Tárnoki Judit szerk.: Tisicum - A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok Évkönyve 19. (2009)

Régészettudomány - Raczky Pál - A Körös-kultúra figurális ábrázolásainak értelmezéséhez

Tisicum XIX. as they represented animals of pivotal importance in the newly emerging food producing economies of Southeastern Europe. This type of representation depicts the mental relation between people and animals that had gained core importance in their new form of subsistence. As the Körös culture was being transformed in its northern distribution area its cognitive relation to Linearband ceramics became clearly evident in the iconography of the storage vessel recovered at Kosice-Cerveny rak in eastern Slovakia. In that composition, human figures are accompanied by stylized head elements of bulls and cows instead of previously preferred sheep and goat (Figure 3: 4. a-d). This thematic change seems to converge with transformations in the economy, as cattle better adapted to the local environmental conditions - gained key importance in the Great Hungarian Plain and the upper reaches of the Tisza River from the Middle Neolithic onwards. The context of the previously outlined combinations of women and animal representations in the figurai art of the Körös culture as well as the medium chosen for presentation are characterized by the fact that they occur on large storage vessels. On this basis one may presume that essential relationships existed between this special form of vessel, its original content and related social implications. The cooccurrence of and physical relationships between the selfstanding steatopyg figurines and storage vessels decorated with anthropomorphic reliefs in the Körös culture is clearly illustrated by the immediate environment of the house excavated at Szajol-Felsőföld. In discussing anthropomorphic plastic art in Southeastern Europe, Julian Thomas has proposed that the great number and rich variety of such objects within this cultural sphere may be indicative of a "representational ideology" associated with personal identity. This would also mean a symbolic material language that stood in contrast to those used in Western Europe. This hypothesis also means that the pieces of Neolithic plastic art in the Balkans under discussion here may have been associated with concrete personalities and their social situations. The investigations of Svend Hansen have shown that previously propagated interpretations of Neolithic and Copper Age clay figurines rooted in the "fertility paradigm" were based on feeble theoretical foundations. In addition to the developments outlined here, fragmentation studies on Balkan Neolithic figurines by John Chapman and Bisserka Gaydarska have suggested that between the symbolic creation and destruction of such artifacts a special "biography" may be observed. During their life span they may have mediated different meanings towards the community. Douglass Bailey has pointed out that the fundamental social unit and immediate media context of figurai representations in Southeastern Europe was the household. This situation also seems evident in the physical environment of the house excavated at Szajol-Felsőföld. Individual and communal definitions were embodied in a synthetic manner within the material framework of various types of anthropomorphic representation, embodied by the symbolic language of the cultural context in question. I 76