This beautifully produced, well-illustrated, traditionally structured, and data-packed monograph brings mature American processualism to European prehistory, which has moved on in both interpretation and multiple scales of vision. The basic concept is that the explanation of the recurrent change from interregionally connected object-richer nucleated settlements to regionally integrated object-poorer dispersed settlements is transferable from a small lowland area in Hungary to other contexts, potentially worldwide. The premise of interpreting the excavations is “you get what you see”—a reflectionist view of the past, in which interpretations can be read directly off excavation detail. But can concept and premise be challenged?
The Körös Regional Archaeology Project (KRAP, 1998–2007) focused on communities after the establishment of farming and before the onset of institutionalized central authorities (aka chiefdoms). Four facets of the transition from the Neolithic to the Copper Age (4600–4400 cal BC) were studied in southeast Hungary: settlement duration and settlement organization, subsistence, and resource acquisition. The paucity of excavations on Early Copper Age (ECA) settlements prior to this project meant many “firsts” for the project team through their excavations at two sites located 70 m apart on opposite sides of a stream, including Vésztő-Bikeri (VB) and Körösladány-Bikeri (KB). The first achievement was the rejection of traditional hypotheses “explaining” the transition, such as Indo-European invasions and climatic change.
The most surprising finding from paleoenvironmental investigations of the region's mosaic-type landscape was the long-term stability of the river network over the past eight millennia, with far less flooding capacity than previously thought. Data from the project reported here have enabled the replacement of the old idea of ECA sites as short-term, seasonal pastoralist camps with a more complex picture of a network of year-round, multigenerational fortified “villages” of several dozen people coeval with rare tell occupations and a plethora of unfortified single-extended-family hamlets. Also new is the continuation of a Late Neolithic intramural burial tradition into the ECA, in parallel with the novel formal extramural cemeteries. The implication is that there was much more space-time variability in practices than previously imagined, although Parkinson's earlier idea of the breakup of large Late Neolithic nucleated settlements consisting of multiple household clusters into individual households forming dispersed ECA settlements remains the fundamental insight for settlement pattern change. Yet, the insistence on the almost Childean autonomy and self-sufficiency of these villages ignores the fundamental need for mating networks linking dozens of villages and maybe hundreds of hamlets—a biosocial requirement for stable settlement underpinning all regional networks and beyond.
Settlement duration was approached through 32 AMS dates—regrettably not explored through Bayesian modeling—which demonstrated overlapping occupations of VB and KB in the forty-fifth to forty-third centuries cal BC, with the possibility of forty-sixth-century dates at KB (although the text is contradictory on this point). Multiple lines of investigation (pottery, lithics, subsistence) suggested that the same community lived in both settlements, although the implications for the collection and reuse of resources (lithics, timber) are hardly explored.
The structure of the two villages was suggested by geochemical, geophysical, and gridded surface collection data and confirmed by excavation: a central area with a well and houses (at VB) or without (at KB), surrounded by a ring midden and bounded by a double ditch-and-palisade defense. The VB houses were larger than expected for the ECA, but their one-room form lacked ovens, hearths, and storage bins. Craft production showed household differences, with textile production suggested for Feature 5 and antler arrowhead making in Feature 4/14. Little is made of the deliberate practice of house burning at VB, which would have provided a multisensual spectacle for visitors and residents alike.
Project recovery techniques of sieving and flotation produced a large faunal sample of almost 50,000 items, with fragmentation reducing the total identifiable to species to more than 10,000 items. The two site assemblages were almost identical for butchering techniques, age profiles, and a mixed-herd, meat-based strategy with a minor emphasis on dairying and little hunting—although more ovicaprines were butchered at KB than at VB. The broad-spectrum plants comprising wheats, legumes, wild plants with medicinal properties, and fruits and nuts showed the use of all parts of the mosaic-like local environment, whereas the increased density of plant remains at KB is interpreted as an intensification of barley production for exchange.
The local resources available for exchange for exotic metal and lithics were limited to pottery, barley, stock, and antler arrowheads. Impressive scientific characterization studies using TOF-LA-ICPO-MS demonstrated the exchange of pottery across distances up to 50–100 km from specific sites, whereas the intensively reduced lithics showed low-bulk exchange from the Apuşeni Mountains, Serbia, and North and West Hungary (a map of sources would have helped!). Copper and gold were also imported, showing that the much more intensive Late Neolithic interregional exchange networks had survived in attenuated form. One would hardly expect more for dispersed village sites, yet, in the succeeding Middle Copper Age (MCA), Bodrogkeresztúr pottery would be exchanged as far as the Baltic shores, and a clay mold for an MCA shaft-hole axe turned up in an Iranian tell!
KRAP and the coauthors of this volume are to be complimented for providing a new vision of ECA settlements and social practices, which showed far more continuity with the Late Neolithic than had been previously expected. Yet, their answer to the big question of whether these dispersed sites retained the Neolithic territorial organization or developed new, larger-scale sociopolitical structures remains hazy; without a clearer answer, we cannot hope to extrapolate the Körös regional case to wider contexts. And without tackling the taphonomic issues of house burning, we remain uncertain about some of the other household practices on the Körös River in the fifth millennium cal BC.
