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 of the mortuary domain for the ideological aims of different groups, stimulated by the adoption of new attitudes to bodies, linear irreversible time and linearity of space. It is also in times of greatest social conflict that there is the most obvious overlap of the life-cycles of persons and artifacts through deposition of grave goods with individual burials. The Tiszapolgár-Basatanya and Tibava cemeteries are the most extreme examples of the death of a marked diversity and quantity of prestige metalwork and many other materials to provide a clear mortuary message about the struggle for social dominance amongst the living. Rich cemeteries remind us that the physical form of sites and monuments is not the only way in which tradition is mediated and manipulated. The houses and other structures which dominate the built space of tells and farmsteads alike are some of the most potent forces for the display, embellishment and denial of tradition. Similarly, the artifacts which are so profilic in quantity and diversity in Hungarian prehistory provide extraordinarily potent media for the display of individuals' affiliations to past, present and future. Style is the means by which current strategies are negotiated with recourse to traditional values. Conclusions In conclusion, we suggest that this study has demonstrated the utility of the concept of arenas of social power in the conceptualisation of social change in the landscape. The alternation of emphasis on mortuary and domestic arenas is a characteristic of many long-terms sequences in European prehistory but rarely so evident as in Eastern Hungary. The creation of social power in small-scale communities rested on differential use of the economic and ritual possibilities inherent in the domestic landscape and the wildwood, as well as very different classifications of the natural and cultural world in which all the communities were embedded. The increasing scale of social interaction in exchange and alliance networks led to the creation of novel opportunities for social change in the context of an often hostile traditional ideology. In this sense, the linkage of both internal and external sources of social change are inevitable if we are to develop an integrated approach to the study of the Neolithic and Copper Age of Eastern Hungary. We may end with a caveat related to the scale of social action. The long-term sequences for which we have studies were neither necessary nor inevitable but relied on small-scale, often cumulative changes in short-term social action as well as the structural constraints of the medium-term and long-term. These short-term changes are particularly significant in the creation of new arenas of social power. For example, the first burial which made use of novel mortuary rites would always have been a critical step in the unintended sequence of subsequent events, though only with hindsight could it be seen as the start of a tradition which has survived for recognition in the archaeological record. The most optimistic principle of interpretation is that only those innovations which gain lasting social significance survive in the archaeological record at all. We must not delude ourselves that this is always the case! Acknowledgements I am happy to acknowledge the financial support for the ongoing Upper Tisza Project (1991-): the National Geographic Society, the British Academy, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Research Committee of the University of Newcastle and the Prehistoric Society. It has been a source of great strength to have received support for these bodies from David Harris, John D. Evans, Anthony Harding, Jimmy Griffin, Bernard Wailes and Greg Johnson. I am more than grateful to all my co-workers on this project for discussing and criticising these ideas, the most important of whom are Robert Shiel, Sándor Bökönyi, István Bona, Pál Raczky and József Laszlovszky. I received invaluable comments on the problems of purity and pollution, on linear and cyclical time and on many aspects of the interpretation of the data sets from Mike Rowlands. Helpful comments on earlier drafts of this research have also been made by Bob Layton, John Bintliff, Paul Halstead, John Barrett, Chris Smith, Marek Zvelebil, Diane Whatley, Elizabeth Rega and Colm O'Brien. What is left that does not convince is my problem. 88 Jósa András Múzeum Évkönyve 1994