Early Village Social Dynamics: Prehistoric Settlement Nucleation on the Great Hungarian Plain

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With National Science Foundation support Drs. William Parkinson and Dr. Richard Yerkes will work with an international team of colleagues to conduct three seasons of multi-disciplinary field research in southeastern Hungary. The team brings together U.S., Hungarian, Greek, and Serbian specialists in archaeology, paleo-botany, archaeo-zoology, geophysics, soil chemistry, and geomorphology to examine the development of pre-urban settlements in the Körös Region of the Great Hungarian Plain within the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe. Specifically, the team will examine the process of settlement nucleation and population aggregation as revealed in the archaeology of agricultural villages during the Middle and Late Neolithic (5,300-4,700 cal BC). The project examines dramatic changes in socio-economic organization and settlement patterns that occurred nearly a thousand years after farming was established in the Carpathian Basin. These changes include natural and cultural processes that led to the establishment of compact, nucleated, fortified, villages that grew by accretion into 'tells' (artificial mounds of stratified occupations that spanned several centuries and consist of layers of leveled wattle-and-daub structures, filled-in features, and burials). This multi-disciplinary research project at several Neolithic sites in the Sebes-Körös region, Hungary will test models of settlement aggregation and nucleation that can be used to explore similar social processes elsewhere in the world.The main research objective is to test explanatory models for the emergence of nucleated agricultural villages that emphasize different causal factors (e.g., environmental changes, new animal husbandry practices, intensification of ritual and warfare, demographic transformation). The multi-disciplinary, international team will conduct systematic investigations at two tells and contemporary "flat" (non-tell) sites in the Sebes-Körös Region of Hungary. A geomorphological and soil coring program aimed at reconstructing the mid-Holocene hydrology of the region will also be conducted. Most data recovery and analysis will occur in Hungary, with only some samples for destructive analysis being brought back to the U.S. Data entry and artifact processing, cleaning, and sorting will occur daily at the research facility in Vésztõ.This study of nucleation in ancient village societies contributes to a broader anthropological understanding of the natural and cultural processes that laid the foundation for many other social changes, including the emergence of urbanization, territorialism and the development of economic and political complexity. By assessing independent lines of evidence, it will be possible to demonstrate how environmental, ecological, and social factors resulted in settlement nucleation, and eventually the development of large urban centers. Investigations of this long-term process on the Great Hungarian Plain will contribute to a general understanding of the social and structural dynamics within autonomous village or tribal societies that pushed and pulled them eventually toward social stratification, hierarchical organization, and urbanization. The proposed research will contribute to anthropological knowledge and social theory, advance international collaboration between American and East European scholars, and make datasets and research results widely available in public lectures, scientific journals, websites, and a monograph. It will increase technological and scientific understanding of the human past, and demonstrate how current social problems may have originated.