The Life and Times of the House: Multi-Scalar Perspectives on Settlement from the Neolithic of the Northern Alpine Foreland

Abstract

The settlement record of the Neolithic of the northern Alpine foreland is used to address the question of what difference having high-resolution chronology — in this case principally provided by dendrochronology — makes to the kinds of narrative we seek to write about the Neolithic. In a search for detailed histories, three kinds of scale are examined. The longer-term development of cultural patterns and boundaries is found to correlate very imprecisely with the character and architecture of settlements. Individual houses and settlements were generally short-lived, suggesting considerable fluidity in social relations at the local level. Greater continuity can be found in the landscape, perhaps involving more than individual communities. We argue that the particular history of the northern Alpine foreland is best understood by interweaving multiple temporal scales, an approach that will need to be extended to other case studies.

Les données fournies par les habitats néolithiques du nord des Alpes sont à la base d'une enquête cherchant à établir quelle différence une chronologie de haute précision — s'appuyant ici en grande partie sur la dendrochronologie — peut-elle faire quand il s'agit d’écrire l'histoire du Néolithique. Nous examinons trois types d’échelle qui pourraient contribuer à produire des récits plus étoffés. Le développement sur la longue durée de tendances et de cadres culturels ne semble correspondre qu'approximativement au caractère et à l'architecture des sites d'habitat. En général les maisons et les habitats individuels étaient occupés sur de courtes durées, ce qui indiquerait un large degré de fluidité dans les relations sociales au niveau local. Par contre on observe plus d’éléments de continuité dans les campagnes environnantes, ce qui suggèrerait l'engagement de plusieurs communautés. Nous soutenons que dans le cas du nord de l'arc Alpin l'histoire gagne à être appréhendée par l'utilisation de plusieurs échelles temporelles mais qu'il faudra étendre cette approche à d'autres études de cas. Translation by Madeleine Hummler.

Am Beispiel der neolithischen Siedlungen des nördlichen Alpenvorlandes wird dargelegt, welchen Einfluss jahresgenaue Chronologien — in diesem Fall auf dendrochronologischer Basis — auf unsere Interpretationen der neolithischen Gesellschaft haben. Mit dem Ziel, eine detaillierte Vor-Geschichte zu schreiben, werden drei Ebenen beleuchtet. Langzeitentwicklungen kultureller Muster und Grenzen korrelieren nur ungenau mit dem Charakter der Siedlungen und dem Hausbau. Häuser und Siedlungen waren gewöhnlich kurzlebig, was auf beträchtliche Flexibilität der sozialen Beziehungen auf lokaler Ebene hinweist. Mehr Kontinuität findet sich in der Landschaft oder Siedlungskammer, wobei hier wahrscheinlich mehr als nur eine Siedlungsgemeinschaft involviert war. Die historische Entwicklung im nördlichen Alpenvorland lässt sich allerdings am besten nachzeichnen, wenn die verschiedenen zeitlichen Ebenen miteinander verwoben werden, ein Ansatz, der sich auch auf andere Fallbeispiele ausdehnen lässt.

Keywords:

• Neolithic
• northern Alpine foreland
• architecture
• impermanence
• settlement archaeology
• lakeshore settlements
• time scales
• dendrochronology

Mots-clés:

• Néolithique
• arc Alpin
• Suisse
• Allemagne du sud
• France de l'est
• caractère éphémère
• archéologie des habitats
• habitats lacustres
• bords de lacs
• échelles chronologiques
• dendrochronologie

Stichworte:

• Neolithikum
• nördliches Alpenvorland
• Architektur
• Unbeständigkeit
• Siedlungsarchäologie
• Seeufersiedlungen
• zeitliche Ebenen
• Dendrochronologie

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alex Bayliss, Albert Hafner, Stefanie Jacomet, Urs Leuzinger, Pierre Pétrequin, Jörg Schibler, and Werner Stöckli for their constructive criticism of an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to Ian Dennis and Kirsty Harding for their help with the figures. Finally, we thank the four anonymous reviewers whose comments have greatly improved the overall argument of the paper.

Notes

1 The Times of Their Lives project (www.totl.eu).

2 Following international scientific convention (Mook, 1986), we use bc for dendrochronological dates, and cal bc for calibrated radiocarbon dates. We refer to larger spans of time principally in cal bc terms (generally estimated informally), whereas site biographies are normally discussed in bc terms (and based on detailed dendrochronological analysis). For further discussion of correlations between the two, see Stöckli (2009).

3 Case studies will of necessity be very selective, as it is rare to have high-quality data for both architecture and finds from the same site. In addition, preliminary site reports must be treated with caution, as only definitive dendrochronological study can reveal short gaps in site sequences and variability between houses (see Leuzinger, 2000: 175; Bleicher, 2009b: 239). We concentrate on settlements and houses for which we have checked the available evidence and consider the results to be reasonably well established. Also, we are aware that identifying house plans in extensive, multi-phase sites with many posts is a problem; for further discussion see Ebersbach et al. (2015).

4 The influence of taphonomy, while crucial, cannot be addressed in this paper. It is however being tackled in a new project funded by the Swiss National Research Council (SNF), ‘Formation and taphonomy of archaeological wetland deposits: two transdisciplinary case studies and their impact on lake shore archaeology’, at the IPAS in Basel.

5 Although of course not everyone agrees that life was constantly precarious, the idea that the use of wild resources only increases in times of need remains (see, e.g. Jacomet et al., 2004: 396–97).

6 Nor is permanence crucial to the definition of a village. Other than size (of more than 20 houses or more than 50 inhabitants), Rathbone (2013: 41) merely cites the proviso that a ‘village’ should be inhabited year-round, even if only by a part of its population during some periods. It is on this basis that the term is occasionally retained here to refer to the collectivity beyond the cluster of two to three buildings.

7 As is currently being attempted for Arbon Bleiche 3 using isotopic analyses (www.i-bone.ch).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniela Hofmann

Daniela Hofmann is a junior professor at Hamburg University, but has spent much of her professional career in the UK. There, she completed her PhD (Cardiff, 2006) and worked on research projects centred on isotopic analyses and radiocarbon dating, but her interests also comprise Neolithic architecture, burial rites, anthropomorphic figurines, and culture change, with a special focus on the early Neolithic of central Europe.

Renate Ebersbach

Renate Ebersbach is an associate professor at Basel University, where she did her PhD (1999). Her research is centred on the Neolithic of central Europe, focussing both on archaeological and archaeobiological topics. Current research comprises Alpine foreland pile dwellings.

Thomas Doppler

Thomas Doppler is a research associate at Basel University, who completed his PhD in 2010. In his research, he focuses on Neolithic archaeology, wetland archaeology, bioarchaeology, stable isotope analysis and social archaeology.

Alasdair Whittle

Alasdair Whittle is a distinguished research professor at Cardiff University, where has worked since 1978, and a fellow of the British Academy. He has researched extensively across many dimensions of the Neolithic in Europe. Currently, he is leading the ERC-funded The Times of Their Lives project (2012–17) with Alex Bayliss of Historic England.