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 SHERKATT (1982.) has documented a shift in settlement concentration to the edge of the plain, so as to control access to important rocks and minerals in the hills north of the plain. The increasing dominance of household units and strategies of prestige goods accumulation ensures that the tell has little place in the more flexible, opportunistic social landscape of this period. In the Early and Middle Copper Age, the mortuary arena of social power has overtaken the domestic arena in importance, not least as the key spatial context for social reproduction. A new pattern of dispersed settlement, with small farms scattered evenly over much of the landscape, is found in the first half of the Late Copper Age in Eastern Hungary. The Baden phenomenon (BANNER 1956) includes communal inhumation cemeteries, such as Alsónémedi, but these are not so common in North-East Hungary as in the Danube valley. The differentiation between finds discarded in the mortuary domain and those in the domestic domain reinforces the notion that status is won more readily in the former. In comparison with most field surveys in Eastern Hungary, there is a relatively large number of dispersed Baden sites known from the Polgár Block (Fig. 7). 21 scatters are known, while no single finds have been recorded. There is continuity from the earlier Copper Age in both the linear settlement pattern on the Polgár and the Csőszhalom peninsulae and the Hodos islands and also with sites in the Tiszadob area, though in the latter sites penetrate deeper into the dry interfluves than before. The Tiszagyulaháza islands area also reoccupied, but on a smaller scale than before. There were three kurgans found in the Polgár Block (Fig. 7). The kurgans cover individual inhumation burials of articulated complete male skeletons, furnished with a narrow range of specific grave goods (lumps of red ochre, the remains of blankets, caprine astragali, perforated dogs' teeth, rare silver earrings and copper beads). All of these undisputed facts would seem to be sufficient to convince readers that we are in the presence of that rare prehistoric specimen - a well-attested migration. The alternative view of kurgans is that most of the elements defining the phenomenon have already occurred, singly or jointly, in the earlier Copper Age and that the kurgan „package" is a strikingly novel arrangement of local forms legitimated by symbolic associations with the past. We should begin with the kurgan itself, since it is the visual embodiment of the new monumental burial. Archaeologists who have participated in field survey on the Alföld will agree that it is very difficult to distinguish visually between a kurgan and a tell. This will have been the case in the Late Copper Age, when the appearance of few tells was emphasized by building houses on the top (for a rare exception, see Gorzsa: HORVÁTH 1987.33-). The visual similarity in size and shape leads one to the hypothesis that kurgans were built to imitate tells or, more accurately, to re-incorporate the ancestral place-values of tells and their ancestors into the mortuary domain. The impetus for this imitation was local - those abandoned mounds so rich in oral tradition and folk memory, the locus of the tribal ancestors whose ways were not necessarily followed by the acquisitive Copper Age households. The burial form of the kurgans was also not novel - individual inhumations of complete skeletons were the standard rites for the newly dead of phases of the earlier Copper Age (BOGNÁR-KUTZIÁN 1963.), often oriented W-E (BOGNÁR-KUTZIÁN 1972.153.), although extended inhumations were rare (Tiszapolgár-Basatanya and Srpski Krstur: BOGNÁR-KUTZIÁN 1972.153-, cf. BANNER 1956.). The grave goods of the barrow graves also find some parallels in earlier Copper Age graves: red ochre at Tibava (BOGNÁR-KUTZIÁN 1972.155.), copper beads at Deszk A and HódmezővásárhelyNépkert (BOGNÁR-KUTZIÁN 1972.138.), perforated animal teeth at Lebő A (BOGNÁR-KUTZIÁN 1972.136.), while long blades are clearly paralleled at many Copper Age sites. It can thus be demonstrated that many of the elements of the kurgan „package" were available for combination and recombination in the mortuary arena of the Copper Age of Eastern Hungary. It is therefore difficult to test the two opposing hypotheses: whether „outsiders" moved into the Alföld and marked their dominance with monumental barrows, or „local" elites exploited traditional and well-understood mortuary symbols in order to underscore their success in regional alliance and breeding networks. After all, the more dispersed the farmsteads of this period, the more widespread the requisite breeding network needed to be. The other aspect of the second half of the Late Copper Age is that the decline of the domestic arena coincided with the rise of the monumental mortuary arena. Field survey results are unanimous that settlement debris from this period is closer to invisibility than site sherds from any other period in Hungarian prehistory (SHERRATT 1983-37.). The region marked by kurgan burial may be contrasted with the first half of the Late Copper Age, where smaller or larger communal cemeteries dominated the mortuary arena (e.g., the Baden cemeteries in the Danube valley: BANNER 1956.) but, here too, the domestic arena was attenuated. Flow did these changes affect social reproduction in the kurgan lands? Barrett has argued persuasively that burial under barrows forms the focal point for the re-definition of genealogical status; only after burial could mourners return to the wider community (BARRETT 1990.). Certainly he is right to stress that, unlike partial burials after exhumation in the Hungarian Neolithic, 84 Jósa András Múzeum Évkönyve 1994