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

Social power in the early farming communities of ... settlements occupied as well as a marked continuity in settlement from the Late Neolithic. 24 scatters are known but no single finds have been recorded (Fig. 6). Five out of the 11 Late Neolithic sites are re-occupied in this period, including Copper Age scatters within 100 m of all three tells. The main cluster of Copper Age sites portrays a moderate expansion across the landscape, based on a markedly linear settlement from Basatanya north to the Hodos channel. Only one site in this line is set back from the wetland edge (Polgár 46). The Hodos island is re-occupied by two settlements, since a break from the Middle Neolithic, and two new sites are founded near Csőszhalom. The Kengyel-Tiszadob corridor is re-settled and sites are still found on the Tiszagyulaháza islands and the Tiszadob „uplands". The sites reveal a wide range of sizes, with low-density dispersed scatters at Polgár 46 over 25 hectares, similar scatters at Polgár 59 and 60 over 6 and 7.5 hectares respectively, and small scatters of 0.2 hectares at Polgár 23 and 30. Thus large, low-density sites comparable to those of the Middle Neolithic are known in the Copper Age, characterised by much lower densities of structures than on the Csőszhalom tell. The shift to farmsteads away from tells has three implications for social reproduction: 1. the dominance of the household as the primary economic unit, in contrast to the densely packed overlapping social networks on the tells; 2. the importance of extensive local networks linking perhaps as many as 50 dispersed farmsteads into an exogamous breeding unit; and 3. the predominance of a comparative ideology of prestige goods accumulation over the overtly traditional, egalitarian values of the tell village. These changes may explain the wide range of rich grave goods found in the inhumation graves of complete, articulated skeletons that characterise the mortuary population of Early Copper Age cemeteries such as Tiszapolgár-Basatanya (BOGNÁR-KUTZIÁN 1963). These cemeteries are often partitioned into lines or rows of graves, which may represent household groups from particular farms. BARRETT (1990.) has shown the significance of placement for individual burials in barrow cemeteries of the Bronze Age of Southern Britain; the Copper Age cemeteries show the emergence of complex cemetery topography without a monumental burial form. The denial of monumentality is perhaps a symbolic distancing from the ancestral tell monuments, standing unoccupied, if not unused, in the landscape. The Copper Age cemeteries tend to be located some distance not only from tells but also from contemporary farms, giving them a liminal status between the farmland of the living and the world of the ancestors - the locus of transition of states of being. The removal of the newly dead from direct association with the houses of the ancestors (on the tells) and those of the living (the dispersed farms) suggests a different conception of ancestral landscape, more in harmony with the dispersed social relation of an exogamous network than the placebased values of the tell communities. The spatial linearity of the cemeteries is matched by their linear concept of time, with the once-and-for-all insertion of a sequence of dead bodies until dissolution of the lineage leads to abandonment of the cemetery. What of those few communities who lived on tells in the Early Copper Age? Although different sequences occur at each excavated site, less intensive occupations occur, with lower densities of artifacts and less solid structures, with more interruptions in the sequence and, consequently, a less active contribution to tell-building. At Herpály, an arrangement of loosely spaced houses in early phase 5 is replaced by an occupation defined only by hearths, both associated with pottery transitional between the Late Neolithic and the Early Copper Age (RACZKY 1987.111.). At Gorzsa, a similar assemblages was found mostly in graves on the tell but settlement areas are to be excavated (HORVÁTH 1987.36-37.). The tell at Vésztő was abandoned at the end of the Late Neolithic for several centuries, only to be re-occupied in the Copper Age (HEGEDŰS-MAKKAY 1987.89.). At present, it is the only tell with occupation and mortuary remains in the Middle as well as the Early Copper Age. Although the main mortuary rite consisted of inhumation burial in coffins, an exceptional act was the burial of seven children inside the burnt debris of a house (HEGEDŰS-MAKKAY 1987.91.). Unfortunately, the excavators do not clarify whether the burials are under the burnt remains (a primary burial inside a house that was subsequently burnt) or in them (a secondary burial, as the beginning of another cycle of life and death on tells). In either case, the Vésztő burial is the sign of a renewed concern for the extended social group and its social reproduction, in contrast to the individual households of the coeval farmsteads. This continued occupation of tells in the midst of an landscape developed in ideological opposition to tell values indicates a lengthy period of tensions between two incompatible modes of social reproduction and two contrasting conceptions of time and space. In the succeeding Middle Copper Age and flat communal cemeteries continue to receive the newly dead from surrounding small farmsteads (e.g., the cemetery of 54 graves at Tiszavalk-Kenderföldek: PATAY 1978.). Another new feature is the creation of separate ritual enclosures, such as the ring-ditch (or Rondel) at Szarvas 38 (MAKKAY 1980/81.); the new possibilities of aerial photography will doubtless transform our knowledge of such cropmark sites. At the same time, wealth indices make a quantum leap upwards, with rich hoards such as the Tiszaszőlős gold treasure (MAKKAY 1989.) and wealthy cemeteries such as Tibava (SISKA 1968.). Jósa András Múzeum Évkönyve 1994 83