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The Opovo Project: A Study of Socioeconomic Change in the Balkan Neolithic
Abstract
This report provides the preliminary results of an archaeological project currently underway in the Vojvodina, Yugoslavia. The project focuses on the site of Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk, which lies in the lower valley of the Tamiš River, north of the Danube. Excavation of the site began in the summer of 1983. Materials so far uncovered indicate that the site represents a late neolithic/early eneolithic settlement, belonging to the Vinča-Pločnik culture. The project is designed to investigate problems generated by earlier research efforts in the area of the late neolithic and early eneolithic of SE Europe. In addition, it provides an opportunity to study variation within the Vinča culture, in terms of its regional setting and its economic activities.
... u periodu od poslednje četvrtine šestog do sredine petog milenijuma pre nove ere. Istraživanje društvene strukture neolitskih i eneolitskih zajednica na Balkanu ima dugu tradiciju (Chapman 1991(Chapman , 2010(Chapman , 1990(Chapman , 1981Halstead 1989Halstead , 1995Halstead , 1999Windler, Thiele, and Müller 2013;Müller 2012;Arponen et al. 2016;Tringham 1992;Tringham, Brukner, and Voytek 1985;Tringham and Krstić 1990;Tringham 2000;Borić 2015Borić , 2008Borić , 1996McPherron and Christopher 1988;Tripković 2007Tripković , 2015Porčić 2019b;Glišić 1968;Tripković 2013), a u poslednjih deset godina istraživanja su usmerena eksplicitno na merenje i kvantifikaciju stepena društvene nejednakosti (Porčić 2019a(Porčić , 2012Windler, Thiele, and Müller 2013). Ovaj rad predstavlja doprinos empirijskoj osnovi za rekonstrukciju i merenje nivoa nejednakosti u kasnom neolitu centralnog Balkana na osnovu nedavno objavljenih naseobinskih podataka koji se mogu iskoristiti za ocenjivanje prisustva i stepena nejednakosti u praistorijskim društvima. ...
The social inequality represents one of the major problems of the contemporary world and an important anthropological subject. The transition to agriculture is often viewed as an important turning point for the development of social inequality in (pre)history. For this reason, the study of the social inequality in
the Neolithic communities is of particular importance for the understanding of the origins and the development of this phenomenon. This paper represents an empirical contribution to the study of social inequality in the Late Neolithic in the Central Balkans (5300-4500 BCE). The aim is to quantify and estimate
the levels of inequality between households in three Late Neolithic settlements: Belovode, Pločnik, and Drenovac. In line with the current methods for the estimation of social inequality from archaeological remains, this study relies on the house floor area as a proxy for household wealth. The house floor area measurements are based on the geophysical survey data published in the literature with around 1000 house floor area measurements available for the analysis. The Gini index is calculated for each site based in the distribution of house floor
area. The results suggest that the social inequality on all three sites was relatively low, as the Gini values range from 0.18 to 0.22. These values fit well with the Gini estimates based on the previous research of the social inequality in the Neolithic and Eneolithic period in the Central Balkans. When compared
to the cross-cultural variation based on the ethnographic, historical and archaeological sources from the literature, these values are low compared to other horticultural and agricultural communities. One potential explanation for such low values is that the agricultural production in the Late Neolithic of the Central
Balkans was labor-limited rather than land-limited, which usually results in the low potential for social inequality, as hypothesized and shown by Bogaard et al. (2019). On the other hand, we must keep in mind that the wealth is measured by proxy which is suitable for the detection of statistical trends in cross-cultural
comparisons, but may be less reliable for individual cases. Moreover, it is not certain that the individual house is the basic social unit, as it is possible that the basic social unit for a corporate group which includes extended families living
in several houses. Therefore, the result which suggests low levels of social inequality should be taken as a hypothesis which needs to be tested further with other classes of evidence.
La documentazione della prima campagna di scavo del 2006 a opera della Soprintendenza Archeologica delle Marche e delle successive cinque dal 2011 al 2015 condotte dalla Sapienza Università di Roma nel sito di Portonovo è stata eseguita con metodi tradizionali. La documentazione grafica, piante e sezioni, e i resoconti di scavo sono stati realizzati in modo manuale su supporto cartaceo. Questo tipo di supporti, come è noto, può risentire di numerosi problemi legati allo spazio fisico occupato, al rischio di smarrimento in archivi non ben organizzati e al naturale deterioramento progressivo del materiale cartaceo. Per ovviare a questi inconvenienti, si è deciso di convertire tutti i dati raccolti nel corso della ricerca dal formato cartaceo a quello digitale attraverso l’utilizzo di metodi e strumenti alcuni dei quali ancora in fase di sperimentazione.
Over several decades, we have written extensively about the household as a fundamental organizational unit of the Neolithic society. Starting from our definition of the household cluster at Brześć Kujawski 3 and the detailed analysis of household activities at House 56 at Brześć Kujawski 4, we continue to consider the household as the locus of decision-making and resource allocation even as our thinking has evolved over the intervening years. At the same time, Neolithic households functioned within local concentrations of settlement in which they interacted with other such units. We characterize such local social entities as “hamlets,” adapting the definition used by the anthropologist Frank Cancian to refer to institutionalized alliances of domestic groups in which affiliation is demonstrated through residential proximity. We have studied two such hamlets of the Brześć Kujawski Group: the Osłonki-Miechowice-Konary hamlet and the Smętowo hamlet consisting of Brześć Kujawski and Pikutkowo. We characterize these hamlets to show how they extend our original conception of household-based societies to develop a robust understanding of local Neolithic communities.
The present paper offers a short overview of aspects related to the grinding technology and its spatial dimension in two Late/Final Neolithic settlements in Northern Greece. An attempt is made to understand how grinding tools are manipulated in different spatial and social scales and through that to gain a glimpse at the traditions and practices that synthesize the cultural milieu in which these tools were made and used. To this end, contextual analysis is combined with a special emphasis on aspects of the tools’ life-cycles, their state of preservation and taphonomic factors.
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