Prehistoric Figurines

Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic

Douglass Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134323296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Fully illustrated, Prehistoric Figurines brings a radical new approach to one of the most exciting, but poorly understood artefacts from our prehistoric past. Studying the interpretation of prehistoric figurines from Neolithic southeast Europe, Bailey introduces recent developments from the fields of visual culture studies and cultural anthropology, and investigates the ways in which representations of human bodies were used by the pre-historic people to understand their own identities, to negotiate relationships and to make subtle political points.Bailey examines four critical conditions:
* figurines as miniatures
* figurines as three-dimensional representations
* figurines as anthropomorphs
* figurines as representations.Through these conditions, the study travels beyond the traditional mechanisms of interpretation and takes the debate past the out-dated interpretations of figurines as Mother-Goddess as Bailey examines individual prehistoric figurines in their original archaeological contexts and views them in the light of modern exploitations of the human form.Students and scholars of History and Archaeology will benefit immensely from Bailey's close understanding of the material culture and pre-history of the Balkans.

1
INTRODUCTION

Looking up from my fieldbook, I saw one of the students running, full tilt. She was coming from the other side of the valley, from the flat lands, across the river. Was it Jo, one of the Third-Years? She was struggling, arms flailing awkwardly as she tried to keep her balance, fists clenched; unsuitable boots made her progress a challenge. Every couple of steps her foot would catch a rabbit hole hidden in the grasses or she would half-trip on an old plough furrow. She stopped across the stream bed from us. Redcheeked, face streaked with dirt, frizzy red hair matted to her forehead, bent over, hands on knees, head up, wheezing in sharp, shallow gasps, she forced out an explanation. ‘. . . found . . . grid 145 . . . eroded surface. . . . Steve says get you . . . bring camera, more bags . . .’

Leaving the mapping team to log in the rest of the river course, I drove the Land- Rover, through the ford, up the bank opposite and threw the door open for Jo to haul herself up and in. Bumping our way back across the grassland, we could see the Grab Team up ahead, clustered around Steve, some on their hands and knees, others bent down pushing back the grass looking at the ground. Still wheezing (why do asthmatic students smoke?), Jo filled me in.

She had been working with Steve’s team recording one of the 7,000-year-old Neolithic settlements that we had found in the valley bottom the week before. On the surface of the ground, the site was nothing more than pottery sherds, flints and clumps of burnt clay-and-straw building material. Today’s collection of all the finds from the area and the mapping of the densities of finds would reveal how large this new site was and it would give us some idea about where to drop test-trenches if we decided to have a better look later in the summer or perhaps during the next season.

Earlier in the day, in the cool, quiet, early light just after dawn, I had left Steve and his team laying out the collection grid, marking grid numbers on the grass with spraypaint, assigning teams of grabbers to the squares, labelling and handing out finds bags and starting notebook entries. Jo said that after about two hours, work had stopped when one of the First-Years had let out a yell. Either the student had cut the hell out of her hand, had disturbed a snake or a rat, or she had found something extraordinary. Jo finished her report as we slowed to a stop by Steve’s team: the survey team had turned up a small, badly preserved, fragment of a clay female figurine (fig. 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Figurine discovered by the Southern Romania Archaeological Project, Teleorman Valley.

Introduction

Why do prehistoric figurines evoke such strong emotions? Why, in this example from our work in Romania’s Teleorman Valley, did the discovery of one, broken, out-of-context, surface-find create such a stir among the students? Most of them knew that the significant finds would be tallies of numbers, the densities of the more mundane sherds and flint scrapers? Why do specialist studies of figurines account for a disproportionately large number of pages and illustrations in excavation reports? Why are objects such as figurines deemed appropriate, desirable enough, to be included in Sotheby’s or Christie’s auctions, to take pride of place in museum cabinets and displays? Why are you reading this book? Why, indeed, am I drawn to write it?

The answers to these questions come from an investigation not so much about figurines themselves, in the sense of stylistic typologies or imaginative reconstructions, but about figurines as dynamic visual events. Because of this, the book before you is about many apparently disconnected subjects, discontinuous periods, separate regions and places. There will be no exhaustive compilation of figurines, their find-spots, and no discourse on culture-historical similarities among figurines from neighbouring or distant sites. Valuable though such descriptive studies are for making typological, cultural and chronological comparisons, I am looking for a different kind of answer, a different type of meaning.

The goal is to understand how and why objects such as figurines evoke the strong responses that they inevitably stimulate in you, in me and undoubtedly in their prehistoric makers and users. In understanding the how and why of figurines as visual culture, we will find a better understanding of Neolithic figurines. In a better understanding of Neolithic figurines from southeastern Europe, we will refine our understanding of the people who made, looked at, used, held, thought about and threw away these objects.

Starting in the middle of the seventh millennium BC, people in southeastern Europe made clay, bone and stone anthropomorphic figurines. Though figurines were produced in other periods of Europe’s prehistoric past (e.g., the Upper Palaeolithic and its so-called Venuses), the Balkan Neolithic provides the largest body of material: hundreds of thousands of figurines were made. In the Balkans,¹ the phenomenon is tightly restricted to the Neolithic (6500–3500 BC); figurines appear with the first settled, pottery-making farmers and they disappear abruptly with the abandonment of the Neolithic way of life that marks the start of the early Bronze Age in the middle of the fourth millennium BC.² What was it about the Balkan Neolithic? What are the social, economic, material and political contexts in which Neolithic figurines were made? How did the people of the Neolithic Balkans live?

The Neolithic of Southeastern Europe

At a general level, the Balkan Neolithic is a collection of communities that lived their lives in similar ways.³ Diversity along regional and chronological dimensions distinguishes different groups. Important variations lie in the ways people shaped and decorated pots, in the size, shape and permanence of their habitations, in the manner in which they handled death and displayed status, and in the intensity of exploitation of food resources. The traditional approach to this diversity identifies formal variation in material culture, mainly ceramic vessels, and assumes that these variations distinguish different cultural groups of people. Archaeologists thus generate schematic correlations that arrange cultures in time and separate them across the space. At the pan-regional level, there is more similarity than difference. Viewed at a finer resolution, of course, there was tremendous variation along these dimensions: between different parts of a region, within single river valleys or plateaux, between two adjacent settlements, between individual houses, huts, and even between individuals within a household. At the regional level, however, the similarities force us to think of a broadly common way of life.

Though the different Neolithic communities of the Balkans share many characteristics, they are distinct from those that occupied the region in the millennia before 6500 BC. These distinctions are important; they suggest that the people living in the region after the middle of the seventh millennium BC thought about the world in radically new and different ways, indeed that they possessed a new philosophy of life. On the ground, there was no absolute transition of a way of life; there was no revolution as we understand that concept. The changes were radical, with fundamental, if unintended consequences, but they occurred over a long period time, in various spurts and retardations, emerging in some areas sooner than in others and co-existing with other, particularly pre- and non-Neolithic, ways of life. Figurines were one of several key components in this new way of living.

The built environment

One of the most important components of the new philosophy was the relationships that linked people to particular parts of the landscape: the explicit marking of repeated engagement and alteration of the terrain. The non-Neolithic Balkans was defined by temporary occupations and mobile existences that made short-term uses of caves and open-air sites; the Neolithic was about huts, camps and villages. It was about settling down.⁴ Neolithic people physically built their own social environments; architecture offered shelter but, more importantly, provided the mechanisms for people to engage and create place. Some Neolithic built environments were little different from the places that mobile Upper Palaeolithic groups had used: small huts with simple, single-roomed floor plans, lined pits dug into the soil, covered with a roof, surrounded by walls made of saplings.⁵ Distinct and novel for the Neolithic, however, were more substantial structures of one or two rooms, built at ground level, containing simple interior features such as a hearth or an oven. Both pit- and surface-level structures formed loose aggregations without formal spatial arrangement; most accurate analogies are drawn to shortterm camps, places lived in, abandoned, reused and then abandoned again perhaps on a seasonal basis.

At the same time in other parts of the Balkans, people created more substantial built environments with larger buildings (up to 10 m on a side) made of thick wooden posts, sunk into foundation trenches, interspersed with smaller wooden poles around which were entwined branches and twigs which, in turn, were covered with a mixture of mud, clay and grasses. In some buildings, sun-dried mud bricks or stone foundations made walls more stable and structures more permanent. Many buildings contained four, five or more rooms in which particular areas were dedicated to specific activities such as parching, grinding and storing of plant foodstuffs. Larger, more permanent structures were grouped together in highly organized ways, forming villages, often tightly packed with little extra open space. In other cases, building arrangement left significant areas of open space, areas in which people shared activities and resources, ate and talked.

Significantly the larger, more orderly arrangements of buildings had long lives. Older structures were repaired; replacements were constructed directly on top of buildings that had collapsed or, frequently near the end of the Neolithic, had been burned down intentionally. In many places, when buildings were replaced, great effort was made to rebuild in precisely the same location with earlier floor plans carefully replicated. With many regenerations of buildings, villages grew into substantial tells rising from the landscape, becoming highly visible statements of monumental settlement. Tell villages represent communities’ commitments to particular places for settlement; attention to location and forms of rebuilding established links between living and past generations of village residents.

Though commitments to settlement and architecture are common across the Balkan Neolithic there is variation in the degree and in the timing of their appearances. In northern Greece, for example, substantial, long-lived villages made with durable stone and mud brick occurred early, from the second half of the seventh millennium BC. To the north, along the lower Danube, such substantial construction materials never appeared and monumental tells did not emerge until the middle of the fifth millennium BC, 1,500 years after pit features and surface structures first appeared in the area. Neither to the north nor south did tells dominate; Neolithic Balkan landscapes were mixtures of different degrees of settlement permanences. To the west in Serbia, for example, tells appeared at the same time (and in the same landscapes) as did less permanent habitations, though tells were less frequent than flat settlements that spread horizontally through successive phases of building. In southern Bulgaria another pattern reveals only tells.⁶ Perhaps the most accurate reconstruction of Balkan Neolithic settlement patterns includes different manifestations of the built environment depending on variation in activities, seasons or political reasons.

The social and political significance of Neolithic Balkan architecture cannot be overemphasized. Houses and villages created tangible, physical, and relatively permanent boundaries around groups and their activities. The physical presence of houses established and reinforced cohesion of small co-resident groups. Houses pulled together group members at the same time as separating them from other groups. Membership in households was maintained over time by repeated rebuildings that secured physical links with earlier generations of houses (i.e., the long-term occupation of tells), or by repeating the form and size of a structure nearby (i.e., a thin, horizontal spread of occupation). Houses incorporated individuals into groups at the same time as they excluded other individuals. Similarly, aggregations of buildings incorporated individual houses (and their households) into the larger social institution of the village.

The social and political consequences of the Neolithic developments in Balkan architecture were fundamental. Benefits of incorporation were shared resources and labour, reduced risk for an individual or household, and other co-operative spin-offs of communal living. More dramatic were negative consequences: tensions and conflicts inherent in shared living, competition for limited resources, the ill-ease that exclusion generates. To realize the benefits, to reduce the tensions, and to overcome the threats to community coherence, Neolithic village living required not only new materials but also less tangible, political mechanisms. Resolution of conflict and tension was a major part of Neolithic life and was played out with new objects and raw materials, developments in attitudes to the dead, and changes in the scales of economic activities.

A new materiality

As significant as the adoption of architecture was a dramatic increase in the number and range of objects that people made and used. The most important element of this change was the adaptation of a ceramic pyrotechnology (Vitelli 1989, 1993, 1995). Balkan Neolithic potting developed through two stages: an early experimental encounter of the technology followed by a longer phase during which the elaboration of forms, techniques and uses expanded. The experimental phase consisted of casual attempts at potting; a few people making one or two vessels of simple design, irregular construction and uneven firing. Most likely, the first potters were people with experience in locating, gathering and processing other, special, raw materials; they knew where to find plants for food and, particularly, for medicines and for making mood-altering substances. Esoteric knowledges needed for collecting and transforming a raw resource such as a plant into a consumable, medicinal potion could easily have been adapted into the knowledges required for locating, collecting and processing a new raw material, such as clay. The abilities to find, extract and work clay and then transform it, by firing, from a natural, malleable, perishable medium into a permanent one were special skills. As Karen Vitelli has argued, early potter-gatherers may have played special roles in Balkan Neolithic communities. Equally important, the transformative process of pot-firing and the special identities of pot-makers most probably invested early ceramic objects with equally special meanings.

It is relevant, therefore, that early ceramic vessels were not used for cooking or storage, uses that only developed as ceramic technology stabilized and became a more commonly held knowledge. With time, vessel shapes became extraordinarily diverse; potters became technical specialists producing many pots of regular shape and decoration. In this the more developed phase of Balkan Neolithic potting, vessels were used for cooking, for storage, for transportation, for display; ceramic was now the medium of preference for container technologies. Ceramic vessels facilitated the accumulation and exclusive storage of plant or animal products, and pots were also social objects, playing important roles in feasting and exchange and in expressions of group and individual identities.

Appreciation of the transformative character of ceramic technology is an important consequence of the adoption of pottery-making. Creating a permanent medium from an impermanent one and making the perishable durable are significant material and spiritual transitions. In the experimental potting stages, pottery-making and pottery use must have evoked the magical and the other-worldly; ceramic practitioners would have been magicians, shamans and respected or feared possessors of special knowledges. In the more developed phases of potting, the significance of the transformation can be recognized in the roles that pottery vessels and other ceramic objects played as they carried messages of status and imagery.

The introduction and development of pottery-making was only one part of a wider new materiality that characterizes the Balkan Neolithic. Stone, both ground and flaked, was made into axes, scrapers, blades and other tools such as grinding-querns and grinders. Animal bone was made into spoons, awls and scrapers: animal horn into digging-sticks, shaft-hole axes and adzes, hammers and pounders. Though not preserved, other objects of perishable materials were widely used: containers of woven plants and gourds; wooden pots;⁷ leather straps and coverings; net bags; textile clothing, rugs and wall-coverings. Though not all of these objects were new to the Neolithic, the variety of form, the scales of their production, use and consumption, and most especially the impact of a new, malleable but permanent medium such as clay would have been fundamental: the Balkan Neolithic was a time of material objects. The increase in made objects documents a new way of living, of people and possessions, of increased scales of production and consumption, of technological evolution, of collection and hoarding, but also of giving, receiving and sharing. The adoption of a ceramic technology was significant and novel, although in reality the gross increase in frequencies of objects may only be a consequence of the more radical change of people marking out space with structures, buildings, camps and villages repeatedly occupied over time.⁸

Expressive material culture

An important component of the new materiality that defines the Neolithic Balkans was the production, use and strategic deposition of intentionally expressive objects, particularly those made of fired clay. Anthropomorphic figurines are one example of the new, permanent, and specifically expressive, objects. Animal as well as human forms appear in the shapes of pots as well as in the two-dimensional images depicted on vessel surfaces. Representations of buildings, their façades as well as their interiors, also appear in miniature as house models.

More striking were new materials that appeared through the fifth millennium BC, materials with particular, visually provocative, physical characteristics. The use of copper, first for cold-hammered trinkets and pendants and then for extravagantly large tools, is matched by the use of gold for body ornaments. These are sensually stimulating materials used to make objects displayed and consumed close to the body. Similarly, white shell of the marine mollusc Spondylus gaederopus was made into bracelets, rings, beads and pendants; graphite and gold solutions were used to decorate pot surfaces. Copper tools, gold and Spondylus jewellery, and brilliantly reflective pottery surfaces provided tremendous new potentials for the expression of individual and group identities. Significantly, many of these new, visually expressive, objects were deposited in burials.

The emergence of permanent, intentionally expressive material culture and the more general increase in the number and varieties of things that people made and used had consequences for the ways in which people acted out who they were and what they intended as their relationships with others. The use of pottery decoration as a means (even unconscious) of expressing and recognizing affinities to groups complements the senses of incorporation and exclusion evident in the growth and development of houses and villages as social institutions. Expressions of membership in a household or village must have taken advantage of the potential presented first by the almost infinitely malleable (and decoratable) medium of clay and second by the more general potential presented by the arrangement (hiding, hoarding, sharing, displaying) of all objects intentionally expressive or not. Importantly, the new materiality of the Balkan Neolithic provided, if not the recipe, th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Miniaturism and Dimensionality
• 3 Hamangia
• 4 Anthropomorphism
• 5 Cucuteni/Tripolye
• 6 Visual Rhetoric, Truth and the Body
• 7 Thessaly
• 8 Subverting and Manipulating Reality
• 9 Corporeal Politics of Being in the Neolithic
• Notes
• Bibliography