valley, China, the Andes and Mesoamerica (Sherratt 1995a, 19), and in half a paragraph sketches the similarity and difference (not enough ‘added value’) of the European prehistoric sequence (Sherratt 1995a, 20). Sedentism developed to provide a ‘setting for social drama’ (Sherratt 1995a, 21). He concluded:

In all of these motivations, there is a common urge to seek excitement, which was fuelled as the ritual and consumption practices that crystallised at nodal sites spread outwards to create new contexts for performance and the creation of value: the coming of the Neolithic was never as boring as just the invention of porridge (Sherratt 1995a, 21).

It is instructive now to look back not only on the panache of these ideas (still of value for thinking about Neolithic Europe as I comment further below) but also what is not in the account. Although in the Mesopotamian case it is clear that the account begins with a contrast between the early and late ‘Ubaid phases and goes on with Uruk expansion, there is no further chronology! How quickly did this all begin? Were the supposed relationships always spatially symmetric, or can we see beginnings in one area before another? Was the tempo of change even across the span of time (centuries? or longer?) that is implied? And where are the people, the social actors, who are otherwise masked by generalising references to exchange systems and social drama? The account reads more like a high-level model of causation and relationship: a broad canvas rather than a long-term narrative as such. As far as I know, Andrew made little or no reference in his work to the Annales school, in which there is, for example, the famous advocacy by Braudel of individual, social and geographical time (cf. Bintliff 1991; Braudel 1975; Knapp 1992). What has come to be called ‘time perspectivism’ might have helped to bring more sense of different scales to the account of the emergence of Mesopotamian civilisation, but it seems clear that Andrew Sherratt’s ‘big picture’ was not the same as Braudelian longue durée. For one thing, there is no claim in Andrew’s account that the environmental, geographical setting is what endures; rather, it is the specific ‘axiality’ of the two rivers which enables the articulation of Mesopotamia into wider networks (Sherratt 1995a, 18–9).

Long centuries and infinitesimal small steps

Andrew Sherratt has not been alone in advocating a broad-canvas approach. More recently, for example, John Robb has argued that we should renew our attention to long-term factors, referring to a scale of ‘spans of time up to several centuries’ (2008, 57). For him, as well as for Andrew Sherratt, ‘explaining long-term change has been a striking lacuna in recent archaeological theory’ (Robb 2007, 287), with accounts trapped in a kind of ethnographic timeframe, of a generation or so (Robb 2007, 291). Specifically in his study of long-term change in the Neolithic Mediterranean, he has called for fresh perspectives on ‘how humans make their history on a scale beyond experience of a single lifetime’ (Robb 2007, 3), and argues that ‘the timescale of most interest for observing historical workings of practice is likely to be neither the span of decades nor of millennia, but on the order of a few centuries’ (Robb 2007, 294). At this timescale, and across broad geographical areas, that encompass other parts of Europe as well as the Mediterranean itself, a ‘general transformation’ and ‘great changes’ are played out between 4000 and 2000 BC, in a shift from the world of tells, villages and ritual monuments to that of dispersed settlement, cemeteries and concentration on individualising, gender-marked statuses (Robb 2007, 287–9). Here, in comparison with ‘Reviving the grand narrative’, there is chronology; ‘the pace of change is likely to be highly variable, with great stability and slow, gradual change punctuated by episodes of rapid change’ (Robb 2007, 295). But overall, the sequence is in general smoothed, though there are ‘at least three distinct moments of change’, with much continuity, change happening ‘in degrees without abrupt ruptures, even when the aggregate transformation over long epochs was dramatic’ (Robb 2007, 320–1). In this approach to the long-term, there is a chronological frame, but timing and tempo tend again to be subjugated to the bigger, overall picture.

A related approach has recently been suggested by Ian Hodder, in a provisional synthesis of the main results so far of the Çatalhöyük project on the development of early Neolithic settled existence and symbolic and conceptual schemes (running since 1993, and thus another counter-example to Andrew Sherratt’s claim of a rejection of large-scale problems at that sort of time). Hodder’s wide-ranging account covers many individually important themes, including the nature of memory, the articulation of households within the community, ...