Daniela Hofmann Cardiff, Oxford and Durham Universities, UK)

The Neolithic Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK, ca, 5600-4900 cal BC) of central and western Europe is traditionally regarded as very much a house-based society. The large wooden longhouse seems to monumentalise the domestic, at the expense of large-scale enclosure-building or expenditure in burial. In addition, farming is the undisputed basis of existence. It is hence hardly surprising that past models, most notably Hodder’s (1990) opposition of the domus and the agrios, have polarised the domestic and the wild in stark terms and correlated them with the house/settlement and the landscape respectively. It is, however, unlikely that either settlement or landscape would have been perceived in a static way. For example, we now have increased evidence for the routine use of places away from settlements for herding cattle, as well as for the existence of fields in different types of setting and for other activities, such as resource procurement, trade, or ritual. However, interpretations of such activities are still often phrased in an unhelpful opposition between insiders/dealing with the domestic and outsiders/dealing with the wild which in turn form the basis for social reconstruction. It is here that a new AHRC funded project on diet and mobility in the LBK aims to enhance our knowledge of differences in lifeways within and between communities. We hope to show that considerable diversity existed in the use of landscape zones for various activities, and that these daily usages, alongside more exceptional ones, were implicated in the creation of identities at various scales. This is a necessary first step in contextualising the frequentation of different places. Rather than an opposition of wild and domestic, we can perhaps envisage a patchwork of places with ambiguous categorisations that can be selectively drawn upon.
Reference: Hodder, I. 1990. The domestication of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell