Paluch Tibor: Egy középső neolitikus lelőhely a kultúrák határvidékén. A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Monographia Archeologica 2. (Szeged, 2011)

Evergreen

EVERGREEN The topic of this volume is evergreen as it brings back an era of history seen as the time humans spent in Paradise. The subject of this book is the Neolithic era, a period when the possibilities for ensuring one's daily bread and a secure roof over one's head were discovered and thus the population of the human community started to increase. Objects similar to those discussed in this volume were first saved from "the foam of the Maros River" by Zsófia Torma, the grand dame of Hungarian archaeology, in the area of Tordos in Hunyad county in 1875. More than a hundred years ago academics learned about new finds much more swiftly than they do nowadays - and so I was delighted to read this new manuscript that might confute or support my earlier theories. I call the era this volume discusses a period of mosaic cultures. These forms of civilization flourished in the sixth millenium BC, when the Black Sea and the Bosphorus (which came into being around the middle of the millenium) separated the Fertile Crescent from southeastern Europe. The immense economic changes of the previous thousand years started to bear fruit: small fortifications, predecessors of later sacral centers emerged; food production provided an ever-growing part of the diet; and the first metal, copper, appeared. In this period the earlier complexes of similar material culture, presumably ethnically intertwined as well, disappeared. Such were the Linear Pottery Culture and the Körös-Cri§-Starcevo-Karanovo I pinch pottery complex that thrived from the Rhodope Mountains to the Carpathian Basin. The main cause of this fragmentation was presumably the development of agriculture, which meant that people where more bound to a certain location. I think archaeology's sub-disciplines can offer a great deal to these discussions. Once we learned at school that the Neolithic was the time of "domestication fever" and that's why the number of cattle bones increased in the assemblages. Today no one can seriously think that a couple of aurochs calves simply kept in a corral would become tame domesticates when they grow up. The emergence of agricultural production and the domestication of plants and animals were tasks of hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This process is reflected in the excavations and findings of the past few decades. In a wide region ranging from Palestine to Anatolia (and perhaps the Lower Danube) buildings and carvings of gigantic size have been discovered dating to the period before the appearance of pottery, to an early phase of grain cultivation and small ruminant domestication. These are findings no one ever dreamed of. This huge cultural complex whose northern branch might be identified with Lepenski Vir of the Lower Danube, has not yet been named. A name such as "the New World" would be pertinent as this was the time when humankind's new world was created. There is a 300CM1000 year gap in our meticulously designed chronology and it is the task of the archaeologists of coming decades to fill it. I am sure that this is only a question of talent, patience, good luck - and money. I wish all of these to be there for the new generation of archaeologists who study the Neolithic, as the immense transformations of this era will always be an evergreen topic of academic research. Szeged, Autumn 2011 Ottó Trogmayer