| Theory of Balkan Prehistory |
© 2008 International Institute of Anthropology
© 2008 Lolita Nikolova, PhD
Created: 10-03-09
© 2008 Lolita Nikolova, PhD
Created: 10-03-09
Comments, critics, suggestions
 | |  | |  | |  |
Please submit comments, critics or suggestions on Theory of Balkan Prehistory at
admin@iianthropology.org
Criteria: 1. Sufficient and correct theory. 2. Sufficient and correct record base. 3. Sufficient
and correct interpretation arguments.
John Chapman: Meet the ancestors: settlement histories in the
Neolithic. In: Bailey, Douglass, Alasdair Whittle and Daniela Hofmann
(Eds.) (2008). Living Well Together. Oxbow books (internal link), pp.
68-80.
Author's goal statement: To fill a major gap in research into Neolithic Settlement: the
definition of founder communities (p. 68).
Cited references: 51 titles (13.72% author's publications). Comment: the text does not
shows that all references were used in depth and comprehensively.
Author's result: No definition of founder communities in the conclusions (see pp. 78-79).
In the text "founder communities is replaced by three "kinds" of "pioneer communities" (p.
69) which are the main focus of the publication ("Three fuzzy set"): the single-household
site, the hamlet and the village (pp. 69-80). Comment: there are missing scholar criteria for
these classification, since 1. single-household site can be a hamlet. 2. What is difference
between hamlet and village - Can small village be named hamlet? 3. Single household site
is based on presumption of a social grouping, while hamlet and village are terms based on
archaeological criteria that characterized settlements. However, there is no definition of any
of the three component of his "fuzzy set" and the text is full with statements without
arguments
Main theoretical problems:
1. The hierarchy of the prehistoric settlements is very popular topic in archaeology and
anthropology. The problem is how to apply the theory. In regards to Balkan Prehistory, in
historiography is popular the typology of Timothy Taylor which was not cited by John
Chapman.
2. Going back to the so-called single household site, it cannot be included in hierarchical
system since one household can occupied even whole village, especially in the cases of
polygamous traditions. In archaeology we do use household as social unit for occupants of
a house since we do not know whether there was one or more families. However, vise virsa
makes no scholar sense since one household can occupies more than one house. It is
possibly "diminutive settlement" or "farm" that could help Chapman. However, there should
be clear archaeological criteria what one understands under different categories. What for
one researcher is hamlet, for another would be a small village (small settlement).
More critical is the statement that "in archaeological terms, the single-household site is a
small locate with either one or two structures or a small number of pits, and with material
remains consonant with small-scale deposition by a small group of people" (p. 69). As it as
clarified above, household is an anthropological category which is used in archaeology to
describe the habitants of one house. If we have 5 houses, we would presume five
households, but this is just one of the interpretation models. These houses can belong to
one and the same household. I do not know archaeological records that would limit the
archaeological conclusion to the simple formula only - 1-2 structures = single-household
site (p. 69).
3. Incorrect use of the archaeological arguments. Examples:
3.1. [Divostin]. Chapman (p. 69): Of the three phases of Starcevo occupation at Divostin,
Phases 1a and 1b represent deposition by a single household [reference to plan 1 in
McPherron and Srejovic 1988). Compare Melenko Bogdanovic in the same monograph [p.
35]: The Neolithic settlement of Divostin covers approximately 150,000 [sq. m]. Between
1967 and 1970, about 2,400 [sq. m] of the site were excavated...
3.2. [Rakitovo] [73-74]. cp. http://www.iianthropology.org/archbalkanrakitovo (text by Lolita
Nikolova from a manuscript deposited in the Library of the Archaeological Department at the
Faculty of History, Sofia University St. Kliment Okhridski (2005).
3.2.1. John Chapman states that Rakitovo started as a hamlet and developed as a village
(pp. 73-74). However,
1. According to Velichka Macanova, the village has earlier non-documented (destroyed)
habitation area that belongs to earlier Karanovo I culture.
2. J. Chapman limits himself to the criterion of number of houses, although Rakitovo shows
a model, when the number of houses increases but on one and the same territory. Then,
we have two different models - village with houses with courtyards and without courtyard.
However, when we think about pioneer communities (the topic of Chapman), it is possible
in the initial houses to have lived 2-3 families, although the next generations village to
include houses with 1-2 families. By all circumstances, the archaeological criterion of
hamlet and village (less houses and more houses) cannot be used for anthropological
conclusions. For the scale of Neolithic Rakitovo is a village and I cannot see any indication
that it was a hamlet. From the perspectives of the pioneer theory, it is critical to define the
earliest archaeologically documented village "pioneer community" since Macanova
proposed, there was earlier village in the completely destroyed area. In addition, J.
Chapman made a re-reconstruction of the stratigraphy and insists (p. 73) that there was
intermediate pit-phase. In my text from 2005 (internal link) I stressed on the fact, that there
was a pit overlapped by a house and based on the pattern of first pit-houses tradition in the
Central Balkans (see Neolithic in Serbia) I concluded that it is possible the series of pits
belonged to a earlier level defined by me as A3. However, the absence of detailed
documentation makes any statements about the stratigraphy very hypothetic since the pits
can be contemporary with the houses.
3. On the whole, Rakitovo does not support any theory of development of the pioneer
communities from hamlet communities toward village communities but shows one of the
settlement pattern in the Neolithic Balkans - increasing of the density and number of
houses on one and the same territory.
3.3 [Karanovo]. According to John Chapman, Karanovo represents the model of village
pioneers because of the 12-15 houses excavated "in the earliest Karanovo I occupation (p.
75). Tow static presumptions are theoretically unacceptable - the houses had one and the
same number of residents, and houses from one and the same stratigraphic level were
contemporary. First, the demography of villages changed and second, the excavations in the
Balkans do not document in details the microstratigraphy of the different settlement levels.
Re-discussion:
1. Chapman insists he presented three kinds of pioneer sites (p. 76) and most of the sites
"can be readily be placed in one of the three classes". As we attempted to show above with
a few instances, in fact the examples of Chapman to define the types are critical. Also, he
insists that a "new class of site" was defined - the pit-site (p. 76), although the foundation of
the prehistoric village as a pit-houses village is a pattern well documented and well known
by the Balkan prehistorians (see Neolithic in Serbia).
2. In fact in the section of discussion John Chapman does not discuss his previous
thoughts, but tries to add arguments that regretfully cannot help pioneer theory. For
instance, if the documentation of pits only means that "archaeologists have failed to dig in
places where houses are to be found) then, how such archaeological evidence define
"single household site"? Curiously, the defined in the text "single household site" shows in
Table 2 (p. 77) as the well known term "Homestead". Then, we must accept that both terms
are synonymous.
3. Obviously, John Chapman had a big trouble with Rakitovo, so in Table 2 levels A & C
were described as a hamlet but in Table 3 and in the most part of the text - as a hamlet and
a village.
Then, after all this mixture in the text and tables and so few instances used in the text, how
can we believe that "most sites can readily be placed in one of the three sites" (p. 76).
4. The important problem of the interrelation between these so-called pioneer types of
community was missed in the discussion since it would require a statistical data. Forever, if
we discuss the mechanism of Neolithization, how the community was organized appeared
to be of importance. While the theoretical model of Chapman derives from the well known
typologies of the settlements, in fact he missed to make the real contribution that one could
expect - which type dominated. His thoughts about the tells (p. 78) that began their life as
villages should mean that the third type would dominate in the regions of tells. Since
Rakitovo was a village according to the available data, it occurs that the so-called
single-household site (in fact Homestead) and hamlets appear to be either exception and
even not existed for some microregions.
5. In this work John Chapman continues to insists that the prehistoric people thought in
terms of sherds and used the sherds to express cultural memory. That author see "a good
example" at Endrod 119 and Fuzesabony-Gubakut, "where refitting of sherds between two
occupations phases documents specific historical links between two periods of dwelling:
most probably the keeping of ancestral sherds for display as tokens in a later dwelling
phase" (p. 78). My understanding in this case is that we face a overinterpretation of the
records without arguments. The sherds are popular in the villages and tells and one of the
main reason was that they were used as a building component (the base of hearths and
ovens, as well as tracing roads) and as water absorbing material (see Galina Belova 2008,
Malta EAA Abstracts).
In research problem in fact was missed - how the pioneer communities transmitted the
material culture and how they adapted their material culture pattern. But to pose this
problem, a researcher needs to use another framework - of primary (in fact real) pioneers
and turn to Hoca Cesme in the Balkan case, and in fact to discuss whether all first settlers
in the different microregion felt pioneers. It is possible the lands were well known and used
as interaction zone before the foundation of first villages. In fact there are thoughts about
interactions (p. 78) but they do not relate to the topic of pioneer communities.
Conclusion. Since the conclusions of John Chapman neither pose new problems nor help
to resolve the inner contradiction, we will limit our concluding consideration to the following:
1. There are two means to try to construct models about the Prehistory, in particular about
Balkan Prehistory - inductive and deductive.
2. Despite John Chapman gives a series of examples, in fact the discussed work is an
example of a deductive publication, in which the author failed to connect the theory and the
empirical material by systems of arguments and in such way to make the readers learn
more about the Neolithization as a complex process.
3. Despite Chapman thinks that this work fills a major gap - the definition of founder
communities, in fact it is again one of those writings that approaches how to understand but
does not help a lot to understand the complex Neolithization process. The main
weaknesses are the mixed and unclear theoretical criteria of classification, the absence of
statistical data and the limited general theoretical framework. The author would probably did
better if tries to follow the already well defined scholar directions in the context of problems
of colonization, adaptation, demographic boom and many other popular and widely
discussed problems in the modern historiography. For the time being, we can conclude that
his theoretical attempt neither proof nor reject that the popularization of the virgin and known
but non-occupied territories was well elaborated social strategies of bigger communities to
settle down in the new microregions followed by segmentation and further inner migration
process. In the context of the Balkans, we may need to distinguish two types of pioneers -
immigrant and local, but there are missing data that can help to propose more detailed
anthropological models.
admin@iianthropology.org
Criteria: 1. Sufficient and correct theory. 2. Sufficient and correct record base. 3. Sufficient
and correct interpretation arguments.
John Chapman: Meet the ancestors: settlement histories in the
Neolithic. In: Bailey, Douglass, Alasdair Whittle and Daniela Hofmann
(Eds.) (2008). Living Well Together. Oxbow books (internal link), pp.
68-80.
Author's goal statement: To fill a major gap in research into Neolithic Settlement: the
definition of founder communities (p. 68).
Cited references: 51 titles (13.72% author's publications). Comment: the text does not
shows that all references were used in depth and comprehensively.
Author's result: No definition of founder communities in the conclusions (see pp. 78-79).
In the text "founder communities is replaced by three "kinds" of "pioneer communities" (p.
69) which are the main focus of the publication ("Three fuzzy set"): the single-household
site, the hamlet and the village (pp. 69-80). Comment: there are missing scholar criteria for
these classification, since 1. single-household site can be a hamlet. 2. What is difference
between hamlet and village - Can small village be named hamlet? 3. Single household site
is based on presumption of a social grouping, while hamlet and village are terms based on
archaeological criteria that characterized settlements. However, there is no definition of any
of the three component of his "fuzzy set" and the text is full with statements without
arguments
Main theoretical problems:
1. The hierarchy of the prehistoric settlements is very popular topic in archaeology and
anthropology. The problem is how to apply the theory. In regards to Balkan Prehistory, in
historiography is popular the typology of Timothy Taylor which was not cited by John
Chapman.
2. Going back to the so-called single household site, it cannot be included in hierarchical
system since one household can occupied even whole village, especially in the cases of
polygamous traditions. In archaeology we do use household as social unit for occupants of
a house since we do not know whether there was one or more families. However, vise virsa
makes no scholar sense since one household can occupies more than one house. It is
possibly "diminutive settlement" or "farm" that could help Chapman. However, there should
be clear archaeological criteria what one understands under different categories. What for
one researcher is hamlet, for another would be a small village (small settlement).
More critical is the statement that "in archaeological terms, the single-household site is a
small locate with either one or two structures or a small number of pits, and with material
remains consonant with small-scale deposition by a small group of people" (p. 69). As it as
clarified above, household is an anthropological category which is used in archaeology to
describe the habitants of one house. If we have 5 houses, we would presume five
households, but this is just one of the interpretation models. These houses can belong to
one and the same household. I do not know archaeological records that would limit the
archaeological conclusion to the simple formula only - 1-2 structures = single-household
site (p. 69).
3. Incorrect use of the archaeological arguments. Examples:
3.1. [Divostin]. Chapman (p. 69): Of the three phases of Starcevo occupation at Divostin,
Phases 1a and 1b represent deposition by a single household [reference to plan 1 in
McPherron and Srejovic 1988). Compare Melenko Bogdanovic in the same monograph [p.
35]: The Neolithic settlement of Divostin covers approximately 150,000 [sq. m]. Between
1967 and 1970, about 2,400 [sq. m] of the site were excavated...
3.2. [Rakitovo] [73-74]. cp. http://www.iianthropology.org/archbalkanrakitovo (text by Lolita
Nikolova from a manuscript deposited in the Library of the Archaeological Department at the
Faculty of History, Sofia University St. Kliment Okhridski (2005).
3.2.1. John Chapman states that Rakitovo started as a hamlet and developed as a village
(pp. 73-74). However,
1. According to Velichka Macanova, the village has earlier non-documented (destroyed)
habitation area that belongs to earlier Karanovo I culture.
2. J. Chapman limits himself to the criterion of number of houses, although Rakitovo shows
a model, when the number of houses increases but on one and the same territory. Then,
we have two different models - village with houses with courtyards and without courtyard.
However, when we think about pioneer communities (the topic of Chapman), it is possible
in the initial houses to have lived 2-3 families, although the next generations village to
include houses with 1-2 families. By all circumstances, the archaeological criterion of
hamlet and village (less houses and more houses) cannot be used for anthropological
conclusions. For the scale of Neolithic Rakitovo is a village and I cannot see any indication
that it was a hamlet. From the perspectives of the pioneer theory, it is critical to define the
earliest archaeologically documented village "pioneer community" since Macanova
proposed, there was earlier village in the completely destroyed area. In addition, J.
Chapman made a re-reconstruction of the stratigraphy and insists (p. 73) that there was
intermediate pit-phase. In my text from 2005 (internal link) I stressed on the fact, that there
was a pit overlapped by a house and based on the pattern of first pit-houses tradition in the
Central Balkans (see Neolithic in Serbia) I concluded that it is possible the series of pits
belonged to a earlier level defined by me as A3. However, the absence of detailed
documentation makes any statements about the stratigraphy very hypothetic since the pits
can be contemporary with the houses.
3. On the whole, Rakitovo does not support any theory of development of the pioneer
communities from hamlet communities toward village communities but shows one of the
settlement pattern in the Neolithic Balkans - increasing of the density and number of
houses on one and the same territory.
3.3 [Karanovo]. According to John Chapman, Karanovo represents the model of village
pioneers because of the 12-15 houses excavated "in the earliest Karanovo I occupation (p.
75). Tow static presumptions are theoretically unacceptable - the houses had one and the
same number of residents, and houses from one and the same stratigraphic level were
contemporary. First, the demography of villages changed and second, the excavations in the
Balkans do not document in details the microstratigraphy of the different settlement levels.
Re-discussion:
1. Chapman insists he presented three kinds of pioneer sites (p. 76) and most of the sites
"can be readily be placed in one of the three classes". As we attempted to show above with
a few instances, in fact the examples of Chapman to define the types are critical. Also, he
insists that a "new class of site" was defined - the pit-site (p. 76), although the foundation of
the prehistoric village as a pit-houses village is a pattern well documented and well known
by the Balkan prehistorians (see Neolithic in Serbia).
2. In fact in the section of discussion John Chapman does not discuss his previous
thoughts, but tries to add arguments that regretfully cannot help pioneer theory. For
instance, if the documentation of pits only means that "archaeologists have failed to dig in
places where houses are to be found) then, how such archaeological evidence define
"single household site"? Curiously, the defined in the text "single household site" shows in
Table 2 (p. 77) as the well known term "Homestead". Then, we must accept that both terms
are synonymous.
3. Obviously, John Chapman had a big trouble with Rakitovo, so in Table 2 levels A & C
were described as a hamlet but in Table 3 and in the most part of the text - as a hamlet and
a village.
Then, after all this mixture in the text and tables and so few instances used in the text, how
can we believe that "most sites can readily be placed in one of the three sites" (p. 76).
4. The important problem of the interrelation between these so-called pioneer types of
community was missed in the discussion since it would require a statistical data. Forever, if
we discuss the mechanism of Neolithization, how the community was organized appeared
to be of importance. While the theoretical model of Chapman derives from the well known
typologies of the settlements, in fact he missed to make the real contribution that one could
expect - which type dominated. His thoughts about the tells (p. 78) that began their life as
villages should mean that the third type would dominate in the regions of tells. Since
Rakitovo was a village according to the available data, it occurs that the so-called
single-household site (in fact Homestead) and hamlets appear to be either exception and
even not existed for some microregions.
5. In this work John Chapman continues to insists that the prehistoric people thought in
terms of sherds and used the sherds to express cultural memory. That author see "a good
example" at Endrod 119 and Fuzesabony-Gubakut, "where refitting of sherds between two
occupations phases documents specific historical links between two periods of dwelling:
most probably the keeping of ancestral sherds for display as tokens in a later dwelling
phase" (p. 78). My understanding in this case is that we face a overinterpretation of the
records without arguments. The sherds are popular in the villages and tells and one of the
main reason was that they were used as a building component (the base of hearths and
ovens, as well as tracing roads) and as water absorbing material (see Galina Belova 2008,
Malta EAA Abstracts).
In research problem in fact was missed - how the pioneer communities transmitted the
material culture and how they adapted their material culture pattern. But to pose this
problem, a researcher needs to use another framework - of primary (in fact real) pioneers
and turn to Hoca Cesme in the Balkan case, and in fact to discuss whether all first settlers
in the different microregion felt pioneers. It is possible the lands were well known and used
as interaction zone before the foundation of first villages. In fact there are thoughts about
interactions (p. 78) but they do not relate to the topic of pioneer communities.
Conclusion. Since the conclusions of John Chapman neither pose new problems nor help
to resolve the inner contradiction, we will limit our concluding consideration to the following:
1. There are two means to try to construct models about the Prehistory, in particular about
Balkan Prehistory - inductive and deductive.
2. Despite John Chapman gives a series of examples, in fact the discussed work is an
example of a deductive publication, in which the author failed to connect the theory and the
empirical material by systems of arguments and in such way to make the readers learn
more about the Neolithization as a complex process.
3. Despite Chapman thinks that this work fills a major gap - the definition of founder
communities, in fact it is again one of those writings that approaches how to understand but
does not help a lot to understand the complex Neolithization process. The main
weaknesses are the mixed and unclear theoretical criteria of classification, the absence of
statistical data and the limited general theoretical framework. The author would probably did
better if tries to follow the already well defined scholar directions in the context of problems
of colonization, adaptation, demographic boom and many other popular and widely
discussed problems in the modern historiography. For the time being, we can conclude that
his theoretical attempt neither proof nor reject that the popularization of the virgin and known
but non-occupied territories was well elaborated social strategies of bigger communities to
settle down in the new microregions followed by segmentation and further inner migration
process. In the context of the Balkans, we may need to distinguish two types of pioneers -
immigrant and local, but there are missing data that can help to propose more detailed
anthropological models.
| Chapman 2008:77, Table 3. Fragment Rakitovo Reinterpretation of the stratigraphy by Chapman: A - Houses + pits B - pits C - houses Comments: There are missing precise stratigraphic data about the excavated structures at Rakitovo. If we follow the plans, we must assume the pits preceded the earlier house-level that can be confirmed by the fact that one house overlapped a pit (internal link in Bulgarian). In other words, there are no archaeological arguments about the so-called pit-phase (B) proposed by John Chapman. As a rule, the pit-houses typify the earliest settlement levels of the Balkan Neolithic sites. Also, it is non-logical to presume that there was pit phase at Rakitovo, since there is no close settlement where would the community moved and there is no single insatnce in the Balkans either for a transition from surface houses to pit-houses nor for using of a village in earlier Neolithic for a cult place with pits and then re-using for a village. |