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 explain why relatively few Bronze Age houses on tells were destroyed by fire in comparison with those of the Late Neolithic. Linear time is symbolised in the cemeteries, in contrast to the cyclical time of the tell settlements. In summary, Bronze Age communities of Eastern Hungary thus participated in, and continued, the tradition of monumental tells and barrows by stressing the domestic use of ancestral monument but also linking up to the earlier Copper Age practice of the bounded flat cemetery. Social reproduction was thus based on the successful integration of prestige goods accumulation into corporate tell group ideology, with the ancestors still omnipresent in the fabric of the tells while their bodily remains were deposited in communal cemeteries. This long-term sequence of the later prehistory of Eastern Hungary can be read as a suite of alternating arenas of social power, in which those social actors dominating the domestic and mortuary domains vie for control of the key practices through which social reproduction is validated. The existence of prior uses of similar monuments in the sequence, at least from the Middle Neolithic onwards, leads to a contrast between place-centred, ancestor-based ideologies and ideologies of competitive prestige goods accumulation and alliance building. This contrast is matched in the mortuary sphere, when the dead body can be dangerously polluting or relatively innocuous, and buried in containers symbolic of cyclical or linear time. The earlier Bronze Age appears to represent a period when tensions arising out of the two contrasting ideologies of time and space lead to the use of elaborate material culture to stress social boundedness, as in the Late Neolithic. Discussion Several long-term trends in the settlement evidence represented in the Polgár Block appear to characterise in microcosm the pattern of settlement changes found over much of the Alföld. Thus the appearance of nucleated tells in the Late Neolithic and the Early-Middle Bronze Age and the predominance of dispersed flat sites, often farmsteads, in most of the intervening periods forms the background problematic to the Upper Tisza Project; explanation of these changes constitutes one of the main project aims. Two basic characteristics of the settlement sequence are the chronological variations in 1. the number and size of sites and monuments and 2. the form of sites and monuments. At least three hypotheses may be advanced to explain 1.: variations in the occurrence of diagnostic sherds; fluctuations in population; and fluctuations in the distribution of people across the landscape. The occurrence of diagnostic sherds certainly varies in the Hungarian sequence (cf. RUTTER 1983.). The paucity of Copper Age (especially Late Copper Age) decorated wares leads to under-representation, while almost every Middle Neolithic sherd is diagnostic to period. Equally, large numbers of sherds have been recovered which can be dated unspecifically to the Bronze Age (c 35 from Block 1); many of these scatters may well date to the Early-Middle Bronze Age. In contrast, a single highly burnished black fine ware can identify a Late Bronze Age presence. Thus, even general patterns of settlement numbers are but a partial artifact of archaeological diagnosticity. Given this caveat, the population hypothesis may be investigated with data on both site size and number. Consistent assessment of the size of the surface scatters requires intensive gridded collection, not feasible on more than a handful of sites (cf. SHERRATT

1983-)• The pattern found in Block 1 is that site size tends to very inversely with site numbers (with occasional exception such as Polgár 46). The big increase in the number of scatters of the same mean size from the Szatmár phase to the Tiszadob period surely indicates some measure of population growth. However, it would be difficult to falsify the hypothesis that, from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, a broadly similar total population occupied Block 1 but was distributed in different types of sites and monuments. This brings us back to the theme of settlement nucleation and dispersion. The fundamental pattern which emerges from Block 1 is the multiple re-occupation of flat sites in the lowland zone. The dichotomy previously drawn between dispersed flat sites and nucleated tells (CHAPMAN 1989.) can now be seen to be an oversimplification, in three senses. First, the existence of previously settled flat sites provides an important resource to new occupants of the old settlement, whether detected by the occurrence of artifacts from a previous age or known through oral tradition. These multi-period sites do not concentrate their discard or architectural debris to the extent typical on tells; their remains indicate the significance of ancestral land in a less focussed manner than is found on tells. Secondly, there are several examples of the combination of the tell principle and the flat settlement principle, through which large sites can be created as an extension from the original core of the tell settlement. And, thirdly, the desire to be associated with previously occupied tells as much as kurgans leads to the use of flat settlement modes in the vicinity of pre-existing tell settlements. Our proposition is that significant sites and monuments contain within them the core of what is most important for the social reproduction of the group, the mechanism through which they define their community's place in time and space, especially in relation to their past. Given that the strategies of social reproduction will be reflexively related to the form of the site or monument, it follows that changes in the form of sites and monuments should be related 86 Jósa András Múzeum Évkönyve 1994