SPATIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND NEOLITHIC HOUSES

 

SPATIAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND NEOLITHIC HOUSES 

Durrington Walls, House 1, 2006. The pale cleared floor is the central area of the house, with the hearth. The beds and 'dresser' are around the edges.
 

I have always been somewhat critical of Mike Parker-Pearson's use of Ethnographic Analogy to suggest parallels between British Neolithic monuments and Madagascan beliefs regarding the use of stone for ancestors and wood for the living. He used the analogy to suggest that the area around Stonehenge was a 'Land of the Ancestors' within the wider 'Land of the Living'. The problem was never that I thought it was unlikely or a terrible hypothesis; it was simply the guidelines that allow us to evaluate analogies showed that this one was very weak indeed. There was a vast separation in both distance and time, as well as a completely different cultural background, all of which meant that there was nothing to suggest a link in beliefs beyond use of  stone or timber in large scale building projects. Despite that, I think he came fairly close to the truth, but by luck and chance rather than good deduction. It does seem both cultures shared a belief in ancestral spirits (inferred from the archaeology in the Neolithic) and an agricultural economy, but beyond that there is little common ground or history between the two groups.

 

So here I am about to indulge in some very similar long distance analogy; but, accepting the rules of analogy and the inherent weakness of this one, I will not assert that this is any more than a possible interpretation of the evidence.

 

 

 Skara Brae House 1: The stone lined rectangles to either side are the beds, the clear area in the centre the hearth. (Stock Photo).

 

I have just been watching  Julian Richards' "Stonehenge Access All Areas' episode 10, in which he talks to Mike Parker-Pearson about the excavations at nearby Durrington Walls. Richards asks about the comparison between the houses at Durrington and the ones at Skara Brae in Orkney.  MPP replies  by saying that they are so similar that when they overlaid the plans of House 1 at both sites they were almost identical in both size and layout. Now I should mention that this is of course a pretty strong piece of Ethnographic Analogy: both sites are from the same time period (Late Neolithic) and both share clear cultural affinities (corded ware pottery, henges and stone circles) and histories (earlier communal burial mounds) and the distance between them is only around 600 miles - as opposed to the 5000 or so miles between Stonehenge and Madagascar. 

 

Both house types share the same layout - a central hearth, a set of shelves or similar furniture opposite the doorway, and sleeping areas to the sides of the hearth. The latter are also similarly differentiated: to the right is a large bed, presumably for adults, whilst opposite is a smaller space more suited to children. The repetition of this model across several houses at both sites (and its parallel in the tomb of Maes Howe on Orkney) all suggest a layer of symbolic meaning being portrayed in this organisation of space. Its exact meaning, beyond pure functionality, is harder to demonstrate. Which is where my own dodgy analogy comes into play.

 

Many decades ago, I studied archaeology in southern Africa and went on to work in the Spatial Archaeology Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. We worked on landscape distributions of both Stone Age rock art sites and Iron Age (farming) settlements, as well as the use of space within settlements and dwellings. We were introduced to the views of David Lewis-Williams and the oppositional symbolism of shamanistic religions through his parallel work on rock art in the Drakensberg Mountains (see my post 'A Look at Neolithic Beliefs'). 

 

We were also aware of the shamanistic nature of African beliefs and the modern-day symbolism which could confidently be traced back into the Iron Age and used to interpret archaeological arrangements of structures and areas within houses. And the patterns were consistent and readable across a wide variety of southern African tribal groups and regions. Time and time again, settlements were laid out to similar symbolically significant patterns, and within them households created their own microcosm of the same pattern.

 

The classic settlement in this model was a circular kraal of houses with the stock enclosures and a meeting area in the centre (although there was a wide variation in this pattern), with the entrance downslope and the headman or chief's compound at the top, with the households between roughly in order of rising status as you went up the slope. Curiously, MPP reckons that the settlement at Durrington Walls was arranged as a ring of dwellings around a central 'empty space' reserved for ritual structures. This is probably coincidental, as the format is fairly logical and there is no evidence of further similarities. Still, it would be interesting to excavate at the top of the enclosure and see if there are any high status houses up there, wouldn't it?

 

Within individual homesteads, there is further symbolic organisation of space. In essence, front is public and profane, back is private and sacred. So in front of each main house is a small clearing for public gatherings, with lesser huts for the wives and older children, boys on one side and girls on the other, near the bottom of the compound.  Behind the headman's hut is a fenced off private yard where there are shrines to the family ancestors (a sacred space) against the back wall of the hut. Inside each main hut the space is likewise arranged around the central hearth so that the family head sits opposite the door and nearest to the shrines behind the wall, in the place of honour. His wives sit either side of him, with children and other family members arranged around the fire, ending with guests nearest the door. Normally men sit on one side and women on the other. Sleeping arrangements are similarly regimented, although normally the head slept with his chosen wife in her hut which she shared with her young ones.

 

Evidently in the British Neolithic cases, some of the family slept in the main houses (not in outlying wives' huts) but curiously if the children's bed is noticeably smaller, it rather suggests that, as in Africa, older children slept elsewhere. 

 

 There are clearly a number of differences between the pattern described here and that observed in the British houses, and it would be foolish to take the parallel further than to say that the use of space in the Neolithic cultures shows signs of have been organised on traditional or symbolic lines. But given the similarities in the belief systems, it is very tempting to suggest that, like the African example, the Durrington and Orkney traditions may have been based upon similar sets of symbols, with the level of privacy, status and sacredness increasing from the door to the rear of the house. It has been suggested that the furniture against the back walls may be some form of shrine rather than simply storage space; this would certainly align with the interpretation suggested here. But at the risk of diminishing my case, it is possible that the archaeologists suggesting the shrine idea had in mind similar patterns known from Africa, and were simply making the same parallel that I am.

 

It seems unlikely that in the near future we will have detailed enough samples to test these ideas with any degree of certainty, so, for the present at least, as I have said before, you pays your money and you takes your choice. One day, hopefully, it will all become clear.