A Nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum évkönyve 36. - 1994 (Nyíregyháza, 1995)

John Chapman: Social power in the early farming communities of Eastern Hungary – Perspectives from the Upper Tisza region

John CHAPMAN These locations provide equal access to both wet and dry farmland, with variable potential for fishing. The existence of a long-term central place such as Csőszhalom in the Late Neolithic landscape attests to a level of social differentiation not seen previously. The 5 m high tell continues to provide a landscape monument with its own distinctive long-term placevalue throughout later periods. A frequent event on Late Neolithic tells is the destruction of a house or whole group of houses by fire; the stratigraphy of many tells reveals a „burnt horizon" of burnt clay fused by high-temperature firing. Three explanations of burnt horizons or houses have been advanced: 1. the traditional invasion hypothesis, usually involving long-range North Pontic arsonists (GIMBUTAS 1978, GIMBUTAS 1979); 2. accidental fires resulting from cooking, baking or other pyrotechnical activities; and 3. the deliberate destruction by fire of houses to complete the life-cycle of the house and its contents (RACZKY 1982/83, cf. for Vinca houses, TRINGHAM-KRSTIC 1991.584,588.). The North Pontic invasion model of Kurgan waves can be dismissed summarily, since the 14C dates for the tells are more than a millennium earlier than the earliest dates for the North Pontic barrows. Accidental fires cannot be ruled out, especially not on sites where houses often lie less than 2 m from each other. In the Zürich Lake-Village exhibition of 1990, a fire started by an arsonist in one house spread to the whole village within half an hour (RUOFF 1992.), leaving no time to salvage the domestic artifacts. The third hypothesis is the hardest to test, despite the evidence available for deliberate house-burning in the Early NeÄthic. The problem is that there is no example of a burial deposited as the penultimate act of the life of a Late Neolithic house. Quite the opposite - all the recently excavated Late Neolithic tells boast numerous burials of partial or complete inhumations, usually of articulated skeletons, on unoccupied parts of the tell but, without exception, outside the houses (RACZKY 1987.). The only example of a burial „associated" with a house is the coffin burial inserted into the south wall of a shrine from a previous occupation horizon at Vésztő (HEGEDŰSMAKKAY 1987.96.). It is of course still possible to argue for deliberate house destruction at the end of the social cycle of the household. In contrast to the fusion of deceased person and structure in the Hungarian Early Neolithic, the separation of dead human from dead house may represent a distancing of the newly-dead from the household or the distinction between a failed social grouping and a failed architectural structure. The notion that death had less potential for pollution seems to characterise the Late Neolithic, the period par excellence of extreme material and ritual boundedness. The alternative mortuary rituals of on-tell inhumation indicate ancestral continuity in the realm of the living. This is best demonstrated by the preliminary results of serological analysis of the tell burials at Gorzsa, which indicate that the burials comprise the deceased of four successive units of the same genetic unit (HORVÁTH 1987.45.). An innovation for tell burial is the provision of timber coffins for many of the tell burials. It is interesting to note that the proportions of the coffins at Vésztő match those of the shrine building in level 4; the form of the cult building for the living may have been implicated in the passage of the newly dead to the ancestors. The small groups of burials on the tells are a parallel to the Bulgarian examples and represent the first spatial step in the distancing of bodies, if not ancestors, from the houses of the living. But still the ancestral values predominate on the tell and the ancestors are not excluded; rather, the passage from the world of the living to that of the dead is made more secure by the provision of coffins and fine grave goods. In summary, ancestral values continue to dominate the Late Neolithic, not least because of the visual symbolism of the height of the tell in contrast to the flat sites of the other villages and hamlets and the surface of the plain itself. The higher the tell rises from the plain, the deeper the ancestral relations which tell-dwellers can claim, in contradistinction to the occupants of flat sites whose descent group memories are constructed in different and less visually impressive ways. For this reason, social relations between tell communities and those on flat sites may have been mediated primarily through the ancestor cult, privileged access to which was in the hands of the tell ritual specialists. Preliminary data from flat sites suggest that there are fewer burials and fewer objects of ritual paraphernalia there than on tells. The first use of distinct, bounded cemeteries in the prehistory of Eastern Hungary is dated to the Copper Age. Here, the relationship between tells and cemeteries is quite different from that defined for Bulgaria. Because of their small numbers in the Alföld, each Late Neolithic tell assumed a greater place-value, in a wider social setting, than in Bulgaria. For this reason, there was a greater likelihood of inter-site tensions between tells and flat sites in a period of wide-ranging exchange networks, with their potential for wealth accumulation. The larger number of flat sites, each at an important node in the exchange network, made it harder for tells to exert the control of prestige goods that was highly probable in a tell-dominated landscape. Thus, at the time when the first cemeteries appear in the Early Copper Age, in the early 4th millennium CAL B.C., tell occupation becomes quite rare and the dispersed farmstead constitutes the predominant settlement unit (BOGNÁRKUTZIÁN 1972, SHERRATT 1982, SHERRATT 1983.). The Early - Middle Copper Age in the Polgár Block is characterised by an increase in the number of 82 Jósa András Múzeum Évkönyve 1994