JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
ARTICLE NO.
16, 334 – 395 (1997)
AA970310
The Age of Clay: The Social Dynamics of House Destruction
Mirjana Stevanović
ARF; and U.C. Berkeley
Received March 15, 1997; revision received May 1, 1997; accepted May 15, 1997
This study provides some fresh insight into Neolithic domestic architecture through the analysis
of architectural technology and the control over the practice of house construction and destruction.
Examined on a regional or local level, architecture of the Neolithic is often presented as a fairly
homogenous social practice over the large area of Southeast Europe. In viewing the Neolithic houses
as homogenous and uncontroversial material culture, archaeologists have overlooked not only the
possible variation and multimeaning of the Neolithic houses but also their striking and extensive
means of destruction. The role of house conflagration, a practice that lasted during the entire Neolithic
of Southeast Europe, has not been addressed in archaeological investigations. Indeed the phenomenon of burned houses has been treated as a series of lucky accidents during the Neolithic, which
are primarily responsible for the preservation of Neolithic sites. Contrary this view, I argue that it
is unlikely that the houses were burned as a result of a series of accidents or for any structural and
technological reasons but rather that they were destroyed by deliberate burning and most likely for
reasons of a symbolic nature. The causes for the practice of house firing and house abandonment
as observed through the architectural evidence at the site of Opovo are believed to have been related
to the need for house replacement and securing its postutilitarian visibility in order to show social
and material continuity of the Neolithic society. In my view, a struggle for social and material
continuity might have been a leading mobilizing force in creating and maintaining social practices
and beliefs in the Neolithic society. q 1997 Academic Press
people. In Southeast Europe the Neolithic1
houses were the first permanently and systematically built dwellings that are known
in the archaeological record and whose
emergence is linked to the more general process of neolithization, i.e., domestication.
The Neolithic period, as many archaeologists demonstrate, is the key transitional period from the hunter – gatherer way of life to
the farming (i.e., food-producing) life. During this period a change from mobile living
in the nonpermanent or semipermanent
dwellings to living in the permanent dwell-
THE NEOLITHIC HOUSE SOCIETIES
. . . the best way to understand Montaillou is to
[. . .] go straight to the basic cell which, multiplied
a few dozen times, went to make up the village.
This basic cell was none other than the peasant
family, embodied in the permanence of a house and in
the daily life of a group co-resident under the same roof.
. . . the inhabitants of Montaillou [themselves],
for whom the family of flesh and blood and the
house of wood, stone or daub were one and the same
thing.
(Ladurie 1979: 24) (italics are my emphasis)
This article addresses the houses made of
daub in the Neolithic of Southeast Europe,
which at the end of their use-life were destroyed in conflagration. It asserts house
burning as a deliberate social practice and
evaluates its significance for the Neolithic
1
In this essay, ‘‘Neolithic’’ is used to mark the time
period that is otherwise segmented and called differently in different parts of Europe and the Near East.
Thus, in this case the Neolithic stands for Neolithic,
Eneolithic, Mature Neolithic, and the Copper Age. With
full appreciation of the regional-specific periodization,
I decided to use one term in order to avoid confusion.
334
0278-4165/97 $25.00
Copyright q 1997 by Academic Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
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ings organized in villages occurred.2 Sedentism has been invoked as one of the main
characteristics, if not the cause, of the process of neolithization while architecture became the symbol of the period. It is widely
assumed that at this point in time a ‘‘domestic’’ mode of living emerged.
In archaeology a domestic house is considered to provide a body of evidence that
authors often refer to when they write about
diverse issues specific to the Neolithic period (Hodder 1990). It has generated a number of formal and social interpretations of
houses including speculations on matriarchal versus patriarchal social organization.
Yet, it can hardly be said that we have much
insight into the architectural practices of the
Neolithic people and much less into the social forces that organized these practices.
This article, therefore, raises the question of
the Neolithic houses which were central to
the domestic domain in the changing Neolithic society, but traditionally taken to be
uncontroversial features of the cultural environment. In Southeast Europe architectural
evidence for the Neolithic is presented on
both a regional and a local level as a result
of a homogenous social practice that was
conditioned by a settled way of life and new
farming economy and demonstrated by the
existence of long-lasting tell settlements. In
viewing the Neolithic houses in Southeast
Europe as harmonious material culture, ar2
There are examples of permanent dwellings and village life from the Mesolithic period in Southeast Europe,
such are the settlements in the Iron Gorge region including the famous Lepenski Vir site, Padina, Hajdučka Vodenica, and others. It is increasingly evident that our
concept of sedentism is monolithic and simplistic and
that it will change in the future so to encompass a variety of human solutions to the problem of sedentism,
which are not present currently in archaeological explanations. In this study, it is not the problem of sedentism
that is primary subject and therefore the traditional
view of Neolithic as the first period of the sedentary
village life is not challenged. For further insights into
the problem of Neolithization and for the references see
Rowley-Conwy and Zvelebil (1989), Seferiades (1993),
Zvelebil (1995), and others.
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chaeologists have overlooked the significance of their destruction by conflagration
during this period of prehistory. The role of
house conflagration, a practice that lasted
during the entire Neolithic of Southeast Europe, has traditionally not been addressed
in archaeological investigations (see Fig. 1).
House building as well as house destruction are the hallmarks of the Neolithic period in Southeast Europe. This article argues
that both house construction and destruction are closely related architectural practices which have to be examined simultaneously. The practices of house construction
and house burning by the same group of
people may seem to be on opposite sides of
the spectrum, even paradoxical, when one
considers that the Neolithic period was the
beginning of house construction on a large
scale. I suggest, however, that they were
complementary practices. In other words, I
argue for the possibility that a deliberate social strategy existed during the Neolithic according to which houses were built with the
intent to be destroyed at a certain point in
their use-life, moreover by an act of conflagration. Through this extensive study of
construction materials that were used in the
Neolithic and their multiple transformations
during the house use-life, I intend to address
a number of larger archaeological and anthropological issues. These include the role
of the house in the Neolithic house-based
societies, i.e., the link among the house’s architectural, social, and symbolic significance. The house is to be interpreted not
only as a feature that protects one from the
elements but also as a meaningful and complex artifact which can express physical, social, and symbolic aspects of the lives of the
people who dwell in it.
More specifically, I will present in this article the results of the analysis of the materials for house construction and how their
choice might be linked to the practice of
house burning at the Neolithic village site
of Opovo. Opovo is a Vinča culture site situated in the southwest part of the Banat in
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MIRJANA STEVANOVIĆ
the province of Vojvodina in Serbia, former
Yugoslavia. It lies in the lower valley of the
Tamiš river, 20 km from its confluence with
the Danube. The Vinča culture lasted from
ca. 5500 B.C./4700 B.C. to ca. 4000 B.C./3300
B.C. Its territory is considered to be in the
region of the central Balkans (south from the
Danube and Sava rivers, in contemporary
Serbia and northern Macedonia). Its core territory is in the Morava and Vardar river valleys. The Vinča culture spread from this core
territory up to the Drina and Ibar rivers and
Šar planina to the west and to the Suva and
Osogovo mountains to the east (Garašanin
1979) (see Figs. 2 and 3). The Morava (both
Great and Southern branches) and Vardar
valleys run through the middle of the Balkan
peninsula and are considered its main natural north-south communication route. This
is the shortest direct communication that
joins the Aegean coast and the central Danube region. It is also considered to be the
direct communication route between, on the
one hand, the east Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and the Near East and Central Europe
on the other hand. Therefore, it is believed
that in this region the contacts between two
broad cultural regions, the east Mediterranean and the Central European, were most
intensive (Garašanin 1979).
The eponymous Vinča culture site of
Vinča-Belo Brdo became renowned from the
time of the earliest excavations carried out
at this site in the beginning of the century
(e.g., Vasič 1936). Since its discovery to the
present the site of Vinča-Belo Brdo and
abundant other sites of the Vinča culture
have been the subject of numerous studies
of prehistoric archaeology. The scholars who
concerned themselves with the archaeology
of Southeast Europe have considered the site
of Vinča-Belo Brdo the basis for the relative
chronology of the Balkan-Danubian Neolithic and Eneolithic (see Garašanin 1973;
Tringham 1991c; Stevanović and Jovanović
1996). Moreover, this important prehistoric
culture of Southeast Europe features nearly
all the phases of development of the long
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Neolithic period and it represents a fruitful
source for studies of architecture and other
Neolithic material cultural.
House Burning as Social Practice
in the Vinča Culture
Southeast Europe has historically and
prehistorically been a crucial region, as it
represents the crossroads between Europe
and the Near East. The proximity of Southeast Europe to the Near East made this region a part of the wider debates in the origins of agriculture, sedentism, urbanism,
and origins of civilization. The extent of archaeological research made the region one
of the archaeologically better known areas
in Europe.
The attention that was given to Southeast
Europe by assuming its importance as a
gateway for the process of diffusion was
probably a decisive factor for its further developments in archaeology. The concept of
culture change by population replacement
was, in a way, imposed on Southeast Europe
and inspired extensive investigations for its
evidence (Srejović 1988). In Yugoslavia the
Neolithic — represented by the Vinča culture — was sometimes characterized as the
‘‘glamour period’’ of prehistory (Bankoff
and Winter 1982: 149). Coincidentally, the
tone and scope of the debate empowered
but also constrained the archaeology of the
region. The constraints for archaeology of
the region that resulted were that many
other avenues of research, architecture of the
Neolithic being one, were not considered.
It has been noticed in archaeology that in
the large area of Southeast Europe in the
Neolithic period the archaeological cultures
show a striking similarity in archaeological
remains that pertain to building activities in
terms of the volume of materials and their
universality at settlements (Chapman 1981;
Sherratt 1982a,b; Stevanović 1972, 1995;
1985; Tringham 1971, 1972, 1995; Tringham
et al. 1985, 1992; Tringham and Krstić 1990a).
In addition to their universality and volume,
it was recognized and emphasized by Tring-
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SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF HOUSE DESTRUCTION
ham (1990, 1994, 1995), and investigated by
Tringham and Stevanović (1990, 1991; Stevanović 1996), that there is another common
and important characteristic of architecture
in this region — house destruction by burning — a phenomenon which had been up to
that point recognized in archaeology only in
the sense that the burning has preserved the
architecture exceptionally well. At virtually
all the sites with preserved architecture we
see the dramatic effect of a large-scale house
fire and the massive accumulation of burned
clay rubble of clay house floors and the daub
of the superstructure. There has not yet been
reported a single Later Neolithic site in the
region with architecture remains that are
completely unburned.
In the house fire, under high temperatures, the clay covering of the wood frame
is transformed into a durable ceramic-like
material. The Vinča culture houses, for example, were built by the wattle-and-daub
method of construction. This method involves using a mixture of materials that
comprise (a) a heavy or light framework of
wood (including the main upright posts and
the wattling, planks, half-timbers, reeds
which were woven or packed horizontally
or placed vertically between them) and (b)
a layer of varying thickness of clay which
was daubed over the frame on one or both
surfaces. Archaeologically these structures
comprise areas of compacted, fired clay rubble, representing all that remains of the
burned and collapsed superstructures of
wattle-and-daub buildings. They are typically found in proximity to postholes, pits
and other surrounding features.
The house fire, in a way, produces a Pompeii effect in the archaeology of this region
by literally ‘‘freezing’’ the picture of the
houses at the moment when they collapse
after their burning. We recognize that after
their collapse they have been modified by
removal of rubble, and possibly of some
burned artifacts. Thus, we have the main differentiating elements of the house in situ in
the form of house floor, its walls, and other
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immobile and mobile elements that include
furniture, ovens, pots, and a variety of artifacts whole or crushed on the floor and covered with the crumbled walls. This is a
unique record which allows extensive architectural analysis and provides an extraordinary situation for examining the technology
of construction in the Neolithic that is not
possible in many other archaeological contexts from this period of prehistory (Tringham and Stevanović 1990, 1991). In most
other areas of the world, Neolithic structures
are represented only by postholes.
This homogeneity in the architectural remains in terms of their construction and
their destruction in a conflagration is linked
to a specific episode of prehistory — 4500 –
3000 B.C. or 5300 – 3800 B.C. — and is not observed in the prehistoric periods before or
after — neither in such frequency nor in such
volume (see Fig. 1). Chronologically this
phenomenon belongs to the period of the
Middle to Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic.
In terms of regional prehistoric cultures of
Serbia, that is, from the early stages of the
Vinča culture — around 5200 B.C. — based
on the 14C dates (see Gimbutas 1991:451) until the end of the Vinča culture — around
4000 B.C. — according to the 14C dates from
the same source. However, if the phenomenon of house burning is observed on the
larger regional level, that is, including the
Neolithic/Eneolithic cultures of Bulgaria
and Southern Hungary, it lasted longer (at
Karanovo site and culture in Bulgaria from
ca. 6200 – 3800 B.C. and at the Tisza and Tiszapolgar culture sites in Hungary from ca.
5300 B.C. to 3800 B.C., according to the 14C
dates).3
3
It is very likely that future research will show similar
if not the same method of house construction and destruction in the earlier periods of prehistory in Southeast Europe. That is, that building and possible destruction of dwellings can be extended back to the transitional period from Mesolithic into Neolithic and
especially to the Early Neolithic. It is already rather
apparent that, for instance, the people of the Early Neolithic Starcevo culture who inhabited earlier the same
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MIRJANA STEVANOVIĆ
Houses as Social Spaces in Southeast
European Archaeology
Up to this point the Neolithic architecture
of the region has been mainly viewed
through the studies of the transition to a sedentary way of life. Neolithic architecture is
firmly embedded in two very important issues of archaeology of Southeast Europe and
the Near East — sedentism and the nature of
social formations of the Neolithic period.
The sedentary way of life — its causes, consequences, mechanisms, and definition —
has been the object of rich debate (Hodder
1990; Kaiser and Voytek 1983; Price and
Brown 1985; Rafferty 1985; Tringham and
Krstić 1990b; Wilson 1988; and others). Sedentism is usually defined as a link between
a house and its inhabitants. Thus the significance of architecture in the process of settling down is not disputed, but the degree
of its importance varies depending on
whether it is taken to be a cause or consequence of sedentism.
It has been suggested that the house may
at certain times have been conceptually central. As such, it would have evoked certain
emotions such as security, and served to demarcate the social and cultural from the wild
and natural (see Hodder 1990) It is also possible that the ‘‘institution’’ of the home was
necessary in order to objectify and to enclose
a newly created social structure protecting
the individual’s investment and possessions
(see Wilson 1988).
The Neolithic societies have often been
characterized as being structured around the
domestic mode of production (Sahlins 1968,
1972). The household is considered in these
studies the primary unit of production and
reproduction. In Southeast European archaeology a household (i.e., a co-residential
unit) has been equated with a house and
geographic territory as the Vinča culture people, practiced similar if not the same method of house construction (see Stanković, 1992, for house description from the
Starčevo culture site), as well as their destruction in
conflagration.
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extensively examined for intensification of
production (Kaiser and Voytek 1983; Tringham 1985; 1990; Tringham and Krstić 1990b),
as well as for increased reproduction (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1973, 1984; Bogucki 1988; Sherratt 1984; Sterud 1978; Todorova 1978). The role and significance of
the built environment in these studies have
been entertained as part of and secondary
to the analysis of agriculture.
Lévi-Strauss has proposed a direct relationship between the house and the lineage
and, moreover, between the house and the
social organization of the groups (see Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). It is interesting
that archaeology, at least in some regions of
the world, assumes the same position even if
unintentionally. Archaeologists working in
Southeast Europe have not been traditionally engaged in the theoretical debate on the
role and significance of the house for the
social organization and its potential to mark
the lineage in settled societies. However, interpretations of the houses and villages of
Neolithic societies in Southeast Europe have
implicitly been along the lines of the lineage
(see for instance, Chapman 1989; Lazarovici
et al. 1985; Todorova 1976; 1990; Todorović
and Cermanović 1961).
Inferring from Neolithic architecture,
mainly from the uniform house size and
house type, archaeologists have traditionally
considered Neolithic societies to be as internally undifferentiated as the houses themselves (Garašanin 1973; Todorova 1990; Todorović and Cermanović, 1961; to mention
only few). The only exception to this constructed uniformity is the occurrence of occasional large long-houses that have variously been interpreted as village halls or
clubhouses rather than as residential dwellings (Nea Nikomedeia, Sesklo, Dhimini in
Greece; Polyanitsa in Bulgaria; Gomolava in
Serbia) (see Whittle 1985; Brukner 1982), or
structures interpreted as temples (Partsa in
Romania) (see Lazarovici et al. 1985). Villages in the Neolithic have been considered
to consist of extended families of the same
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SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF HOUSE DESTRUCTION
ˇ
Vucedol
Bubanj ISalcuta¸
Krivodol
ˇ
VincaPlocnik
ˇ
(Gumelnita)
¸
(Gumelnita)
¸
ˇ
VincaPlocnik
ˇ
ˇ
VincaTordosˇ
¸
Dudesti
Cris¸
Cris¸
ˇ
Starcevo
ProtoCris¸
ˇ
FIG. 1. The Burned House Horizon in Southeast European Prehistory.
lineage sharing all resources and labor communally, much like the traditional ‘‘zadruga’’ in the Balkans (Byrnes 1976; Halpern
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1958; Hammel 1984; Hammel and Laslett
1974; Stahl 1986).
Zadruga literally means ‘‘cooperative.’’
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MIRJANA STEVANOVIĆ
Historically, zadruga describes a form of
joint family, usually related in the male line,
and a prominent feature of rural society. A
zadruga is defined by Mosely as ‘‘a household composed of two or more biological or
small-families, closely related by blood or
adoption, owning its means of production
communally, producing and consuming the
means of its livelihood jointly, and regulating the control of its property, labor, and
livelihood communally’’ (1953:19).
Todorova and Vajsov (1993) assert on the
basis of the Neolithic settlements of Ovčarovo, Polyanitsa, Goljamo Delčevo that the
earliest founders of these villages comprised
in the early stage three to five member families. During the later phase of the settlements
(phase IV at Ovčarovo, for instance) the village is described as comprised of three
groups of dwellings (eight to nine houses
per group), from which they conclude that
the ‘‘original commune’’ consisted of three
extended families, each of eight to nine nuclear families. By the culmination phase the
Ovčarovo settlement was comprised of 25
dwellings of smaller size, each believed to
have housed not more than one average
family of three members — still organized on
the zadruga model.
Todorović and Cermanović (1961), and
Benac (1952) interpreted the Neolithic social
organization of Vinča culture settlements on
the basis of architecture as the formative period of the nuclear family unit living in an
individual house. They say the village comprised a single lineage that had communal
ownership of the basic means of production.
Tripolye culture architecture and social organization have been interpreted also as representing an ‘‘original zadruga.’’ In this instance, however, the interpretation is based
much more on the Marxist explanation of
society than on ethnohistorical analogy.
Both Kricevskij (1940) and Passek (1949)
concluded that in Neolithic villages several
nuclear families shared one collective long
house, each family occupying a small housing unit with other long houses serving as
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storage and communal rooms for the whole
village. The division of labor and ownership
of the means of production in these villages
were thought to be as communal, with equal
access to resources for all village members
and with no social differentiation.
It is important to understand that the interpretation of the Neolithic social organization as the original zadruga is based solely
on the architectural evidence. Without disputing the possibility of the original zadruga
or matriarchal social organization during
the Neolithic, I believe that such an interpretation of the Neolithic architecture is unsubstantiated at the present stage of research on
Neolithic architecture.
The works by Tringham on Southeast European Neolithic households, their spatial,
economic and social organization, and their
gender tensions (1984, 1985a, 1990, 1991a,b,
1995) and by (Chapman 1989) on house and
village complexity in the Vinča culture, on
the other hand, have inferred — based on the
Neolithic houses in the region — more complex and more dynamic social structures
during the Neolithic. It was this kind of vision of the Neolithic in Southeast Europe
that prompted me to ask questions such as,
what can we learn from studying the Neolithic architectural record that could throw
more light on the house and contribute to a
better comprehension of the processes of a
new practice of creating structured space by
humans and in return what can we learn
about social complexities of the inhabitants
by studying their houses. In this article it is
assumed that the objects which people create and with which people surround themselves including houses have meaning for
them and show the relation of these individuals not only to the space in which they live
but to the wider society; they help build the
context of social action (Hodder 1987; Donley 1982; Donley-Reid 1990; Moore 1986;
Tringham 1994). It is proposed here that the
buildings themselves and their associated
material culture provide evidence for domestic space as place and an expression of
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lineage continuity, which also acted as both
context and media in domestic negotiations,
tensions, gender relations, and dominance
structures.
The Technological Practice of
Architecture in Southeast Europe
Within the renewed effort to stimulate the
studies of the house in anthropology (e.g.,
Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995 volume) as
well as in social theory in general (numerous
works that through the studies of space, action and agent often refer to architecture,
such as Bourdieu 1990; Foucault 1984; Pred
1986; and others), I find that in archaeology,
theoretical discussions on the prehistoric
house as a technological practice is missing.
Looking through the archaeological prism,
the technological aspect of architecture
should be the baseline for the analysis and
interpretation of the house. The dwelling, I
would argue, includes the ‘‘making of’’ the
house, and in my mind, it has a logical precedence over inhabiting the house.
I argue in this article that the technology
of architecture has to be understood in its
social context and not just as technical skills,
as has too often been the case in archaeology.
Technology of architecture should be understood as the processes through which materials are transformed into artifacts and cannot be separated from the social relations of
their production (many authors make and
expound upon this point; see, for instance,
Lechtman 1977, 1984, 1993; Lemonnier 1990,
1993; Ingold 1988, 1990; Dobres 1995; and
for a thorough review, Dobres and Hoffman
1994). Architecture can be seen, therefore,
as the transformation of raw materials into
cultural products, a process through which
the social relations are being formed, played
out, or negotiated (Ingold 1990, Hughes
1979).
Hodder (1990) indicates a crucial role of
production in the Neolithic society and
stresses that the act of moving and living
inside the house is the major acting force in
becoming cultural objects (after Heidegger
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1977). My emphases, however, would be
that the practice of building the house, the
transformation of building soil, and its combination with other organic and inorganic
elements in the essential source material for
house production was the crucial cultural
building block in the process of becoming
cultural objects. I further entertain the possibility that the practice of house discard/
abandonment/destruction in the Neolithic
Vinča culture society was an expression of
the same cultural process, that of becoming
social agents.
In Southeast European archaeology the
house as a subject of analysis has traditionally been assigned a background or secondary importance. It is examined primarily as
containing and encompassing other human
material culture and activities, and secondarily as the medium and product of human
activities. Furthermore, houses are traditionally viewed in archaeology as stable, slow
changing, and not indicative of social processes except for those which bring about a
considerable cultural and social change. This
‘‘disadvantage’’ makes them less important
in conceptualizing the behavior of small size
social groups or an individual, whereas it
makes them more indicative of large scale
social processes. It could also be asserted
that in archaeology the house is taken to
be a composite material culture beyond
the complexity of an artifact and in the analysis not subjected to the same conceptual
schemes as other artifacts. The lack of discussion on technology of architecture is an
example of this.
Neolithic houses are immobile features set
on the landscape in particular arrangements
that satisfy the needs and ideas of their human creators. As the products of technological practices, houses are artifacts of a certain
culture and express the social conditions of
their creation. These houses are not only
spatial and organizational products but also
technological products. Much of the explanation in archaeology, and especially the explanation of architectural remains, depends
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MIRJANA STEVANOVIĆ
on the way of conceptualizing space. However, in order to interpret domestic architecture one has to understand not only the spatial relationships within each house and
within the larger community but also the
transformative processes of the materials involved in house production and simultaneously their effect on the social processes.
Thus, rather than analyzing the spatial aspects of Neolithic houses, I have ventured
into examining their material constituents,
their use-lives, and the cause of their destruction. While I quite agree that the house
provides the context for the artifacts and features within it, I emphasize that, at the same
time, the house is an artifact in itself and
needs to be studied as such. One aim of the
research presented is to elevate the house to
the level of an artifact and demonstrate that
its archaeological remains — house rubble —
are a valuable part of material culture once
a set of analytical tools is developed that will
allow archaeologists to use house rubble to
make inferences about society.
To begin investigating the complexity of
Neolithic architecture, I suggest (after Tringham and Krstić 1990b; Tringham 1994; 1995;
McGuire and Schiffer 1983) that a Neolithic
house should be viewed through its four basic phases of use-life rather than as a single
event/product: (i) house construction (including building technique and materials),
(ii) house use (spatial organization), (iii)
house maintenance, and (iv) house destruction. Not all the phases have been considered to be viable as a subject of technological
practice. Some are believed to be more so,
such as construction and maintenance, while
use and destruction are not. It has been suggested and the investigation presented in
this article will support that prehistoric
house destruction could be interpreted as a
deliberate technological practice (Semenov
1968; Shaffer 1984, 1993; Wilshusen 1988,
1989).
The practice of house construction during
the Neolithic in Southeast Europe featured
some technological innovations, such as use
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of structural materials and their combinations that had not been used before. At the
same time, the introduction and development of new strategies, methods, and techniques of production were taking place,
such as, for example, house construction in
the wattle-and-daub method. Even though
soil of various types had been a known material resource, which, when mixed with water and tempering materials, had been used
for the production of pottery, figurines, and
many other objects, its use in house construction had been minimal until the Early
Neolithic period. There is also another dimension to the technology of house construction — the use of large quantities of materials that had not existed before. The magnitude of the project of Neolithic house
building required massive amounts of soil
that had to be dug out and mixed with water
and large quantities of organic temper, as
well as an adequately complex organization
of labor, access to the resources for construction materials and building area, and the
proper scheduling for successful results.
This paper’s title places clay in the focus
of the discussion. The aim is to draw attention to the role that clay had as a raw material in societies throughout the prehistory of
Europe. Especially important is the role clay
had during the Neolithic period. The Neolithic period in Southeast Europe is marked
by an incredible increase of material production probably resembling a level of industrial manufacture. Whereas evidence of the
production of foods, textiles, and other activities in the Neolithic societies is not as
obvious, even though it is present, evidence
for the production of artifacts made of clay
as a fundamental raw material, such as ceramics, figurines and other figurative representations, and house construction, is plentiful. Not only were houses constructed of it
but also house interiors with mobile and immobile furniture and a variety of tools were
all made in clay. Thus, a typical scene of a
Neolithic house is the floor built of a thick
layer of compacted clay on which we find
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other objects made of it: bed platforms and
benches; ovens and ‘‘mangals’’ for warming
food and air; wheat grinding receptacles,
grain grinders, and mortars; storage vessels
and very large immobile vessels built into
the floor; portable storage containers (in
numbers that usually go over several dozens) and lids; clay balls used for a variety of
functions, such as weights for fishing nets,
weaving, and cooking/heating stones; figurative representations of humans and animals; furniture; house and oven models;
jewelry; and so on. The choice of clay as a
predominant source of material for a number of functions in the Neolithic societies
calls for redefining this period of prehistory
as the Age of Clay.
What could be the quality of clay that
made it such a pervasive raw material during the Neolithic? Was it its availability and
abundance? In addition to the list of significant functions of clay during the Neolithic,
I add that clay as a raw material had a particular importance for its quality of providing
durability and visibility in a pragmatic and
symbolic sense to the objects that it constituted.
Moreover, the multiple transformations that
this material as well as other building materials could endure are considered here to be
of exceptional significance for archaeology
of the Southeast European house-based societies. The first set of transformations of the
building materials consisted in their mixing,
in the process of which the raw clays were
brought in contact with domesticated plants,
i.e., food-remains, such as chaff and straw.
The second set of transformations of the construction materials took place when the
house was fired at the end of its use-life.
The clay, wood, and temper materials were
transformed into a durable ceramic-like material. By suggesting the concept of the
house use-life which would have been controlled by the Neolithic people I am also exploring the role that houses come to play as
symbols of social groups, such as bound-
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aries, hierarchies, or mnemonic places,
which lay claim on the valuable grounds.
REGIONAL CONTEXT OF
ARCHITECTURE OF THE
VINCA CULTURE
Long-term permanent villages are the
most characteristic pattern during the Neolithic period of Southeast Europe. The villages are mainly known from tell settlements, even though a large number of flat/
non-tell sites, such as Opovo, have been discovered. For instance, Demoule and Perles
(1993) talk about hundreds of closely
spaced, compact villages known from the
rich basins of Thessaly and central Greece.
Kotsakis talks about large ‘‘flat’’ villages,
with widespread, separated houses and
short-term occupation (1993). Tells and flat
Neolithic settlements are also well known
from the Central and Northern Balkans including the Vinča culture (see Garašanin
1951, 1984; Bogdanović 1981, 1988, 1990; Benac 1973; Brukner 1962, 1988; Jovanović
1965; Jovanović and Glišić 1960, 1961; Srejović 1988; Srejović and Tasić 1990; Tringham
and Krstić 1990b).
Tell sites have the potential to provide excellent architectural and settlement data because of their boundedness and the practice
of very obvious vertical house replacement.
These settlements can be subjected to investigations of the settlement’s size and organization as well as change through time, since
they often represent continuous occupation.
On the other hand, flat settlements feature
expansion by horizontal house replacement
(Tringham and Stevanović 1990) and are different for the analysis of settlement size, its
organization, and household studies. The
flat sites are often considered to provide
much less reliable evidence on settlement
size and organization (see the discussion in
(Tringham and Krstić 1990b).
The broad culture areas of Southeast Europe are distinguished by similarities in
their economy, settlement type, house type,
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and other material culture throughout the
Neolithic period. The Neolithic architecture
seems to show a steady development of certain traits from the earlier to later periods.
First of all, the number of surface buildings
in comparison to subterranean and semisubterranean buildings increases in the later
period. Through time larger and more solid
houses were constructed using greater
quantities of clay, and frequently these
formed villages with evidence of deliberate
planning and delimitation by various means
(Todorova 1990; Tringham 1991b; Whittle
1985; Champion et al. 1984; Ammerman and
Cavalli-Sforza 1973; Dennell 1983; Gimbutas
1976a; Evans and Rasson 1984; and
others). The uniform interior space of the
houses in the earlier periods became segmented in the later periods. The associated
features in the houses such as ovens, furniture, fixed storage vessels, and other artifacts
increased in their number and complexity in
the later periods of prehistory. The materials
for house construction stayed the same, i.e.,
soil, wood, and temper-materials, but were
used in larger quantities than before.
The surface houses from the Late Neolithic period in the region including the
Vinča culture are of square shape at first and
later of rectangular shape, usually comprising a main room with an antechamber. In
some instances the division of the space in
the house is even more complex and comprises several smaller rooms or delineated
spaces (e.g., in the Vinča culture sites of Banjica, Divostin, Gomolava). The house interiors comprise thick clay floors; round, oval,
square, and horseshoe-shaped ovens; silos
for storing grain; massive cattle heads of
clay; a large number of pottery vessels
and other tool assemblages; and traces of
colored plaster (Vasić 1936, Garašanin 1951,
1973, Chapman 1981; Markotić 1976, 1984;
McPherron and Srejović 1988; Jovanović and
Glišić 1960, 1961; Todorova at al. 1983;
Brukner 1980; Demoule and Perles 1993; and
others).
It should also be pointed out that indepen-
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dent evidence for the general appearance of
the Neolithic houses (some of which are
two- or three-roomed like the Middle Neolithic ‘‘megaron’’ at Sesklo) comes from the
clay models, which show double-pitched,
painted roofs and several openings, possibly
doors or windows (Theocharis 1973, Figs.
192, 193, 225). The clay house models are
relatively constant in occurrence in the
Southeast European Neolithic period. Some
of the models have been interpreted as temples (see Gimbutas 1980, 1982); none of the
house models have been interpreted as a
representation of a two-story building, although some of them do show such indications (see Todorova et al. 1983).
The phenomenon of two-story houses has
been ignored in Southeast European archaeology even though there are occasional reports of two-story Neolithic houses from
Tisza and Herpály II contexts in Hungary
(Horvath 1987; Kalicz and Raczky 1987a,
1987b), Gumelnitsa sites in Bulgaria (Todorova and Vajsov 1993), Cucuteni B sites in
Romania and Moldavia (Ellis 1984; Markevic 1981), and Sesklo sites in Greece
(Theocharis 1973, Demoule and Perles 1993,
Treuil 1983). The Opovo excavations revealed another two-story Neolithic house in
the region. However, there seems to be an
air of disbelief around this issue in the archaeology of Southeast Europe. In my view,
this kind of attitude has prevented archaeologists in the region from paying closer attention to potential evidence for two-story
structures during excavation.
Whereas the shape and the size of houses
seem to have followed the same trend all
over Southeast Europe, the methods of construction vary to some extent (Elia 1982).
Mudbrick is typical of the Near East (Fig.
2) and in Europe is restricted to Greece; in
contrast, wattle-and-daub was rare in the
Near East but is characteristic of Europe and
has been seen as a local invention (Treuil
1983). Both techniques occur in Greece,
sometimes at the same site, as at Sesklo (Demoule and Perles 1993). In Southeast Europe
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FIG. 2. Map of the Balkans and the Near East (modified after Gimbutas 1991).
during the Neolithic period and certainly in
the Vinča culture, the only method of construction used was wattle-and-daub.
Presently, there is no evidence for significant differences in house construction, that
is, the building method and the materials
between the tell and flat settlements in the
Vinča culture, and it has been assumed that
they have been of the same kind. The phenomenon of burned houses seems to be a
constant occurrence throughout the Vinča
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culture, regardless of the settlement type or
cultural variant. That the strategy of house
replacement is an important factor in tell formation has been noticed in Southeast European archaeology. Tringham (1990) and
Tringham and Stevanović (1990) pointed out
that in the context of the Vinča culture house
replacement is present also in the case of flat
or non-tell sites, and more importantly that
the Neolithic house replacement is linked to
the practice of house burning.
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Opovo and the Excavation
of Neolithic Architecture
The Banat in the province of Vojvodina in
which the site of Opovo is situated is a part
of the Pannonian plain, the great lowland
plain of the middle Danube basin. As a region, the Banat is bound by the Tisza river
to the west, the Danube to the south, and
the foothills of the Carpathians in Romania
to the east (Tringham et al. 1992, 1985). It is
believed that this area represents the northern edge of the territory traditionally inhabited by the Vinča people (Fig. 3).
Neolithic settlement of the Banat region
began in the late 6th millennium B.C. with
the Early Neolithic Starčevo-Körös cultures.
In the 5th millennium B.C., Starčevo sites
were replaced by Vinča culture sites, which
continued to exist until the late 4th millennium B.C. Opovo is considered to be a Late
Neolithic settlement of the Vinča culture (ca.
4700 – 4500 B.C.). The site covers an area approximately 5 ha on a low knoll overlooking
an abandoned meander of the Tamiš river.
The survey of the area around Opovo carried out by the National Museums in
Pančevo and Vršac identified a large number of Starčevo and Vinča culture Neolithic
sites, some of which are presented in Figs.
4 and 5 (for a more detailed account, see
Tringham, Stevanović and Brukner, in
press).
The major research objectives at Opovo
included: (i) an investigation of change in
the Neolithic agricultural economy north of
the Danube, (ii) an assessment of the permanence of settlement at Opovo, and (iii) a detailed examination of the role of households
in the organization of social and economic
life at Opovo (Tringham et al. 1985: 427).
The interest in the problem of Neolithic
settlement permanence and the role of
households put the focus of research at
Opovo on the houses and other such features. It is known in Southeast Europe that
the best strategy to take in excavating settlement sites, especially if one is interested in
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architecture, is a large exposure of a site,
which allows investigation of the relation
between the houses and within each unearthed dwelling. The strategy of large exposure has been exercised successfully in the
excavation of many Vinča culture sites (e.g.,
Vasić 1936, Brukner 1980). Some sites have
provided a formidable stratigraphic sequence of habitation horizons, or else house
levels, and thus allowed investigation of the
relations between them. This excavation
strategy also has provided the possibility for
obtaining basic chronological divisions such
as the one for the Vinča culture, which
serves as the chronological benchmark for
the wider geographic region.
However, the traditional excavation
method of the large exposure has its limitations. In some ways, by opening large site
surfaces, the archaeologists had little vertical
stratigraphy control within exposed blocks.
Therefore, such a strategy has produced, on
the one hand, an enormous amount of evidence about settlements as a whole, but on
the other hand, many aspects, such as house
construction and destruction, have stayed
blurred. First, the horizontal relationship between the houses, i.e., their contemporaneity, was not investigated in detail but rather
assumed on the basis of the houses’ absolute
elevation. Second, in house cleaning and removal, all the house remains were not
treated as potential evidence; the house superstructure was traditionally discarded
and the focus has been on the house floor.
Third, none of the house remains were considered worth further analysis after excavation. Excavating architecture has traditionally meant acquiring data not on the houses
themselves, except for their size, shape and
orientation, but on the other artifacts found
within them. Thus very basic data on house
walls, floors, roof, and other structural elements have been neglected. There are many
objective and subjective causes for such
methodological shortcomings; to mention
just a few: lack of resources, lack of developed methodology, or lack of interest.
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FIG. 3. Map of the Vinča and Tisza culture sites (modified after Gimbutas 1991).
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FIG. 4. Distribution of loess soils in former Yugoslavia (modified after Chapman 1990).
One objective of the Opovo Archaeological Project was to overcome the shortcomings of previous excavations in the treatment
of Neolithic architecture. It was maintained
at the OAP that flexibility in the method of
house excavation was necessary in an attempt to achieve sufficient detail to allow
meaningful interpretation of features, ensure systematic recovery of samples of all
materials, and complete the excavation of
the block during the projected time. Therefore, the method of floating balks was used
in order to understand the relation between
the houses that belonged to the same habitation level and between the levels. The balks
were positioned so as to provide profiles
linking houses and other features, which
would then, through the careful analysis,
show the relationships. Our sampling of the
construction materials and their transformations included considerably larger quantities
of archaeological material then before (see
Fig. 6).
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Excavating architecture at Opovo with
such objectives meant providing an entirely
new methodology for it that had not been
applied before. Some elements of the
method had been developed initially during
the excavation of the sites of Selevac, Gomolava, and Vinča-Belo Brdo (see Stevanović
1984, 1985, 1996; Tringham 1990; Tringham
and Stevanović 1991). However, only during
the OAP was this method finally established
and systematically executed. In order to collect data on house construction and destruction, our work focused on the careful cleaning of the burned structures, lifting the rubble and mapping it layer by layer, and taking
systematic samples. Recording was carried
out according to cells (each 1 square m) in
and around the structural features. The first
task was to separate house rubble into different categories (house walls, floors, furniture, ovens) out of an often amorphous
mound of material that was formed during
the process of house collapse. Rubble frag-
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FIG. 5. The pedology of the site at Opovo.
ments which exceeded 10 cm in size were
recorded by their specific numbers assigned
within the house map. Each fragment was
first drawn in the house plan and described
in situ in its spatial context. The next stage
consisted of lifting the fragment out of its
spatial context and recording its specific
characteristics. Some of the recorded characteristics provided the measurements for the
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piece as a whole; others refered to the wood
impressions that are part of a particular rubble fragment. The remaining rubble, i.e., the
fragments that were too small to be individually recorded, the fragments from the cultural layer which were in secondary position, and the fragments that were a part of
usually heavily damaged features, were processed separately as the bulk record. The
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FIG. 6. Neolithic houses at Opovo.
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FIG. 6—Continued
bulk rubble was recorded spatially by locus
and by the rubble type (ordinary, floor, vitrified) for their weights.
The next step in data acquisition was to
sample the rubble for further analysis according to the questions that were being
asked in the project. The aim was to collect
more than one sample from each category in
each house in order to compare the samples
from different houses in one building horizon. The remains of the wattle-and-daub
houses were therefore exceptionally and
carefully excavated and systematically and
fully mapped, recorded, and sampled.
House Construction
The strategy, recording, and analysis of
excavation were designed to collect evidence on: (1) house construction materials:
their type, sizes, quantities, and methods of
processing; (2) house construction method;
(3) the transformations of the construction
materials through utilization with specific
interest in the causes of their fires; and (4)
house destruction as the result of fire.
Rubble weights. The rubble weights provided substantial control over the quantities
of clay used in house construction and the
proportions of different construction materials used. Figure 7 illustrates the total rubble
weights at Opovo. The weights of the Opovo
structural rubble show that the largest quantities of this material belong to the bulk rubble, which comprised 14,012 kg. House 1
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comprised 1078 kg of house rubble fragments analyzed. The analyzed construction
clay of house 2 weighed 707 kg. House 3
was only partially excavated and yielded 57
kg of rubble analyzed, and the analyzed rubble from house 4 rubble weighed 188 kg.
The rubble weights indicate that the largest
quantity of building materials at the site of
Opovo was excavated in the latest building
horizon.
In addition, the weights of the bulk rubble
provided data for density maps, which show
the concentrations of the rubble that originally was part of the cultural layers but
could not be directly assigned to any particular structure in the excavation block. After
being spatially located as densities, the rubble could be compared and combined with
the location of actual house remains and
other structures in the excavation block. The
density maps were created for six excavation
layers out of which the latest period of the
settlement at Opovo shows the largest densities of rubble in two areas of the excavation
block. It also shows that the highest concentrations in this building horizon correspond
with the location of houses 1 and 2.
The rubble that was excavated, recorded,
and analyzed does not reflect the total quantities of construction materials employed in
house construction in Block 1 at Opovo.
Rather, it represents only one part of it, that
which was preserved. There are many factors that influence the quantity of rubble that
survives as archaeological record: The origi-
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FIG. 7. Total rubble weight in kilograms.
nal size and type of the building, the way
in which it collapsed, disturbances of the
rubble by later prehistoric activities at the
same place, and disturbances caused by
other postdepositional processes and recent
soil works. Much rubble was spread by
ploughing across the rest of Block 1. Even
the occurrence of a predominant rubble type
of a specific weight range — for example, vitrified rubble which is very light, can influence the total rubble weight of a house. Such
is the case of house 4, where large quantities
of rubble were vitrified. A large sample of
rubble from house 4 was recorded, but it
weighed little in comparison with houses 1
and 2 that did not have such quantities of
vitrified rubble.
The implications of rubble quantities and
densities at Opovo are many. First, it gives
an idea about the quantities of the materials,
their location in the excavated area, and their
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change through time, i.e., by the building
horizon. The top building horizon was the
only one that had two domestic structures.
This may mean that the largest house density in the village was reached during the
last building horizon. This would speak in
favor of a trend, which has been indicated
by other scholars of the Southeast European
Neolithic period, according to which there
was an intensification of production, including house production, which reached its
peak during the Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic period (Tringham and Krstić 1990a,
Kaiser and Voytek 1983). It has been proposed that the increased amount of house
construction material could in the Later
Neolithic indicate the change in house construction introduced with the use of larger
quantities of clay (Tringham and Stevanović
1990; Tringham and Krstić 1990b).
A second implication of the rubble quanti-
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ties is that it allows for the reconstruction of
the proportions of building materials, such
as wood and clay, that were employed for
each house. Both implications will be discussed later with the help of an idealized
model of the Opovo Neolithic house.
Building Materials in Opovo House
Construction: Experimental and
Analytical Studies
The experimental and analytical studies
were primarily undertaken to provide identification of the basic building materials that
were used by the Neolithic people. However, in addition to the basic materials, their
origins, and likely quantities, we are now
able to discuss the kinds of materials locally
available, the strategic choices that were
made by the Neolithic people in the materials for construction, as well as make a contribution to the reconstruction of the environment in which the Neolithic Opovo people
lived.
It was concluded, first of all, that there
were two classes of construction material
which we know for certain were used in the
wattle-and-daub building method at the site
of Opovo. Namely, these are Source materials
(clay and other rock and tree-wood and
reeds); Anthropogenic materials or fine plant
material used as temper (parts of wheat,
such as chaff, straw, grasses, and other plant
materials). Both groups can be further divided into inorganic and organic materials
(see Fig. 8).
Soil for building. The investigation for the
source materials at Opovo began with a
number of steps to identify the original construction clays. A series of physical, chemical and microscopic analyses in combination
with experimental studies were carried out
on the original Neolithic samples and on a
collection of the geological samples of clays
acquired from the vicinity of the Neolithic
settlement. The analysis of the construction
clays used for the Opovo houses was conducted in association with the analysis of the
same type of material from two other Vinča
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culture sites in the region, that of Gomolava
and Vinča-Belo Brdo (Fig. 3). For a detailed
account of the method and scientific analyses that were applied, see Stevanović (1996).4
A variety of tests, such as X-ray diffraction
and fluorescence analysis, enabled the identification and quantification of the clay minerals in the Neolithic unburned samples; the
samples that were burned at low temperatures, i.e., below 4007C; and the burned samples. Their complete mineral composition,
and especially clay mineral composition,
was determined. In conjunction with microscopic analysis it was possible to compare
the results of both groups of samples and
establish that the house construction was indeed performed with the use of two to three
types of soil and their mixtures, including
the surrounding subsoil, which was loess
soil, or a combination of loess subsoil with
marshy or river sediments. In the case of
final coating of internal walls or furniture,
the clays used were of better quality, i.e.,
with more clayey minerals, which originated
in special clay deposits. The fact that the
same types of soil were used as building
materials in all three analyzed Vinča culture
settlements implies that their selection was
either a matter of convenience or a matter
of cultural choice, which might have been a
‘‘convention’’ for the wider region of the
Vinča culture.
Considering the characteristics of the environment in which the Opovo settlement
was situated (Tringham et al. 1992), its inhabitants had access to a variety of soils, especially loess and marshland soils. The site
is located on a slight rise about 4 km from
the present banks of the Tamiš river. In prehistory it would have been surrounded by
waterlogged and marshy ground, full of old
meanders until the major drainage projects
4
These analyses were carried out in collaboration and
with the facilities of the Institute for Materials Testing,
in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and the Department of Soil Science and Geology, Agricultural University at Wageningen, Holland.
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FIG. 8. House building materials at Opovo.
of the 18th and 19th centuries (Fig. 4). The
pedological survey of the team directed by
L. van der Plas and L. Pons established that
a dead meander was immediately adjacent
to the Neolithic village at Opovo (Fig. 5).
When the quantities of clay needed for a
house and its weight are taken with consideration, the most likely solution for the Neolithic builders was to obtain as much construction soil as possible from the vicinity of
the building site. The analyses presented in
this investigation have shown that the majority of soil used in construction was loess
soil. The loess soil came from the loess plateau on which a large number of the Neolithic settlements of Southeast Europe including that at Opovo were located. This soil
is regarded highly suitable for purposes of
plastering and construction. It has been assumed since Paret (1942) that it was digging
for loess soil that cause the many pits found
on LBK settlements. It is thought that in particular the oblong pits beside the long walls
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of the LBK houses provided the loess for the
houses (Modderman 1973 among others).
Milisauskas (1972) and Modderman (1973)
made calculations about the quantities of
clays needed for a LBK house walls and the
likelihood that the pits procured the soil.
It is viable to propose that the pits at
Opovo that were situated around the houses
were the places of procurement of the substantial portion of construction clay. The
marshy soils, which contain plenty of organic materials that make them flexible and
easily workable were probably a very useful
ingredient in the mixture with the loess but
they had to be brought in from the vicinity
of the Neolithic settlement. However, the
problem of construction clay procurement
was more complex activity than the one that
has been described.
At any stratified Neolithic site in the region that was located on the loess plateau,
in the earliest building horizon the access to
the construction soil would have been im-
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SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF HOUSE DESTRUCTION
mediate. However, in the upper building horizons the access to this soil changes. Since
the later houses were erected on layers of
earlier houses they are located on ground
that is raised above the loess plateau and
they do not have an immediate contact with
loess soil. In addition, the burned houses of
the previous building horizons make digging to the loess sub soil more difficult. In
these conditions it is to be expected that the
loess clay procurement took place further
away from the bulding site. Thus, it is feasible to propose that access to building soil
could have been the cause for the horizontal
house displacement in non-tell settlements
of Southeast Europe.
Wood for building. In gathering the evidence on organic source materials, i.e., construction wood and reeds at Opovo, I had to
rely completely on the information obtained
from the house rubble, that is, either from
the wood and reed impressions in the rubble, or from their actual fragments that can
be observed rarely as unburned in the thin
sections. The analysis of construction wood
in all four houses at Opovo concentrated on
the variety of diameters that occur and on
their shape. The frequency of wood diameters is illustrated by the charts shown in Figs.
9 – 12. The wood diameters proved to be very
important evidence for the final reconstruction of the way the Opovo houses were destroyed. They show the following patterning:
i. The reeds and wood used in the construction of houses 1 through 4 ranged from
0.20 to 15 cm. The largest diameter materials
were used only in the construction of houses
1 and 2.
ii. The most common diameter of wood
used in houses 1, 2 and 4, however, is 1 cm.
For house 3 the most common diameter used
is 1.5 cm. The frequency distribution for
houses 1, 2, and 4 is nonnormal, though for
house 1 and 2, wood 5 cm in diameter was
commonly utilized. It is uncertain if the frequency distribution for house 3 conforms to
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a normal distribution or not. In the case of all
Opovo houses wood diameters larger than
7 or 8 cm occur only in small frequencies.
Diameters larger then 10 cm are especially
infrequent.
iii. The analysis of the wood diameters by
house sublayers also shows patterning. In
the case of all the houses, the most common
diameters may be observed in all the sublayers. Thus, in some sense they may be regarded as universal as building material for
all the Opovo houses. However, they do appear within the sublayers in different frequencies when the houses are compared. In
the case of house 1, diameters of 1 cm occur
in much smaller frequency on the bottom
layer, that is on the house floor, than in the
upper two sublayers. In the case of houses
2 and 3 this diameter is of almost equal frequency in all the sublayers. Contrary to the
three other houses in the case of house 4 this
diameter is dominant on the top and middle
sublayers, but entirely missing on the house
floor layer.
Considerable quantities of wood of a diameter of 1 cm on the house floor level in
all the houses except for house 4 may indicate that house roofs were covered with organic materials, such as water reeds and thin
wood branches (i.e., branches of 1 cm in diameter). House 4, however, was built with
two stories and in its case the second storey
would have prevented the roof materials
from falling down on the primary house
floor. In the case of all the houses except
house 3, undoubtedly the largest quantity of
construction wood was that whose diameter
was 1 cm or around it. Construction wood
of other diameters that occur in larger frequency is present in all the sublayers in
varying quantities.
The analysis of the wood impressions observed in the structural rubble allowed making a typology of construction wood at
Opovo. The diameters that range from 0 to
2 cm represent type 1, diameters from 2 to
5 cm are type 2, diameters from 5 to 10 cm
make type 3, and diameters from 10 cm and
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FIG. 9. House 1: Frequency of construction wood diameter at Opovo by sublayer.
above make type 4. The role of the typology
is primarily to indicate the size and possibly
the tree-part that it comes from, such as a
twig, a branch, or a trunk. Thus, type 1 is
interpreted in this study as impressions of
the water reeds and twigs that were used
for wattling; type 2 represents the middlesize branches; type 3 represents secondary
posts; and type 4 primary posts.
The wood-type frequency by house (Fig.
13) shows that all Opovo houses except
house 3 contain all four wood-types. Type 1
is the most frequent in all houses but house
2 where it is second to type 2. Types 2, 3,
and 4 are present in progressively lesser
amounts in all the houses. Thus, wood-type
4, which would be the primary posts is present in the least amounts.
It has been proposed that a mosaic type
of vegetation with heavy forest along the
rivers, open forest and forest-steppe in most
areas, meadow-steppe on the saline soils,
and marshes scattered throughout existed in
the vicinity of the Opovo Neolithic village
(Russell 1993). The building materials that
were used in the Opovo architecture judging
FIG. 10. House 2: Frequency of construction wood diameter at Opovo by sublayer.
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FIG. 11. House 3: Frequency of construction wood diameter at Opovo by sublayer.
by the tree-diameters and tree and reed impressions do reflect, to some extent, such a
mixed vegetation cover. In the analysis presented, the diameters show the presence of
wood that ranges in size from thin branches
to secondary branches and primary tree
parts, all of which could have been found in
the forests. Most of the impressions show
the use of round poles but there are also
traces of split timber (thick tree trunks that
had been made into posts with a semicircular cross-section), posts with a triangular
cross-section and even planks. The water
reeds and grasses that were used in large
quantities for construction at Opovo could
have been obtained in the local marshes.
Even though it is impossible to identify
the tree species of the construction wood
based on the timber impressions in the
daub, it is possible to propose based on the
environmental reconstruction of the area,
that several indigenous trees might have
been used. According to several accounts
(Pounds 1961; Šercelj 1967), the Neolithic
farmers would have found the region of the
Balkans to be almost entirely forested, in
FIG. 12. House 4: Frequency of construction wood diameter at Opovo by sublayer.
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FIG. 13. House 1 – 4: Frequency of construction wood-types.
some places more densely than in others. In
most places oak would have been the dominant tree. Thus, at Opovo, if the indigenous
trees were used as the major construction
timber, it is feasible to expect that oak would
have been the choice.
There are several reasons why oak would
have been suitable wood for construction in
comparison with other tree species that are
likely to have existed in the region. First of
all oak grows to an adequate size to produce
primary and secondary house posts. Second,
it is a more durable wood than other trees
which are likely to have existed around the
Opovo settlement, such as elm, pine, maple,
birch, alder, lime, poplar, and willow (see
Bakels 1978, Table 6). And what is equally
important, oak is very resistant to insects.
Actually, according to Bakels there are almost no insects that attack this timber.
Anthropogenic materials. The Opovo evidence on anthropogenic materials comes
from: (i) The once fresh plant remains that
comprised the organic temper inside the
burned rubble, that have since been completely oxidized and decayed, but were preserved in the burned rubble as hollows
known as pseudomorphic vegetal voids.
The majority of house rubble from Opovo
shows the presence of numerous voids in
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the shape of chaff, straw and other grasses
that were completely oxidized in the house
fire; sometimes the voids of complete wheat
seeds are present. (ii) The actual fragments
of organic materials that were preserved in
the structural materials in silicified form.
Most of these at Opovo seem to be the parts
of wheat that were preserved because of the
high silica content of wheat.
Occasionally there are examples of actual
fragments of the organic materials preserved within the construction materials in
a noncarbonized state and nonsilicified
state, such as grains, charcoal, tree bark,
and others. However, these are not clearly
tempering materials in the structural clays,
but may be the remains of organic materials
used for other purposes, such as wood for
fuel. Examples of such remains were found
at Opovo buried or trapped inside ash deposits, such as indoor oven floors or in ash
depositories next to ovens. In the Opovo
thin sections from the oven floor were identified fragments of charcoal that belonged
to a pine tree and the fragments of unidentified tree bark, which may also belong to a
pine tree.
These building materials are treated as a
special group because they are indicative of
the choices that the Neolithic people had
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SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF HOUSE DESTRUCTION
made as a part of their building strategy. In
this group are included plant materials that
were obtained from the environment, such
as marshy soils with grasses, which might
have been either an accidental or deliberate
addition to the building clay, and the plant
materials that were tended and produced by
humans, such as wheat. These latter materials comprise different wheat parts, such as
chaff, straw, and occasionally whole grains.
The presence of wheat parts in the house
construction material could potentially prove
to be very significant. Wheat domestication
and production had a primary purpose of
providing subsistence for the Neolithic people, a role which seems to be conceptually
distant from that of house construction. At
the same time, the evidence shows that the
wheat parts which were not consumed by
the humans or domesticated animals, such as
chaff and straw, were secondarily used as
tempering material in house building. It has
been suggested in ethnohistorical and engineering sources that chopped straw, grass or
other vegetable materials were often added
to clay daub to help bind it, to assist in the
drying process, and to distribute the shrinkage cracking. The reasons for the choice of
materials is not discussed in these sources. In
archaeology of Southeast Europe it has been
assumed traditionally that the secondary use
of the wheat parts was to aid construction
clay or that it was accidental. It has been suggested, for example by Rye (1981) that these
materials (straw, stems from crop plants)
may be agricultural waste which was included as such.
In my view, the implications of the secondary use of the precious subsistence product, such as wheat in house construction
during the Neolithic deserves attention since
it might be of a nonaccidental and nonutilitarian nature but expressive of the close connection and interdependency between agriculture and a domestic way of life.
In the cultural layers at Opovo botanical
remains were fairly scarce. Based on the
botanical, topographic, and morphological
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analyses, it was concluded that at Opovo
the heavy soils and swampy environment
would not have been very conductive to
Neolithic agriculture, although the region is
the bread basket of Yugoslavia today. Nevertheless, it is clear from impressions in the
house rubble that einkorn and emmer wheat
were cultivated by the Opovo people at least
in small quantities (Tringham et al., 1985,
1992). However, when one considers the
quantities of wheat parts that are observed
as temper in the construction clay at Opovo
the size of crop that was needed to produce
it seems to have been quite substantial. It is
impossible, at this stage, to suggest the exact
quantities of chaff and straw embedded in
the rubble. It has been suggested in the literature that a necessary volume of organic
tempering materials in the construction clay
mixed for mud brick should range from 20 –
30% of the tempering materials to 70 – 80%
of construction clay volume.
At Opovo, the overall impression is that
the quantities of wheat parts used for temper were considerable. At the same time, this
impression is not supported by the existing
evidence on suitability of the area for Neolithic agriculture. Many puzzling questions
stem from these circumstances, such as what
was a necessary amount of chaff for one
house construction, and was this amount
collected from one annual crop or from several crops; how many fields were involved
in it; was collecting carried out over a number of years, in which case the question is
how was it stored or was it collected in one
season; was, along these same lines, house
construction a seasonal activity that took
place after harvesting? We have no idea how
much chaff and straw were produced yearly
but we do not consider them as raw materials available in large quantities. The research
on the quantities of the wheat parts as temper in the construction clay, therefore, has a
potential to confirm or alter this idea.
Bakels (1978) talks about different parts of
plants that were collected for the purpose of
house construction on the basis of void
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MIRJANA STEVANOVIĆ
shape in the tempered building clay that she
finds in the LBK settlements of North and
Central Europe. Bakels claims that the plant
remains found in the daub are seldom
longer than 1 cm and they are remains of
graminae: stems, leaves, and chaff, including
chaff remains of emmer and einkorn, that
the evidence in the rubble as a whole is
highly suggestive of chopped straw. She
adds that in some cases it is clear that loess
was tempered with chaff only; that the chaff
and the straw must have been gathered
especially for this purpose. In addition,
the fact that the weed species found in the
settlements belong exclusively to tall or
climbing plant species is considered evidence that the inhabitants of the LBK settlements would have harvested only the ears
of wheat. Low plants are rare in the impressions, which would mean that the stalks
were cut or picked just below the ear and
not just above the ground (Bakels 1978).
It should be added here that the fine plant
materials were used in house construction
also for tying the construction timber, i.e., at
the joints and for tying the roof parts including roof thatching. One can imagine the use
of a variety of fibers for such purposes. At
Opovo we have found some evidence of this
kind in a fragment of rope and fragment of
textile, both made of flax fiber. In the Atlantic vegetation in Central and Western Europe bast fibers are the most general natural
source of rope (Bakels 1978). Lime- and yewbast in particular were used for binding.
Willow- and elm-bast would have been also
suitable. The latter was used up to historic
times successfully in the experimental construction of a Neolithic house in Denmark
(Hansen 1961).
I conclude this section by pointing out
that, even though the presented discussion
reveals that we have some control over the
plant materials used in house construction
during the Neolithic, it does not offer evidence on the roof construction and its materials. The remains of the roof frame and of
roofing materials have not been found at any
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Neolithic settlement in Southeast Europe so
far. For this reason an assumption exists that
the roofing was made of perishable organic
materials. The roofs for the houses in the
Neolithic of Southeast Europe have usually
been reconstructed on the basis of the house
models and the ethnograpic analogy of the
area. Some house models, such as from Strelice, Moravia, and Branc, Slovakia, have elements that are considered to be the representations of roof rafters (Modderman 1973).
Modderman claims that such roof construction would have used animal skins as
roofing material. Other authors oppose this
suggestion. Startin (1978) states that skin
was not suitable for roofing because of its
poor insulation properties and the necessity
of regular greasing if it is to be long-lasting
and waterproof. The majority of authors
agree that other materials, such as plants,
were the most likely choice for roofing.
Tree bark has been suggested as the most
likely material used for the house roofs in
LBK settlements (see Bakels 1978). In historic
times only birch-bark is known to be used
for roofing in Europe in combination with
wood and sod. It is suspected that the birch
trees were not very common in North Europe during the Neolithic because of their
need for space and light which were not
available in dense forests at the time. Therefore, it is not likely, according to Bakels, that
this bark was used then. But some other
barks could have been used, such as limebark and elm-bark which were used frequently in North America.
Many authors suggest the use of reeds for
roofing during the Neolithic. The reed plant
is a cosmopolitan plant which occurs in a
large number of habitats, all of which are
humid to wet; the water table must lie at
least just under the surface. Some Neolithic
landscapes, such as North European are believed to have been too dry to be suitable
for reed growth. At Opovo, on the other
hand, the environmental conditions seem to
have been ideal for reed growth. Therefore,
it is very likely that reeds, which were inten-
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SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF HOUSE DESTRUCTION
sively used in house-wall construction, were
also used for house roofs. In this case the
roofs were probably made with some sort of
thatching method. Modderman claims that
there is evidence for thatched roofs in the
Neolithic house models from Southeast Europe (see Theocharis 1973: Figs. 8 – 11, pp.
253 – 256).
Elements of House Construction
at Opovo
Some elements of house construction are
directly related to calculating the quantities
of materials used in house construction and
to the reconstruction of the process of house
destruction in the Neolithic of Southeast Europe. These include the quantities and types
of wood and the thickness of the house claycover, that is the rubble thickness. In Table
1 it can be observed that the wall-rubble
shows a large range of thickness at Opovo.
The full range is between 1 and 20 cm but the
majority of rubble thickness falls between
3 and 10 cm. If the wall thickness ranged
between 3 and 10 cm it would imply that a
very large quantity of clay was used in
house construction. In order to calculate the
amount of clay used for house construction
at Opovo I had to use an idealized model of
a Neolithic house.
The idealized house model (Fig. 14) is
largely based on evidence from the Opovo
houses, such as house size, constructionwood size, and clay thickness used for the
walls. The model is only partially based on
informed assumptions, such as house height
and house roof. Since in the Neolithic architectural record the full height of the walls is
never preserved intact, we are forced to
make an approximation of it. The ethnohistorical record shows that in a similar environmental and cultural context the height of domestic structures ranges from 1.5 to 2.0 m.
For the idealized Opovo house model, the
height of 1.8 m has been applied. On the
basis of this idealized Opovo house I was
able to calculate the proportion between the
construction wood and construction clay
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TABLE 1
Median and Mode Values for Wall Thickness
Value
Frequency
.00
659
1.00
2
2.00
15
3.00
95
4.00
153
5.00
195
6.00
177
7.00
186
8.00
124
9.00
77
10.00
112
11.00
47
12.00
32
13.00
13
14.00
11
15.00
8
16.00
2
17.00
2
18.00
6
20.00
2
23.00
1
40.00
1
42.00
1
Total 1921
100.0
Median
5.000
Mode .000
Valid cases
1921
Missing cases 0
Percent Percent
Percent (valid) (cum)
34.3
.1
.8
4.9
8.0
10.2
9.2
9.7
6.5
4.0
5.8
2.4
1.7
.7
.6
.4
.1
.1
.3
.1
.1
.1
.1
100.0
34.3
.1
.8
4.9
8.0
10.2
9.2
9.7
6.5
4.0
5.8
2.4
1.7
.7
.6
.4
.1
.1
.3
.1
.1
.1
.1
34.3
34.4
35.2
40.1
48.1
58.3
67.5
77.1
83.6
87.6
93.4
95.9
97.6
98.2
98.8
99.2
99.3
99.4
99.7
99.8
99.9
99.9
100.0
used in the Opovo buildings. The roof structure even though a part of the idealized
house model has not been included in the
material calculations. The reason for this is
that we have no primary archaeological evidence for roof structure, nor its size nor the
materials that were used in its construction.
The measurements of the model are presented in Table 2.
The idealized house model was used for
estimating the quantities of the materials in
the house construction and especially for estimating the proportions between the construction clay and wood volumes. The relationship between clay weight and volume
was calculated according to engineering
principles (Ramsey and Sleeper 1981). The
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FIG. 14. Idealized Neolithic house model.
idealized house model indicates that the
proportion should be around 10% of construction-wood volume versus 90% construction-clay volume. When this ratio was
TABLE 2
Measurements of the House Model
House Size: 4 1 8 m
(32 m2)
Area gross:
25 m2
Area net:
3.4 1 4.7 m
Wall length: 2 times
Wall volume: 13 m2
24 m length
0.3 m thickness
1.8 m H
Wood volume
Walls:
4m18m
Total of 24 m
f15 – 20 cm
f4 – 10 cm
f1 – 3 cm
Total wood volume
Clay volume — Walls
Wood to clay
volume 1:12
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0.01% – 0.12 m3
0.038% – 0.45 m3
0.08% – 0.95 m3
12.00 m3
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compared with the actual Opovo house ratio
of wood and clay volumes that were inferred
from the house rubble analysis, it gave very
similar results. In the Opovo houses the ratio
was 10 – 15% of construction-wood volume
to 85 – 90% of construction-clay volume. Table 3 summarizes the types and quantities
of materials used in the Opovo house construction.
House Destruction
Since house burning in Southeast European prehistory has traditionally not been a
subject of investigation, the explanation of
this practice either has not been sought or
has been generalized on the basis of popular
constructions. These explanations take two
paths. One of these assigns the practice to
the general intensification of production and
population increase which results in overcrowding in the Neolithic villages. Typically
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TABLE 3
Building Materials and Their Quantities
Building horizon
House length in meters
House width in meters
House surface in m2
House orientation
Recorded house loci
Total rubble weight in kg.
Volume of construction clay in m3
Volume of construction wood in m3
Wood and clay ratio
Volume of anthropogenic materials
House 1
House 2
House 3
House 4
1
8
5.5
40
NE/SW
100
1078
1.1
0.18
10 – 15% (wood) vs
85 – 90% (clay)
20%
1
6
6.5
36
NE/SW
65
707
0.7
0.093
n/a
2
7
4
24
NE/SW
13
57
0.057
0.0097
n/a
3
6.5
5.5
27
NE/SW
22
188
0.188
0.015
n/a
20%
20%
20%
they have suggested that the increased use
of fire within houses or the denser crowding
of houses within the village creates the conditions for occurrence of accidental fires. The
other path seeks the explanation within social dynamics that led to intersettlement
competition, unrest, raiding, and even invasion. Other explanations, which are sporadic
and do not seem to have as much persuasive
power on the archaeological community,
have suggested the deliberate setting of a
fire in a house in order to strengthen construction clay and make it water resistant
(Kricevskij 1940; Semenov 1968), or firing of
an old house in order to preserve its clay
materials for later reuse (Shaffer 1984, 1993).
In the Opovo Archaeological Project we
proposed that the Vinča culture houses: (1)
were burned individually and not collectively; (2) were burned not in the middle of
their use-lives but at the end of their uselives (Tringham 1994, 1995). As has been
suggested by Tringham there is a strong case
to be made against the collective burning of
the houses at the Vinča culture sites (1990b).
The evidence shows that the house remains
of each building horizon are confined to the
immediate area of the house. That is to say,
the cultural layers between two burned and
collapsed houses are free from the burned
remains. The reasoning here is, that if the
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houses had caught fire collectively, the soil
in between would be burned to some extent
and would be rich in rubble remains from
the collapsed houses themselves. The fact is
that while the construction clays were very
obviously fired to achieve the state of the
brick-like material, the surrounding soil was
not. There are traces of very crumbled rubble usually found around the burned house
but nothing that would approximate the
level of house firing. Thus, this evidence is
understood as an indication of individual
rather than collective burning of houses.
In order to support the proposition that
house-fire was of deliberate nature and that
it took place at the end of house use-life, I
examined the following aspects of burned
houses:
1. The houses were consumed in fire completely.
2. The temperatures from burning form
clusters, which could be observed in all four
houses at Opovo.
3. The house construction elements do
not provide enough fuel for a successful
house fire.
4. There are obvious fire-ignition points
within the houses, which are indicative of
how the fire started.
5. The fire path or the spatial direction of
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fire within the houses shows a patterning
indicative of deliberate fire.
The completeness of the house fire. At Opovo,
as well as in most other Neolithic sites in
the region, the entire houses were burned
to the point that organic materials, such as
construction wood and temper materials in
the clay, were thoroughly consumed in fire.
Consequently, the clay cover of the house
was burned and transformed to a brick-like
material. Moreover, construction clay often
shows traces of sintering or that it was reduced to a glassy, bubbly amorphous structure through the process of vitrification. The
burning did not only affect the house but all
the internal mobile and immobile features
and artifacts, which as a result, lost all their
utilitarian purpose in the fire. A typical occurrence at the Neolithic sites in Southeast
Europe is a burned and collapsed house
with everything inside destroyed, for example, cooking ovens, grinding receptacles,
large number of ceramic vessels, stone tools,
bone tools, figurines, and other objects.
There was most likely a large number of
other artifacts made of more perishable materials, such as wood receptacles, baskets,
furs, feathers, and textiles, as well as, remains of stored foods, possible stored seeds,
and stored fuel materials, which by their nature got entirely consumed by fire and
whose remains we find extremely rarely preserved.
In the light of the evidence on completeness of the house fire, suggestions proposed
by Semenov (Semenov 1964, 1968) that Neolithic houses were burned for technological
reasons or as suggested by some for the reasons of fumigation seem untenable. In other
words, since the houses were burned to the
point of being destroyed with all their inventory they could not have been burned for
technological or structural reasons. Also, the
proposition that house burning was carried
out in order to recycle the building materials, suggested by Shaffer (1984) for the Neolithic of Southern Italy, could be rejected on
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this basis. Namely, it is hard to justify burning down a house with its complete inventory in order to acquire the clay from the
old house walls as building material for a
new house. This hypothesis seems not to
hold especially if construction clay is not a
material in shortage, as was the case in the
Neolithic sites of Southeast Europe that were
located on the loess plateau.
The temperatures of burning. The temperature of burning is potentially indicative of
the nature of fire, its ignition, type of fuel,
fire intensity, and fire path. These elements,
in return, could be decisive in determination
of the causes of fire. Keeping this in mind
in all the phases of research on architecture
at Opovo, we tried to acquire data which
could later be used for determination of temperatures of firing.
Virtually all fires ignite because there is
some local high temperature in a region in
which an appropriate fuel – air mixture occurs (Kirk 1969). That is, at a large or very
small point in space a temperature in excess
of the ignition temperature has occurred in
the presence of appropriate fuel and air (or
oxygen). These circumstances constitute a
minimum requirement for any fire to result.
A variety of minimum temperatures for ignition have been reported, and they range
from 190 – 5557C (McNaughton 1944). The
ignition temperatures for most fires are generally so high as to rule out spontaneous
combustion except for a very small category
of materials (see Browne 1929; Hoffman
1940). Also, frequently, no source of relatively high temperatures appears to be present and the origins of the fire seem to be
very mysterious, as is known from arson investigation.5 According to the arson investi5
Since fire losses are one of the most common causes
of civil litigation and one of the most difficult areas
in which to reach firm conclusions (Kirk 1969), some
criminologists specialize in analyzing fire. Their primary interest is in discovering if a fire was deliberately
or accidentally set. It is believed that one half of the
destructive fires in the United States currently are deliberately set by the arsonists. Therefore, in order to prove
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SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF HOUSE DESTRUCTION
gations, it is the point and source of ignition
that are the keys to be determined by the
investigator if an origin of fire is to be discovered.
A major factor in the process of firing is
not only the ignition itself but the next stage,
that is, the temperature at which the fuel
material becomes exothermic and therefore,
self-sustaining. This temperature appears to
be about 270 to 2807C (Kirk 1969). Therefore,
to trace the behaviour of a small flame as it
grows into a large fire is of greatest importance. At the same time, fire is chiefly determined by the availability of the combustible
materials. In the case of the Neolithic house
burning, in my view, it is the origin and the
sustainability of fire that are equally important for explanation of fire causes.
The process of firing clays transforms the
basic clay composition partially or completely depending on the intensity of temperature. It is now known at what temperature intensities certain clay minerals decompose and the same is valid for the nonclay
minerals that are likely to be present in the
soils. All these alterations usually cause
changes in color in the fired clays but the
reactions between iron, calcium, and silica
are responsible for major sequences of
changes in colour that are correlated with
temperature and atmosphere (Matson 1971).
One of the ways, therefore, to reconstruct
the temperatures at which construction clays
were fired would be to investigate the
change of their mineralogical and micromorphological composition, and/or to investigate the change in color that the clays
undergo.
However, in many instances to establish
the clay color change or change in their mineralogical composition is not sufficient. The
minerals in the soils are transformed in fire
and are likely to go through the chemical
reactions that form new minerals out of the
old ones, as will be indicated later. Often it
such crimes, the arson investigators use many scientific
methods to analyze and understand fire.
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is not possible to establish if these minerals
are primary or secondarily formed clay minerals. Therefore, a basic precondition for
conducting the research on the change of
clays when fired is to know the composition
of the original clay in order to be able to
follow the transformations of the minerals
that fire incurs. When this essential precondition, the composition of the clays cannot
be satisfied, an experiment is necessary to
help in making the link between the burned
and the unburned clays.
Experimentation in rubble firing temperatures. It has been mentioned that at the
Opovo site house rubble fragments were
carefully recorded for many technological
attributes including their color. The colors
were assigned to the fragments based on the
Munsell Soil Color Chart. The charts in Figs.
15 – 18 show the frequency of color occurrence in the cases of four Vinča culture
houses at Opovo. However, since the rubble
colors of the Opovo houses by themselves
were not sufficient to show the temperatures
of firing that the houses underwent, my investigation turned to an experimental study,
which was focused on transferring the rubble colors into adequate temperatures of
burning (for detailed account see Stevanović
1996). This procedure required making the
comparison between the original rubble
samples and experimental ones. The experiment comprised the collection of the local
soils found in the vicinity of the Neolithic
settlement; making the rubble-simulations
using these soils; and mixing them with adequate temper materials into rubble-tablets,
which were then fired under controlled conditions, at a series of different temperatures
ranging from 50 – 11007C.
The experimental rubble, which was acquired in this way, was compared with the
original rubble samples through comparison
of their thin sections. Only as a result of this
process was I able to assign certain rubble
colors to certain temperatures of burning.
Table 4 shows the correspondence between
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FIG. 15. House 1: Rubble color frequency.
Munsell colors and temperatures of firing
that were established by experiment.
The process of firing causes first the lowtemperature decomposition that takes place at
temperatures up to 3507C. Any organic material present in clays naturally or added as temper begins to decompose around 2007C. When
the temperature reaches 5007C carbon at the
surface burns and clay color turns reddish.
At temperatures of 500–6007C the structural
clays obtain the porosity and the color of the
brick-like material that makes them durable.
Under suitable oxidizing conditions all carbon
will be removed by about 9007C except graphite which can resist oxidation up to 12007C.
Up to 7507C clays that contain CaCO3 remain
relatively inert. When heated above 7507C calcium carbonate begins to decompose. With
still further temperature increase, and especially in a reducing atmosphere, the calcium
can combine with sodium and other fluxes
and silica to form glass. Vitrification is a process by which glass is formed in clay bodies.
It can begin at about 7007C, but generally does
not become extensive below 900–9507C.
The rubble-colors at Opovo were, with the
FIG. 16. House 2: Rubble color frequency.
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FIG. 17. House 3: Rubble color frequency.
help of the experiment, interpreted as specific temperature intensities (see Table 4).
The temperature frequency charts (Fig. 19 –
26) show the frequencies of temperature occurrence in the case of four Opovo houses.
It could be deduced from the charts that
a variety of temperatures that range between
400 and 12007C occurred during the firing
of the Neolithic houses at Opovo. However,
certain patterning of the temperatures can
be observed. First, in the case of all Opovo
houses the highest temperatures (1000 –
12007C) are present in the smallest number
of cases, except for house 4, which most
likely shows a different pattern because of
specific conditions of burning since it was a
two-story structure. The real sharp break in
temperature can be observed at 700 – 8007C
in the case of all houses. The 500 – 6007C temperatures occur in roughly the same quantities in all the houses.
The general impression is that large quantities of the construction materials in the
Opovo houses were fired at relatively high
temperatures, that is, at the range between
500 and 8007C. If we compare the tempera-
FIG. 18. House 4: Rubble color frequency.
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TABLE 4
Rubble Colors by Munsell Soil Color Chart and Corresponding Temperatures
Temperature
2,5Y
2,5Yr
5Yr
7,5Yr
Below 4007C
2/3, 4/1, 4/3
4007C
4/2, 4/4, 4/6,
5/3, 5/4,
6/4
5/6, 5/8
5007C
6007C
7007C
3/4, 3/6, 4/4,
4/6
4/8
5/6, 5/8, 6/8
6/6, 6/8, 7/8
78/4, 7/6
8007C
5/4, 6/4, 6/6
6/6, 6/8
9007C
10007C
Over 10007C
5/4, 5/6
4/3, 4/4
2.5/1, 3/1
3/2,
3/3
10R
2/5, 3/1, 3/2,
4/1, 4/2,
4/4, 5/2, 5/4,
5/6, 6/4
2/1, 2/2, 3/1,
3/2, 3/3
5/4, 5/6, 5/8,
6/4
5/8, 6/6, 6/8
4/6, 4/8, 5/6,
5/8
3/6, 4/4, 5/4,
6/6, 6/8
7/2
house 4. This result is also to be expected
since the high temperatures require unusual
circumstances, such as very high quantities
of fuel.
If the same temperature range is analyzed
by the house sub-layers (see Figs. 23 – 26) another type of cluster can be observed. It
shows an obvious tendency of higher temperatures to be located closer to or on the
FIG. 19. House 1: Rubble temperature frequency.
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7/6, 7/8
8/4, 8/6, 8/8
7/1, 8/1
5/1, 6/1
6/1
5/6
tures of house burning with the temperatures of pottery production in the same
Vinča culture, which range from 850 to
9507C (Kaiser 1984; Kaiser et al. 1986) we
can conclude that the temperatures of house
burning were high indeed. The very high
temperatures of rubble burning, those above
8007C at which clays sinter and vitrify, occur
in dramatically smaller numbers, except for
10Yr
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FIG. 20. House 2: Rubble temperature frequency.
bottom sublayer, while the lower temperatures are predominant in the upper sublayers of the collapsed rubble.
In the Opovo houses we can see that the
highest temperatures, i.e., the vitrification
spots, occur in the largest numbers on the
bottom sublayer, that is on the house floor.
This was the case in all four houses. These
charts also show that the lowest levels comprise more high temperatures, whereas the
upper layers comprise the lower temperatures. This situation implies that the hottest
fire occurred on the house floor level, and
not on the roof level, for instance.
The house construction elements as fuel for
house fire. The volume of house burning at
Opovo, which is the same as at other Vinča
culture sites, and the intensity of fire that
Neolithic evidence shows bring in the question of what type and quantity of fuel was
used to achieve such results. This problem
becomes especially interesting when one
considers the ethnographic (Gordon 1953;
Vitruvius) and experimental sources (Hansen 1961; Shaffer 1993; Bankoff and Winter
1979) on the subject. These sources point out
the great difficulty that one can have in trying to burn down a wattle-and-daub or a
FIG. 21. House 3: Rubble temperature frequency.
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FIG. 22. House 4: Rubble temperature frequency.
mud-brick building. For this reason the
likely volumes of construction materials,
chiefly wood and clay, that were used for
the Opovo houses are important.
The implications of the ratio between clay
and wood volumes, 10 – 15% of wood to 85 –
90% of clay (indicated in Table 2), are that
the amount of wood was substantially
smaller in comparison to the amount of clay.
I would take this implication even further
and propose that the volume of construction
wood was not large enough to serve as sufficient fuel to bake the construction clay to
the extent to which we find it baked in the
archaeological record.
The analysis of the wood types retained
as impressions in the rubble at Opovo shows
the presence of 43% of type 1 wood, 37% of
type 2, 18% of type 3, and only around 2%
of type 4 wood (Fig. 27). This indicates that
the predominant type of wood in house construction was the thin wood, that up to 2 cm
in diameter.
One more aspect of construction wood as
potential fuel material in house fire is the
wood flammability. Wood flammability
FIG. 23. House 1: Temperature frequency by rubble sublayer.
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FIG. 24. House 2: Temperature frequency by rubble sublayer.
largely depends on its specific gravity. That
is, the wood of low specific gravity, such as
reeds, twigs, and thin branches is considered
more flammable, whereas the wood of high
specific gravity, such as primary branches
and tree trunks, is less flammable. On the
other hand, wood of low specific gravity
even though easy to ignite gives off less energy and is likely to be consumed in fire in
shorter time than the wood of lower level
flammability. According to Kirk (1969),
hardwoods, i.e., oak, are difficult to ignite
but are capable of generating much heat and
extended combustion when burning. Thus
they present a lessened fire hazard as compared to the more combustible softwoods
but create a hotter and more protracted fire.
In the Opovo houses the wood of high
flammability is present in considerably
larger quantities than the wood of low
flammability. The implication of such wood
volumes and types is that the Opovo houses
contained construction wood of flammability that could easily start the fire but not
provide enough energy to sustain the fire
for a long time. For instance, the oven exper-
FIG. 25. House 3: Temperature frequency by rubble sublayer.
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FIG. 26. House 4: Temperature frequency by rubble sublayer.
iment with a newly made and unused oven
of the type known from the Neolithic
showed that after it was fired for 6 days it
needed 10 – 12 h and 2 – 2.5 tons (2T Å 2.5
m3) of wood fuel to reach a temperature of
10007C. Thus, the energy of fuel for burning
a wattle-and-daub house to the temperatures of 5007C and up to 10007C had to be
substantial.
Another important element of wood py-
rolysis is that wood, especially in massive
form, requires a considerable amount of heat
to cause its ignition. This is completed at
about 5007C, at which point wood is completely consumed by fire and only wood
charcoal remains (Browning 1963). Even
though this charcoal could be further heated
and it can release more energy the point is
that additional fuel is necessary to carry this
process through. Therefore, if we know that
FIG. 27. House 1 – 4: Wood-type ratio.
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the construction wood in the Neolithic
houses would be completely gone by 5007C
but the level of temperatures of the house
rubble at Opovo exceeded 5007C and actually goes up to 12007C, we must propose that
the quantities of wood needed as fuel must
have been larger then the wood incorporated in the house construction. Consequently, in order to burn down the houses
at Opovo the Neolithic people needed an
additional source of fuel to that provided by
the wood used in house construction.
The ignition points. In the investigation of
causes and mechanisms of fire one of the
major indicators is the ignition point of fire.
According to the arson investigations, any
low point in a burn pattern should be investigated as a possible origin. Mainly, the
points of the highest temperature found at
the lowest level within a house are most
likely the ignition points of a particular
house fire (Kirk 1969). The reason for good
preservation of the ignition is often that
when a superstructure collapses in fire it
generally preserves the point of fire origin
underneath it excellently. The reason for the
ignition point to show high temperature of
burning is that because the point of origin
is likely to burn longer than the fire that
develops from it, more time is allowed for it
to produce an impressive degree of burning.
Especially important for our investigation is,
that when the fire is aided by the presence
of accelerants or kindling materials of any
kind, an unusually intense fire may result at
the point of origin. Therefore, the lowest
point of burn must always be inspected with
the greatest care. This is especially true if
one is to determine the immediate cause as
well as intention behind deliberate or accidental fire (Kirk 1969).
In the process of house rubble mapping
and recording at Opovo special attention
was dedicated to the locations of vitrified
rubble. The initial observation of the rubble
in a house usually indicated the presence
of several vitrification zones within each
house. However, since there were several
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sublayers of rubble in each house it was difficult to talk with any certainty about the
locations of vitrification zones before a
house was completely removed and rubble
recorded, and all the analyses were finished.
Within the Opovo houses a number of vitrification points, or the hottest spots of fire
in all the sublayers were discovered. Figure
28 shows the frequencies of the vitrification
rubble within each Opovo house. This chart
shows that, indeed, in the case of all Opovo
houses but house 4, most vitrification points,
which are considered to be the ignition
points of fire, occurred on the bottom
sublayer. Thus, once more we can conclude
that in the Opovo houses the fire is more
likely to have started on the floor level then
on the roof level.
The fire path. It is known from arson investigation, and it has been mentioned above, that
the spatial distribution of ignition point/(s)
and temperatures is an important aspect of
fire to consider in a search of the fire causes.
In tracing the fire pattern there are a number
of important aspects, such as that low burns
should be systematically sought while upper
portions of the fire may be disregarded; each
of the burns should be analyzed as to the
spread of fire away from it. This could be accomplished by noting the direction of predominant fire as shown by depth of burn.
One of the guidelines in the research presented in this thesis has been to follow the
spatial clusters of vitrification and high temperatures within each Opovo house. It has
been considered that these elements could
provide the fire path within each house. The
maps of the Opovo houses are presented in
Figs. 29 – 32 and they illustrate the temperature distribution. The house maps show the
following regularities in their distribution:
i. The lower- and middle-range temperatures (4007C/5007C/6007C) are fairly well
spread within the house.
ii. The temperatures around 700 and
8007C are present in larger amounts but in
a more restricted area. This is valid for all
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FIG. 28. House 1 – 4: Frequency of vitrification.
houses except for house 4 (Fig. 32) in which
a fairly large portion of the house interior
was covered with clays burned at high temperatures. House 4 is the only two-story
house unearthed at Opovo and the pattern
of fire in it is bound to be somewhat different from the other houses. The conditions of
burning and the amount of fuel provided by
the second story structure are larger than
they are in one story houses;
iii. Finally, the very high temperatures,
those around 10007C and above, occur in
much smaller quantities and in very restricted areas. Again the exception to this
was house 4. The location of the vitrification
points within the house sublayers shows in
the case of the Opovo house 1. There are six
vitrification points at the bottom sublayer,
four at the middle sublayer, and three in
the top sublayer (see Fig. 29). In house 2,
sublayers three, two, and one contained six,
four, and three vitrification points, respectively (see Fig. 30). House 3 sublayers three,
two, and one contained two, one, and also
one vitrification point, respectively (see Fig.
31). Finally, the sublayers in house 4 continued five, four, and three vitrification points
(see Fig. 32).
Both the frequency of vitrification by
sublayers and the distribution of these
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points within houses, as well as the distribution of the temperature intensities away
from them shows that we can, indeed, talk
about a fire path in the case of the Opovo
houses. First, the depth of burns indicates
that the ignition points were on the house
floor as represented by the vitrification
points. The vitrification did continue to occur in the upper sublayers of the house collapsed superstructure but in smaller numbers. When examined spatially these vitrification points are connected, i.e., the top
points most likely represent the continuation of the bottom points of ignition and in
that sense they indicate a fire path. Second,
the fire path maps show that the highest
temperatures were located in the immediate
vicinity of the vitrification/ignition points.
Only farther away from these points the
temperature intensity dropped down to
500/6007C.
The Neolithic fire scenario. By following the
sequence of examination that was suggested
by the arson investigations, and thus, determining the origin of the fire in the space,
its causative agent, i.e., the nature of the initial fuel and the nature of the ignition, we
should be able to get an informed idea about
the nature of the fire and if it was intentionally or accidentally set. The fire begins with
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FIG. 29. House 1: The fire path. j, sublayer 1; m, sublayer 2; l, sublayer 3;
ignition. In my investigation I proposed that
a point of vitrification that occurs on the
lowest level within a house and exhibits considerable thickness, i.e., continues upward
in the next sublayer, is to be considered the
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, 700 – 8007C.
ignition point. The spread of temperature
away from this point from the highest towards the lowest temperature should be
considered a fire path. Based on the maps
of fire paths within the Opovo houses and
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FIG. 30. House 2: The fire path. See Fig. 29 Legend.
the principles from the arson investigations,
if there were more than one vitrification
point that had been a fire ignition point
within a house, such as in the case of the
Opovo houses, this situation will be considered a deliberately set fire.
It is known that the behavior of fire is such
that it always burns upward. Thus, taking
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all that has been said into account the most
likely scenario for the Neolithic house-fires
was that once started on the floor with some
fuel, fire ignited the roof structure, which
we suspect was built of wood construction
with a large amount of organic, leafy cover
(reeds, straw, grasses), i.e., thatch (see Fig.
33). Fire is chiefly determined by the avail-
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FIG. 31. House 3: The fire path. See Fig. 29 Legend.
ability of the combustible materials. Even
though in the scenario presented the house
roofs are considered a very important source
of fuel, in my view, the roof materials were
the secondary source of fuel for a house fire
and more important for the later stages of
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the fire than for the ignition point. The primary source of fuel was on the floor level
where the fire started. However, neither the
initial fire fuel, if it were structural wood,
nor the roof materials provided enough fuel
for fire of such intensity and of such an ex-
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FIG. 32. House 4: The fire path. See Fig. 29 Legend.
tent to last long enough to burn through the
entire house clay cover. There must have
been an additional fuel involved that was
either set up on the house floor or on the
outside around the house to help it burn
entirely.
There is a possibility that interior fires
originate from exterior sources, which in the
case of the Neolithic fires would mean starting them from the roof and most likely igniting from the exterior even if by sparks from
chimneys. According to Kirk (1969) in such
an instance the house roof gets ignited and
this results in the exterior fire. Since the nature of fire is such that it always burns upwards either the entire roof or some portions
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of it would be caught in fire but the burn
would not go under the roof. The process of
burning can change if the conditions change,
for instance if the roof collapses inside the
house and provides fuel for the internal
burns. In such circumstances it is important
to have sufficient quantities of flammable
roof materials or other fuel to sustain the
fire to the necessary extent.
Other lines of evidence. There are other lines
of evidence within the material culture of
the Vinča people that can be reviewed in
support of the presented statement that the
Vinča culture houses at Opovo were deliberately fired. The first one, I would say, is the
level of knowledge on pyrotechnology of the
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FIG. 33. The Neolithic fire scenario.
Vinča people and their success in the use of
fire in other fields of production. The second
one is the orderly collapse of houses after
their burning and the absence of any traces
of secondary use of the houses.
PYROTECHNOLOGY. The ability of the
Vinča culture potters to reach high temperatures in conjunction with reducing atmospheres on a routine basis and prior to the
first appearance of copper ore processing in
late Vinča sites has been now demonstrated
(Kaiser et al., 1986). Moreover, it is suggested that high temperature firings had become ‘‘culturally conventionalized’’ in the
Vinča culture. The Vinča people’s pyrotechnological experience included also plasterlime production, as well as copper ore processing.
The pyrotechnological practice of the
Vinča culture people could have a twofold
consequence for this study. Firstly, the
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knowledge of fire and skill in handling it
may mean that they knew the ways to create,
control and prevent fires. For instance, in
case of house fires the control could have
been achieved by introducing changes in the
building materials, building methods such
as mud brick architecture, or in a villagewide change of house proximity. Taking
into consideration the lengthy time period
during which the practice of house burning
occurred it seems realistic to assume that
such changes were possible and likely if all
other necessary conditions were met. Secondly, the pyrotechnological knowledge of
the Vinča culture people was such that it
could have allowed for a deliberate setting
up of a successful house fire and hence
house destruction. Knowing that complete
burning of a wattle-and-daub Neolithic
house is not necessarily an easy task (Bankoff and Winter 1979) it is being claimed in
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FIG. 34. House 1 – 4: Impression orientation.
this study that a knowledge of pyrotechnology was desirable for achieving it.
ORDERLY HOUSE COLLAPSE. The second
line of supporting evidence for deliberate
house fire in the Neolithic comes from the
orderly nature of house collapse that the
Opovo houses show. The analysis of the
cardinal orientation of the wood impressions shows considerable regularity (Fig.
34). In the case of all four Opovo houses
the impression orientation is predominantly
NW-SE. Immediately after comes E/W, and
then NE/SW, and N/S. What is even more
important for my argument is that in the
case of all 4 houses the orientation and the
proportion of orientation is almost identical.
My explanation for this regularity is that the
houses were burned down in similar fashion. They have collapsed in a short period
of time, as shown by the long stretches of
fairly intact wall portions which were excavated in some instances. There are no indications of structures burning more than once.
PRIMARY HOUSE USE ONLY. Taking into
consideration that there are absolutely no
indications of these houses being reoccupied I propose that the house burning and
collapse was an organized and strategic effort of house destruction and their complete
‘‘sealing off’’ from possible future utilitarian purposes.
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Discussion
The age of clay. The study presented was
undertaken for two main reasons: one, to
improve our methodology for investigating
architectural remains of the Neolithic in
Southeast Europe and allow for making
more inferences about the behavior of Neolithic peoples in regard to architecture than
we were able to do before; and two, to offer
some plausible interpretations for why and
how the Neolithic houses of Southeast Europe were destroyed. An important focus of
the study, therefore, was the investigation
of the causes of house fires during the Neolithic. The empirical data in this investigation have been used to establish some relationships between the materials used in
house construction and their behaviour in
fire by introducing the method of excavation, recording and sampling the data on architecture and performing their analyses.
The data collected on the construction materials also allow for further insights into the
specifics of the wattle-and-daub method of
house construction.
The most critical evidence that followed
from the analyses is the ratio between the
volume of construction wood and the volume of clay, the wood-types used in construction which indicate their flammability
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potential, and the series of analyses of temperatures of firing of the architectural remains, house ignition points, and fire paths.
The ratio between wood and clay which
shows the use of considerably larger quantities of clay than wood in house construction is an important aspect of the investigation. In the Opovo houses large primary
posts were used but the majority of wood
in the construction was of smaller size. That
is, reeds and small branches predominated,
which is understandable if the environmental conditions are taken into account. The
choice and quantities of the anthropogenic
materials are of exceptional interest, but
they do not seem to play a significant role
as fuel in the house fire. The significance of
the flammability of different wood is that
most construction wood at Opovo was such
that it could ignite easily but being of a low
energy level it could not keep a fire burning
for a long time.
The quantity of clay used in the wall construction unlike wood was large and was
applied on both sides of the house walls (inside and outside). At the same time the temperatures at which the houses burned were
around or exceeded 5007C and went up to
over 10007C. This indicates that fires were
intensive enough and lasted long enough to
burn the clays completely. It is known that
igniting clays is difficult if not impossible
unless substantial quantities of fuel are
added. The question arises whether the
wooden construction of the Neolithic houses
provided enough fuel by itself to burn the
clays to the extent to which we find them in
the archaeological record. According to the
engineering studies in modern brick technology as well as to the ethnographic
sources (Lucas and Harris 1962); (Khalili
1986) the quantities of wood that would be
necessary as fuel to fire the clay to the state
of a brick exceed considerably the quantities
of wood that were used in the construction
of the Opovo houses. In other words, the
construction wood of the Opovo houses
could not by itself constitute enough fuel to
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fire the daub to such an extent regardless of
whether the fire had been initiated accidentally or deliberately.
Thus the flammability of the construction
materials and their quantities available as
fuel both show a negative correlation with
the intensity of the fire (based on temperature readings). In other words, neither the
wood endurance (flammability) nor its
quantities seem to be satisfying to account
as a single factor for the house fire.
I have used these conclusions as basic arguments against the hypothesis that the
house burning was an accidental occurrence. However, in order to support the hypothesis that the house fires were deliberate
and not an accidental occurrence, I have
also investigated the burned houses from
many other points of view. Through this
investigation I have been able to define the
following characteristics of burned houses,
some of which are the results of the properties of materials but some are the result of
human behaviour. The properties of the
construction material show that:
i. the temperatures of house burning
were much too high to have been achieved
only by the fire of the construction wood;
ii. the fire path in each Opovo house indicates several ignition points within a house;
with the same methodology as modern
arson investigation I have used this criterion
to judge if Neolithic fires were deliberately
set or not;
iii. the fire path also shows that the ignition did not start in the house roof but at
floor level; on this basis I suggest that the
fire was set indoors and on the floor level;
iv. the pattern of house collapse supports
the view that houses were pulled down in
an organized and strategic way so as to
bring them to a closure.
Other critical factors are:
a. The completeness of house burning
and completeness of house destruction
when coupled with evidence that the houses
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were not used secondarily, i.e., after firing,
indicate the intention of the occupants to terminate the utilitarian (i.e., for residence) role
of a house by firing.
b. The sophisticated pyrotechnological
knowledge of the Vinča culture people
shows that they were capable of manipulating fire in a variety of productive activities
and would have been able to control house
fires successfully as well if that had been
their intention.
c. Finally a variety of other factors, such
as the fact that we find no bodies inside
houses but we find complete house inventories6; and the fact that we find no animal
skeletons inside or around the houses that
had been caught in the fire, also seems to
point to intentional fires that had not been
set as acts of aggression. Rather, I believe
that other reasons of a social nature should
be explored that could account for the practice of intentional house burning during the
Neolithic in Southeast Europe.
Some intentional reasons for house firing
have already been discussed. The suggestion
that houses were fired for the functional reason of providing a rigid and durable skeleton to the dwelling was suggested by Semenov (1968) but the completeness of house
destruction in the fires contradicts this argument entirely. According to Shaffer (1984,
1993), the reason for house fire was created
by the need for acquiring reusable clay for
further house building. This can be disputed
by the same argument of the completeness
of house destruction in combination with
the fact that the houses were not abandoned
before firing but after firing and the valuable
inventories were not taken out of the fired
6
There are instances of the Neolithic houses that were
burned just like any other house but were completely
or almost completely emptied from the typical house
inventory. However, at this point of investigation of the
subject it seems to me that the reason these houses were
emptied of their typical content lies in their different
function and not in the fact that they were emptied in
the course of house fire escape.
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houses, and that the ‘‘reusable’’ rubble is
still lying where it burned.
Other ‘‘functional’’ causes for house fires
include the need for fumigation of houses
infested with pests. There are many arguments that contest this proposition. The infestation of the Neolithic dwellings assumes
various types of wood insects and wood rot.
It has been mentioned in previous chapters,
however, that oak was the most likely type
of wood used as the primary construction
material, that is for the primary and secondary posts and for the roof beams, and that
this species is very resistant to infestation (see
Bakels 1978). In addition, many ways of fumigating a house are known from the ethnographic sources (see Khalili 1986; Weltfish
1965). Fire smoke, for example, is used as an
agent for fumigation—understandably without it resulting in the house destruction.
Burning a house because it is very infested
in order to replace it with another still cannot
account for the fact that completely equipped
houses were burned down so that none of
the equipment could be reused.
The risk of fire in the age of clay. Nonfunctional
causes of house fires have been argued by the
majority of archaeologists who have worked
in the region. A widely shared belief within
the archaeological community has been that
the Neolithic houses of Southeast Europe were
destroyed as the result of accidental fires. The
competing view assumes that the house fires
were acts of aggression.
Many archaeologists have expressed the
assumption that domestic activities, such as
hearth or even mismanagement caused fire
ignition within a house, which later turned
into full-fledged and uncontrollable fire that
destroyed all the houses in a settlement.
However, evidence presented in this paper
does not support this assumption. First, it is
clear that at Opovo there were no houses
that were not burned. It was concluded that
the burned houses that may have been built
and occupied concurrently were most likely
burned at separate times and not in one
blaze. This conclusion is based on the lack of
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burned remains in between the houses which
would indicate the spread of fire from one
house to the other and its continuation
(Tringham et al. 1992). Second, the reconstructed temperatures of the house rubble
which belongs to the oven superstructure or
oven floor which are usually around 5007C
do not correspond with the temperatures
that occurred at the ignition points of fire.
For illustration of coercive house fires I
turn to ethnohistorical sources. A rare ethnographic account of house fires is presented
to us by the Roman historian Vitruvius who
believed that the risk of fire was great and
the results catastrophic, as demonstrated by
Verulamium when the city was fired by
Boudicca in AD. 61. Vitruvius (as referenced
in Davey 1961:41) writes that the part of the
city of Verulamium that was built in wattle
work burned down during this attack. Vitruvius’ account describes wattle-and-daub
houses as an easy target for the flames. I
would suggest, however, that there was a
difference between the Neolithic and Roman
wattle-and-daub houses that is demonstrated by their different behaviour in fire.
The Roman houses of Verulamium ignited
more easily for a number of reasons. The
Roman cities, in which certain residential
quarters were built in wattle-and-daub according to Vitruvius’ account were famous
for being overcrowded with multistory
buildings that were tightly packed, very
poorly built, with very thin walls and large
thatched roofs. What is most important is
that the clay cover of these buildings seems
to have been quite thin. Equally important
for understanding the Roman Verulamium
city fire of 61 AD is the nature of the fire
itself. The city was burned in an organized
fashion and houses were set on fire at the
same time. This would have caused a large
concentration of the gases that occur in fires,
which could then have carried the fire as
long as there were suitable fuel available.
Another example of house destruction
that was conducted in an organized manner
was the raiding of villages in Afghanistan
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during the Afghan – British war in the beginning of the century, as presented by colonel
Gordon (1953). A house of mud and rubble
walls and a flat mud-covered roof had to be
prepared for burning or it would not burn
at all. The two essentials were extra fuel and
good draft. These houses would not burn by
a simple application of torch to their framework made of wood. Even when houses had
been thoroughly burned, Colonel Gordon
claims, they could be, and in fact were, made
habitable after a few months’ work.
Wilshusen (1988; 1989) argues that despite
sparse accounts of accidental firings of structures in the ethnographic record, the common belief among many archaeologists
working in Southwest United States has
been that pit-structures were real ‘‘tinder
boxes’’; that one of their greatest enemies
was fire (e.g., Canby 1982:563). He notes that
in the Southwest United States all the archaeologists believe that the best explanation of the many burned structures is accident. Wilshusen (1988, 1989), however, argues that, although certainly there are cases
that might suggest accidental burning especially if the finds include an individual that
may have been trapped inside a burning
structure, on the basis of his data from the
Dolores Project earth-covered dwellings do
not burn down as quickly as stick-house
dwellings. An experimental study that was
conducted in order to assess this proposition
in which a pit-structure in the Dolores area
was burned down in 1983 suggested that it
would take at least several hours for a pitstructure to fully catch fire and burn down
(Wilshusen 1988, 1989). Wilshusen also refers to the results of a study of experimental
destruction of a 40-year-old earthlodge in
At-A-Slant Village, North Dakota, in the
winter of 1978 – 79 by burning. This study
proved that earth-covered dwellings simply
are slower to burn down than most wooden
buildings. Wilshusen (1988, 1989) asserts
that in the case of the Middle Missouri tribes
there is ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence of structures being burned down dur-
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ing enemy raids. Those are the structures
with human skeletons inside (Lehmer
1971:101).
In our example, that is in the Southeast
European Neolithic, it seems highly improbable that all so far excavated Neolithic villages throughout this long period of prehistory would have been burned down by coercive activity of the kind described by
Vitruvius, Gordon and Wilshusen. If some
archaeologists do believe that village conflagration as the result of raiding is a plausible interpretation of the Neolithic, they have
first to account for the archaeological evidence that indicates individual and deliberate house firing that has been presented
here. Moreover, they have to rethink and
reevaluate their firmly embedded belief that
the Neolithic was a period of great stability,
peacefulness, gradual change and development in which no large movements of population, such as migrations that would involve territorial fights were taking place. If
all the Neolithic settlements were the targets
of coercive attacks and all their houses were
destroyed in conflagration caused by raiders, the question arises: who were the people
who undertook these attacks?
Several recent experimental studies of firing houses deliberately or accidentally show
that it is very hard or almost impossible to
fire houses built in clay to the extent that
we find in the archaeological record without
some form of help on the part of the humans,
by either providing additional fuel and draft
for the fire and by doing nothing to contain
the fire.
The experimental studies conducted by
Bankoff and Winter (1979) and Shaffer
(1984) have shown that firing of houses that
were built of wattle and daub with large
quantities of clay is very difficult. They conclude that even if wood is a highly flammable building material the fact that the structural wood is coated with a thick layer of
clay makes it hard to burn. The hardest part
in the Bankoff and Winter experiment was
to sustain the fire long enough to have any
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effect on burning the house walls. Actually
the damage of the fire in their experiment
was insubstantial to the structure of the
building. They concluded that to burn the
wood and clay of a house to the extent to
which we find it in the excavated deposits
would be very difficult. Even if an initial
fire were easily ignited by highly flammable
materials stored inside the house, this fire
would not go on, according to Bankoff and
Winter’s experiment, long enough to burn
the construction wood thoroughly. To
achieve that state of burning it would have
been necessary to help the fire in some way,
for instance by adding fuel in order to reach
high temperatures and sustain them until
they could burn wood and clay (Bankoff and
Winter 1979).
An experiment with similar results was
presented by Hansen (1961). The fire in an
experimental Neolithic long-house built of
wattle-and-daub with large thatched roof
came about through carelessness while
lighting a fire on the house’s hearth. As a
result, with the exception of the osiers inside
the clay wall, which remained standing upright, practically all the woodwork was
charred. In spite of the great heat (in places
near a haystack it burned for up to 6 hours),
the clay wall was surprisingly little baked
through. The inner side of the walls was
heavily red or black but only to 0.50 cm
depth. This layer flaked off in about two
weeks. It was only at the top, and at the
places that were especially severely exposed
to the heat, that the clay was practically
baked through, and large pieces of mud
plastering similar to those originally discovered at the ‘‘genuine’’ site could be broken
off. The tops of the roof’s supporting posts
had been ablaze, but had crashed down
fairly soon when they were burned at their
base by the fallen roof. Despite all this, Hansen concluded that the slight damage to the
walls was remarkable.
The practice of house burning lasted
throughout the Neolithic period of Southeast Europe (ca. 1500 years) without intro-
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ducing any changes in the method of construction, or in the choice of the materials
used or in the intrasite organization of the
dwellings. The technological knowledge of
the Vinča culture people has proved to be
substantial and I believe it included the possibility to introduce some changes to their
architecture. The possibility of altering the
method of construction to one of mud-brick
technology would have been feasible if the
social conditions had been favorable. This
method must have been known to the Vinča
culture people from the times of the earlier
settlements (Early Neolithic) in the bordering region to the South, such as at the site
of Anzabegovo (Gimbutas 1974, 1976b). In
addition, soil in large quantities necessary
for mud brick manufacture was readily
available at the Neolithic sites. However, the
mud-brick construction is considered to be
a slower method and more labor intensive.
The dilemma arises: did the Vinča culture
people not want to invest more time and
energy in mud-brick construction of their
houses? Or did they prefer their houses to
be more easily built and at the same time
easier to destroy?
A much more plausible interpretation of
house burning in the Southeast European
Neolithic, which is in my view supported
by the analyses presented in this paper, is
that the house conflagrations were the result
of deliberate and symbolic action. I argue
that for the Neolithic Vinča culture people,
domestic houses were of utilitarian and ritual significance at the same time. But
whereas it is easier to illustrate their utilitarian role based on the number of domestic
activities that were carried out within them,
it is much more difficult to show their nonutilitarian role. Based on all evidence presented in this study, I suggest that the house
burning and collapse was an organized and
strategic effort of house destruction and
their complete ‘‘sealing off’’ from possible
future utilitarian purposes. At this point of
their use-life the houses might have acquired a new, nonutilitarian function, such
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as ensuring the continuation of ancestral line
in one place. Consequently, house construction, their use and destruction were the segments of a continuous process.
House abandonment and replacement. House
and village abandonment and replacement
for structural or social reasons is a worldwide practice known from a variety of time
periods. The term abandonment covers
many different processes and has no single
archaeological consequence. Site abandonment and replacement, even though the latter is much less known, has received a considerable attention in archaeological literature lately (Cameron and Tomka 1993). After
the initial focus on studies of abandonment
in site formation processes (Schiffer 1976),
more recently archaeology has witnessed an
intensification and diversification in the
study of this phenomenon (Brooks 1993). Investigations of planned versus unplanned
abandonment and utilization of sites from
initial occupation to abandonment has been
the focus of research in archaeology (e.g.,
Brooks 1989; Binford 1982; Stevenson 1982),
and ethnoarchaeology investigations (e.g.,
Kent 1984, 1990; Stevenson 1985; Tomka 1989).
The phenomenon of abandonment is currently viewed in the archaeological community as a complex set of processes in which
differences can be drawn in its causes and
its nature, such as episodic, seasonal, permanent (e.g., Tomka 1989), or punctuated abandonment (e.g., Graham 1993). These processes are believed to have operated on the
settlement, aggregate, and individual household level. Furthermore, it has been concluded by recent investigations that abandonment cannot be viewed as a separate
static event, but is always dynamically
linked to other events within a social group
(Brooks 1993).
As suggested by Tringham (1990), discussion on site abandonment and replacement
in the Vinča culture, as well as in Southeast
European prehistory has been limited. Some
causes for village abandonment and later replacement during the Neolithic of Central
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Europe have been implied by archaeologists
that worked on the LBK culture. Childe
(1957), and Soudsky’ and Pavlu (1972) analyzed the LBK horizons of houses in terms
of interrupted occupation. Their argument
suggests that between the two phases of
houses the same people lived at another site.
The cause of such alternating of settlements
was related to the type of agricultural practices conducted by the LBK populations.
Soudsky’ talked about a restricted territory
within which a group of related people
would alternate the settlements staying at
each location for 10 – 15 years at one time or
until the fields are exhausted by overcropping. Modderman (n.d.) argued against cyclical habitation pattern of the LBK settlements remarking that this explanatory
model, developed for the tropical regions
characterized by the slash and burn agriculture, was inappropriately imposed on the
Neolithic settlements of Europe, which were
located on different types of soil.
Explanations such as the one for the LBK
villages of Central Europe presume that as
a single event a complete village was abandoned and later on resettled in a similar
fashion. On the other hand, I suggest that
even though a complete village abandonment and replacement was a possible strategy in the Neolithic, another strategy, that
of abandonment and replacement on an individual or household scale, must not be
ruled out.
In the ethnographic and archaeological literature often mentioned functional reasons
for individual house abandonment are
structural decay, as for instance, among the
American SW Pueblo populations (McIntosh 1974), or insect infestation in the case
of the Navajo, which limited their use-life of
hogans to 6 – 10 years (McGuire and Schiffer
1983:291), (see discussion in Wilshusen 1988,
1989; and Weltfish 1965:252). Extreme
drought conditions and resource depletion
forced many of the Hopi to temporarily
abandon on the village scale the Mesas
(Dockstader 1979:525). The social reason for
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abandonment on the village level is known
from the historic Pueblos at Orabi where the
partial abandonment of the site was due to
a social dispute (see Wilshusen 1988, 1989).
According to Brooks (1993) the Plains societies of North America feature several
types of abandonment, from planned abandonment that was related to the ‘‘life-cycle’’
of the house and a need for its replacement
to the less planned or very sudden abandonment in the case of a sudden death. The
long-term planned house and/or site abandonment could take two years of preparation in which help was provided by the kin.
In these instances, the houses that were
abandoned show a pattern of ‘‘scavenging’’
for high-reproduction-cost goods or other
valued items including removing and transporting of the old wood-beams in the areas
where wood is scarce, and exhibit burning
of the dwellings as a ritual associated with
the abandonment of a residence (1993:180 –
182). House destruction or abandonment for
fear of ancestral ghosts, if a person dies in a
house for reasons other than old age, is
known among the Athapaskans in the
Southwest United States (Jett and Spencer
1981:28). Among the Navajo a house in
which a person died may be burned; if not,
a hole is torn through the north wall and the
roof beams are allowed to fall in, indicating
that the place should be avoided (Reichard
1963:81).
The ethnographic examples are not only
important to illustrate the practice of house
abandonment and replacement on the individual scale but also to draw attention to
another related practice that can occur during the process, that of partial or complete
house destruction. The causes for the practice of house destruction and house abandonment at the Neolithic site of Opovo are
believed to have been related to the need
for house replacement. In any archaeological
study of cooperative production and especially the possibility of cooperative generational transmission of land and other property by households, it is essential to establish
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the relationship of the household to a locus
or loci through time. Houses as residing
dwellings were the focal points for the social
life in many respects of the Neolithic communities (Tringham 1990; Tringham and
Stevanović 1991). This study argues that the
Neolithic Opovo houses were not just abandoned in order for their inhabitants to alternate the settlements and gain new farming
grounds. The Opovo houses, just as other
Neolithic houses in the Vinča culture, were
destroyed before they were abandoned.
The Opovo houses were burned down
and replaced with no exception. The Opovo
houses, moreover were built with a technique that would facilitate house destruction
at the end of its use-life. Since there are no
indications that the end of a house use-life
was based on utilitarian grounds — all the
houses were fully equipped when burnt
down — it is proposed here that their use-life
ended as the result of other nonutilitarian
factors. Surely, such an act of house destruction would have been highly undesirable
among the settled people had there not been
socially essential reasons. House burning
may have been a ritualized act marking, for
instance, the end of a house use-life and an
end or new beginning of a household head
(as suggested by Tringham 1994). In these
circumstances, by housing the events of life
and death of its inhabitants houses are embedded in those events and as such they acquire their use-lives.
CONCLUSION
Continuity of Place
The Neolithic house was the central feature in the society by way of constituting the
largest and most complex single feature for
production and by encapsulating the social
activities within it and its physical belongings. However, the house during the Neolithic might have also had the symbolic role
of securing a postutilitarian visibility and
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objectifying the successful social reproduction of the owners. Social and material continuity were important to the Neolithic societies and might have remained a leading mobilizing force in the society throughout the
Neolithic. The engagement in domestication
of plants and animals, as well as domestication of humans was physically and conceptually a struggle for constancy. The only way
to succeed in the domestication of animals,
plants, and humans, as we know from the
historical periods, is through perseverance
and protraction of human and natural resources.
In the Vinča culture, the period of greatest
intensification of production and the period
of the most extensive house burning coincide with the practice of building new structures which are horizontally removed to a
certain extent from the location of older destroyed houses. It has been suggested that
if this was a common practice in the late
Vinča culture settlements, especially those
where the land available or preferred for residence was more restricted, such as tell settlements, the houses would have symbolized the continuity of land use and possibly
land ownership (Tringham et al. 1992). Thus,
in those circumstances a Neolithic house secured its visibility by being burnt and provided a foundation for the new house with
which it was replaced.
It is quite feasible that such continuity
would have served to legitimize ownership
of a locale in a settlement and of agricultural
resources in the vicinity of the settlement.
Continuity is being assured not only
through succession and replacement of its
human resources (reproduction) but also
through holding onto fixed or movable
property and through the transmission of
the names, titles and prerogatives as presented by Lévi-Strauss and reviewed by Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995). Thus in the
Neolithic of Southeast Europe, in addition
to assurance of a lineage continuity through
reproduction, we could propose a social
mechanism for assurance of continuity
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through the house and the farming grounds
that go with it. It may seem paradoxical to
suggest that house destruction can assure
continuity in a society in which houses seem
to have been the largest asset for an individual or a family. However, if the houses had
to be replaced at some point in their uselife (as suggested by Tringham 1994) and
‘‘sealed off’’ from the future utilitarian purposes to do so by the means of firing them
is an understandible strategy. In fact fired
clay, that the houses were made of, lasts
much longer than unfired clay and becomes
much more visible in the village deposits,
as surely the Neolithic people realized from
their own manufacture of ceramics in clay.
It is not surprising that the Vinča people
would have chosen fire as an agent of transformation — the agent that can create and
destroy — to carry out the closure of their
houses in a ritualized action. Domestication
of fire had been achieved by bringing it
within the realm of the houses (in hearths
and ovens). Fire as an agent of transformation of the raw-food into the cooked-food
was a crucial part of the process that focused
on bringing the wild within the house and
into the cultured/domesticated space of the
humans in the concept of ‘‘Domus.’’ The real
control of fire that followed was achieved
by the sophisticated pyrotechnology of the
Vinča culture people.
During the Vinča culture period house
fires by their destructive role played a constructive part as well and expanded the process of technological and social domestication. The Neolithic house was brought to closure by burning; it was shut off from the
active/utilitarian life. At the same time, it is
preserved by that same fire which transforms it into a brick-like solid material that
can stay as such for an indefinite time. In
this way the house as a place gains visibility
in a much wider sense than it had during
its utilitarian life.
Even though a burned and collapsed
house becomes invisible by being covered
by humus and/or by another house on top,
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it retains its visibility and its mnemonic potential. Its existence would have been known
to the people who built a new house on top
of it. Moreover, the reason that they build
the house at the very place of the previous
one, I believe, was a strategic action with an
aim to incorporate symbolically and structurally the old house into the new one. By
such action the role of the older place continues to exist through the role of the new place.
Thus, the continuation of the place is established.
There are multiple examples from the site
of Opovo, as well as from many other Vinča
culture sites (Gomolava, Vinča-Belo Brdo) of
the practice of house construction by incorporating older outdoor hearths and ovens as
well as older burned houses into the foundation of new houses. This was achieved by
erecting the new house not directly on top
of the older features, but resting on one part
of the older house or feature (in some instances to incorporate more than one outdoor oven and/or house). This positioning
of a house may have given it a structural
advantage in the sense that the stable, solid
ground of the older features was used as a
foundation for the new house. However, the
fact that they do not always lie directly on
top of the older feature I interpret as a symbolic continuation of the place.
The tell settlements of Southeast Europe
and the Near East are prime examples of
such a practice and of the significance of the
place that many generations inhabited. The
non-tell sites or so-called ‘‘flat’’ site, such as
Opovo, are another example of the same
practice. At Opovo there are three building
horizons which, on the basis of 14C dates,
are believed to have lasted for nearly 200
years. In my mind the places of the Neolithic
people which were ‘‘kept alive’’ and visible
for generations to come indicate the continuity of the social structure, such as lineage,
through the mechanics of house construction, their use and destruction being the segments of a continuous process.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the research presented in this article I received
support from the Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation
Research Abroad Program, the Stahl Fund of the Archaeological Research Facility, Department of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, and the Explorers Club Fund.
I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all of
them.
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1990 Die spätneolithischen Siedlungen in Divostin.
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Sciences and Arts, Belgrade.
Bogucki, Peter
1988 Forest farmers and stockherders: early agriculture
and its consequences in North-Central Europe.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Bourdieu, P.
1990 The logic of practice. Polity Press, Cambridge.
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AP: JAA