Social Relations

Settlement evidence

What we have learnt so far, is that almost all Neolithic settlements in Greece appear to be small, probably confined by face-to-face social controls. Social fission encouraged radial colonization of the most fertile landscapes, but more linear or patchy expansion in regions less suitable for the technology and economy of the EN-MN phases. Although stable location tells and shifting flat sites represent alternative modes of settlement and land use, they have a similar range of crops and animals, whilst larger flat sites have comparable population estimates to tells. A third settlement mode combines the two, with a focal tell or flat site with longer use surrounded by less fixed farm or hamlet sites. All these forms generally needed to exchange marriage partners with comparable settlements or settlement clusters, to create a healthy gene pool. The lack of clearly defensive walls and ditches until occasional MN examples and then commoner LN occurrences, suggests that settlements achieved the peaceful intercommunity relations needed both for exogamy and for the flows of imports and visiting specialists testified to in the lithic record. The limited role of ceramics in EN and still to a large extent in MN times, focused on communal eating and drinking, has plausibly been seen as a mechanism through which households within nucleated settlements, and neighboring communities,

Renewed good social ties. But if social fission was the dominant means of settlement colonization, then one’s neighbors were often relatives, and even if not originally, the multi-community breeding

Group soon created kinship webs through constant exogamy.

The plans of nucleated settlements, tell and flat, are seen as emphasizing the competitive household, a model reinforced if we add satellite farms in some neighborhoods (neglected since their detection requires unusually fine-focus surface survey). But how did nucleated sites, and the satellite networks around nucleated settlements, achieve social integration? In the Neolithic Near East, one or more larger or otherwise special houses are claimed as facilities where many households met for social and ritual activities. Such features are hard to identify in the excavated plans for Neolithic Greece. One exception is the “shrine” at EN Nea Nikomedeia (Pyke and Yiouni 1996), a central larger structure with unusual finds, including fine exotic axes. However Halstead (1995a) wonders if this is a precocious example of a household with special status, controlling the exchange of imports, and thus a first link in his evolutionary model which accounts for the less controversial elite enclosures in Sesklo, or at Dhimini, in MN and LN Thessaly. At MN Sesklo there might be a communal structure on the acropolis and another in the Lower Town, distinctive through possessing three entry doors, if small (Nanoglou 2001). EN-MN house models include several examples with four doors, again perhaps for public use.

The narrow built-up spaces of tells suggest that normally important village-wide or intervillage social events took place extramurally, but the large flat sites would have ideal spaces between their loose networks of houses, and indeed it is at one, Makriyalos, that the excavators found feasting debris (Pappa and Besios 1999). In the nucleation—satellite form of settlement, we have suggested for Central and Southern Greece that the larger focal site might be a social center for outlying farms and hamlets rather than a locus of district power, essential to the social and economic reproduction of such a network. In contrast, the latter (power focus) interpretation better suits MN Sesklo. This seems large enough to have formed an endoga-mous society, and here Kotsakis has argued (1999) that the supposed elite enclosure of the acropolis, with its tell-like permanent dwellings, is surrounded by a very extensive Lower Town of shifting flat-site type; here the relationship of satellite settlement to the fixed tell nucleation might be one of subordination.

Rarely in MN and more commonly in LN times, appear two surely linked phenomena: possible defensive features and elite residences or enclosures. Contemporaneously, the restricted role for ceramics opens up progressively to cover the full range of household needs, suggesting a decline in the centrality of communal dining. Some fine wares which are exchanged around wide areas have even been claimed to show the economic reach of influential chieftains or Big Men, while their distribution within MN Sesklo suggests privileged access for the occupants of the elite enclosure over those in the Lower Town. The advent of the great “2PR” transformation in the agropastoral economy which occurred most likely in LN and FN times must have stimulated major changes in the socio-political sphere, and one wonders if all these trends are not linked in a highly causative fashion.

The surprise, difficult to assimilate into our social reconstructions, is the case made by Perles with regard to chipped stone and macrolithic tools, for an early division of labor, on the scale of Neolithic Greece as a whole, into consumer rural settlements on the one hand, and mobile procurers, distributors, and on-site artifact makers on the other. The best clue to the origins of such a system, she hypothesizes, lies in the evidence from the Final Palaeolithic for the start of such economic specialization, suggesting that acculturated foragers were the principal community who developed this way of life. In any case, these specialists probably worked seasonally so as to be able still to maintain their own subsistence economy.

Burial evidence

Archaeologists generally view the form and elaboration of mortuary rituals as highly insightful for shedding light on the social relations of the living (Parker Pearson 1999). In an excellent synthesis of the burial record for prehistoric Greece, Cavanagh and Mee (1998) highlight the extraordinary rarity of Neolithic mortuary evidence. Demoule and Perles (1993) link Greek customs to those general in the contemporary North Balkans: a very low visibility of the dead in EN and MN, a lack of defined cemeteries or funerary monuments, small numbers of burials inside the village (“intramural”), usually under house floors, and no emphasis on status. Only by the FN is there a general shift, with community cemeteries appearing outside the settlement (such as at Kephala on the Cycladic island of Kea), a practice normal for the subsequent Early Bronze Age in most of Greece. Over the same LN-FN period, the wider use of caves includes many functioning as burial locations.

In the early farming era of the Near East, burial beneath the house is often read as stressing the importance of the family, or perhaps a larger kin group. Their occurrence would suit the view that tell villages in Greece are amalgamations of competing families. Yet a central problem lies in what is not visible to us, raising the point made at the start of this section on the obscuring as well as illuminating potential of the mortuary sphere. The number of intramural burials is very low, and where palaeodemographic studies are available women and children are emphasized. The vast majority of the village dead are simply missing. It is more likely that the minority placed in the houses are the exceptions to customary ritual, than that these are the key individuals in the social world (Perles 2001). Perhaps the nature of their death, or their passing away at a certain stage of the family or house-construction cycle, marked them out for exclusion from normal community practice. And what might the latter have been?

One idea is that the dead were normally disposed of outside the tell. A chance discovery at Souphli tell in Thessaly has indeed revealed an extramural cremation cemetery. Further support comes from the extended settlement at the giant flat site of Makriyalos in Macedonia (Kotsakis 1999; Pappa and Besios1999), where the excavated settlement includes ditches and open spaces between house clusters. In the ditches parts of human bodies have been recovered, which Kotsakis interprets as a sign that the dead are merged into the soil of the whole community rather than isolated as house burials or into a communal burial-place. These new results may weaken the supposed opposition between tell individualism and the supposed more communal extended sites, since the Souphli cemetery, if other examples emerge, surely anticipates the FN-EBA extramural cemeteries, generally seen as reflecting village solidarity.