Pal Patay. Kupferzeitliche Siedlung von Tiszaluc.

Chapman, John

PAL PATAY. Kupferzeitliche Siedlung von Tiszaluc (Inventaria Praehistorica Hungariae XI). 208 pages, 82 figures, 55 plates, tables. 2005. Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Muzeum; 96-3706-1150 paperback.

The report from the Later Copper Age (henceforth LCA) settlement of Tiszaluc is a most welcome addition to settlement studies in Central and South East Europe. The main author is the doyen of the Hungarian Copper Age--Pal Patay, now moving effortlessly towards his ninetieth birthday, having started work in the Hungarian National Museum before most readers of this review were born. Until the large-scale motorway rescue excavations of the 1990s and 2000s, no LCA settlement had been explored on such a scale as Tiszaluc. Tiszaluc shows that not all settlements in this period were dispersed homesteads of single families who met formally only at births, deaths and marriages. The site plan looks more like a nucleated village of both earlier (Late Neolithic) and later (Early Bronze Age) periods in the prehistory of the Great Hungarian Plain--it does not fit easily into our general accounts of this period. This volume provides an account of such an intriguing phenomenon.

Seven chapters make up the report. Chapter 1 presents the site, its cultural and chronological context, the working methods and the contributors to the volume; a full description of the excavated features--the palisades, the buildings, the structures, the pits and the hearths (Chapter 2), and of two LCA burials (Chapter 3) follow. The finds--of copper, silver, worked bone and antler, the lithics, the ground and polished stone, the pottery, other fired clay objects, the two figurines, the ornaments, and the animal bones--occupy Chapters 4 and 5. Tiszaluc is set in the wider context (Chapter 6) before a concluding chapter (7). Three appendices deal with artefactual material. As may be imagined, the emphasis is on the houses, the pottery typology and the relative chronology, although a handful of [sup.14]C dates put the main LCA occupation at 3980-3640 cal BC.

There is nothing fancy about this report--just good, basic data produced by careful hand-excavation spread over 17 years (1974-1990). A cemetery of the eleventh century AD, whose graves cut a few Copper Age houses, complicates the stratigraphy somewhat. There were also 22 Earliest Bronze Age pits, and in the northern sector, erosion had affected some features. Otherwise, their dark fill showed up clearly against the yellow loessic substrate.

The settlement was enclosed by a palisade, whose trench was up to 1m deep, with one entrance in the southern sector and a lightly built watch-tower in the south-western sector. Because the palisade-trench cut Neolithic pits and was in turn cut by EBA pits, its Copper Age date was confirmed. There is a hint of a second palisade inside the main palisade--but only in the south-east corner. The dating of this post-line is no clearer than that of the main palisade--there is an urgent need for AMS dates for both features.

A total of 45 rectangular structures was excavated inside the palisade: complete structures are termed 'houses' (Nos. 1-31), incomplete ones 'buildings' (A-M; X is multi-period). The plan (Beilage 3) gives the clearest impression of a complex village with many overlapping house/building-plans. Predominantly oriented east-west, these houses range from square, 1-room 6 x 6m houses to 12 x 7.5m 2-room houses. House 24 was built on a totally different orientation (SW-NE). About half of the buildings showed intersections with another structure: in one case, four structures overlapped each other (21, 30, 31 and H), and there was one instance of a complete, triple superposition (15, 16 and D). While different from Bailey's narratives of house re-building on Bulgarian tells, such superimposition provides a whole series of local micro-sequences showing the use of space inherited from the ancestors. Taking such multiphasing into account, the maximum number of coeval houses would be 30 rather than 45. The closest comparandum comes not from Hungary but from the LCA (Karanovo-V and Karanovo-VI) enclosed phases of the tell occupation at Drama-Medzhumekja, in South East Bulgaria, where a cluster of houses is enclosed by a C-shaped open ditch with associated palisade.

Pits are a perennial feature of Hungarian excavations and one glance at Beilage 1 shows that the village was awash with cut features! The primary function of many of these was clay extraction for house walls, the secondary usage being for household 'refuse'. Two pits contained hearths, several pits contained burnt daub lumps and a single pit (286/A) had a burnt layer near the base, incorporating burnt human bones as what we would term structured deposition. Patay notes 45 cases where thick (8-10cm) layers of river shells were found in pits: these shell-layers show more intensive usage (perhaps feasting) than in the Boleraz settlement pits at Gyor-Szabadet-domb, where freshwater mussels were deposited during flooding. What is not clear from the site plan is the relation (chronological, functional, social) of the pits to the houses--a vital issue for understanding the time-depth of the settlement and its spatial structure.

There are only four intra-mural burials, all of children and with considerable variability. One burial has two silver pendants placed beneath the skull; three of the burials were inside the palisade but each some distance from a house, while Burial B15 was placed 15m outside the palisade. Patay notes the contrast with Neolithic burials in or under the house floor, with no trace of construction sacrifices in the LCA. This suggests that personhood in the later period was based upon different relations than in the Neolithic--a relationship now more distant from the domestic setting.

Though a complex numbering system was devised for the excavation (Abb. 3), and the finds are reported in great detail, their primary recording system is the National Museum Inventory Number. Hence, with some exceptions (e.g. the metal finds and the grave goods), it is not possible to relate the finds to their context of discovery. This is perhaps the most serious deficiency of the report; without a pleasurable but time-consuming visit to Budapest, we cannot discover the contents of House 1 or of Pit 286/A. It is perhaps unrealistic to have expected the excavator to instigate a contextual archaeology at the time ... but the loss is serious: only too rarely is any linkage to social practices possible. An excellent exception is the ceramic refitting exercise completed for all 22 510 LCA sherds. Patay reports that many re-fitted sherds derived from contexts quite far apart, and provides two examples. The full publication of this fragmentation research would be all the more valuable since it concerns a completely excavated settlement.

A thorough typological study of the forms of the restored 130 vessel sample examines shapes which include bowls (5 types), few dishes (2), beakers (4), cups (2), rectangular-mouthed forms (4), amphorae (4), lids (3), a 'Baden'-type submarine and many miniature vessels; footed forms and lids indicates precision of shaping and a sense of geometric thinking; vessels made in multiple parts are comparatively rare. Most forms have a limited size range, one exception being the rectangular-mouthed trough. Decoration is often similarly limited to one or two shape types, for example the channelling found on black burnished ware. 'Artistic' objects (Chapter 5) are few, with elaborate lids and only two figurines, in strong contrast to Late Neolithic aesthetics. It is rare to find copper objects on a settlement, and thus unfortunate that no provenance analysis was carried out on a range of small tools (2 chisels, 3 blades/blade fragments, 5 awls and one copper wire) derived more from pits than from the settlement layer and not at all from houses. Bone and antler remains consisted of a narrow range of forms (predominantly bone awls, a handful of perforated fishing-spears), quite different from the Late Neolithic biserial antler harpoons, bone chisel and antler production debitage. The chipped stone consisted of less than 10 per cent obsidian, often used for sickle blades, and the remainder of flint and hydroquartzite from the North Hungarian Mid-Mountains. The full range of lithic production and consumption is documented, in all raw material categories. Polished stone axes, chisels and shaft-hole axes, as well as the sandstone grinding stones, were made from rocks common in the Matra-Tokaj ranges, some 60km to the north, with the likelihood of some imports from further afield in Transylvania. A short but intriguing report on the faunal remains by Istvan Voros reveals exotic species such as elk, Persian lion and Mesopotamian fallow deer, alongside local large and small herbivores. The predominance of domestic and wild cattle and red deer over caprines and suids may not have been solely a sign of the lack of sieving on site.

Thus, Tiszaluc is a valuable, rare example of an enclosed, nucleated, non-tell settlement with a far narrower range of material culture than that found on the tells that preceded and post-dated its occupation in the early fourth millennium cal BC. The place chosen for the site was an ancestral place, for it had already been occupied in the Middle Neolithic, with its domestic and mortuary deposition. The range of sites and cultural groups used in Patay's comparative discussions indicate the vast size of the social networks through which interaction was taking place and exotic and local goods (and animals!) were passing. The identities of the occupants of Tiszaluc were thus formed through the interface of the global and local at this specific locale in North East Hungary. We should be immensely grateful to Pal Patay for providing such a clear account of this key site for the later prehistory of Central Europe.

JOHN CHAPMAN

Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK