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The Krs Regional Archaeological Project Excavations at Vszto-Bikeri, an Early

Copper Age Settlement in Southeastern Hungary
Paper presented in a symposium entitled The Neolithic in Europe, the Levant, and Asia,
Alan Simmons, Chair, the Society for American Archaeology 66
th
Annual Meeting, New
Orleans, Louisiana, April 19, 2001.
William Parkinson, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
Attila Gyucha, Munkcsy Mihly Mzeum, Bkscsaba, Hungary
Richard Yerkes, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
The Transition to the Copper Age
The transition from the Neolithic to the Copper Age on the Great Hungarian Plain
is marked by significant changes in the archaeological record. These changes in material
culture suggest that the population of the plain underwent a significant social
transformation sometime around 4,500 BC.
The changes documented in the archaeological record include:
-Changes in the spatial scale of cultural groups. The three geographically-
discrete cultural groups that sub-divided the Plain during the Late Neolithic
were replaced in the Early Copper Age by a single, relatively homogeneous
culture that extended across the entire Plain viz. the Tiszapolgr Culture (see
Bognr-Kutzin 1972; Kalicz and Raczky 1987).
-Changes in house form. The large, probably multi-family, domestic structures of
the Late Neolithic were replaced in the Early Copper Age by much smaller, less
substantial one-room dwellings (Parkinson 1999).
-Changes in settlement type. The Late Neolithic settlement pattern, which
combined the habitation of large fortified tells with large flat (i.e. horizontal)
settlements, gave way in the Early Copper Age to the almost exclusive habitation
of smaller, flat settlements (Kalicz and Raczky 1987, Sherratt 1984).
-Changes in settlement location. In addition to being smaller than Late Neolithic
settlements, Early Copper Age sites occurred in far greater number and tended to
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be more evenly dispersed across the landscape (Ecsedy et al. 1982; Sherratt 1984;
Jnkovich et al. 1989; Parkinson 1999).
-Changes in trade networks. The long-distance trade networks of the Neolithic,
that brought goods from as far away as the Black Sea, were re-structured and re-
directed in the Early Copper Age to bring copper, gold, and chert from the
Carpathians onto the Plain (Bognr-Kutzin 1963, 1972; Sherratt 1987; Bir and
Tolnai-Dobosi 1991).
-Changes in mortuary practices. The first large, formal cemeteries in Europe were
established during the Early Copper Age (Bognr-Kutzian 1963, 1972; Chapman
1997). These cemeteries usually occur isolated in the landscape entirely
unassociated with settlement sites and they replaced the common Neolithic
pattern of burying the dead in and around settlement sites.
These changes document a radical transformation that affected almost every
aspect of social organization from the internal organization of settlements and houses,
to the way settlements themselves were organized across the landscape. Yet, throughout
both periods there is no evidence of institutionalized social ranking the Neolithic
societies did not suddenly turn into chiefdoms or states at the beginning of the Copper
Age. Nor is there any evidence that the farmers and herders who inhabited the Plain
during the Neolithic were physically replaced by a new population from elsewhere during
the Copper Age (Bnffy 1994, 1995).
These were basically small-scale, unranked, societies and the various changes that
occurred on the Plain must be understood in terms of the wide range of variability that
occurs within what anthropologists have traditionally called tribal, or autonomous
village societies (Sahlins 1968; Service 1971; Carneiro, Forthcoming). Despite the
obvious potential for exploring the social processes that occur within these kinds of
Parkinson et al. Vszto-Bikeri
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societies, not a single Early Copper Age settlement has been systematically excavated on
the Great Hungarian Plain. The research I will present today are the results of the first
season of systematic excavation at a Tiszapolgr settlement in the Krs River drainage
(see also Bognr-Kutzian 1972; Goldman 1977; Sikldi 1983, 1984).
The Krs Regional Archaeological Project
The research was conducted by the Krs Regional Archaeological Project, a
collaborative, multi-disciplinary research project focused on understanding the various
prehistoric changes that occurred throughout the Krs River Valley system in eastern
Hungary. The project is co-directed by myself and Attila Gyucha of the Munkcsy
Mihly Museum in Bkscsaba, and has received funding from the National Science
Foundation, whose support we gratefully acknowledge. In contrast to most collaborative
projects in Eastern Europe, where the foreign collaborator is seldom more than a name
on the permit, I have been really fortunate in finding a collaborator who takes a very
active role in the project from the research design to the day to day activities of the
actual research. We also need to extend our thanks to the Mayor of Vszto - Mr. Jnos
Kaszai, who allowed us to live in the elementary school in the village which came free
with a gym, where we solidified our international relations through weekly Hungarian
American basketball tournaments.
Last summer we began excavations at an Early Copper Age settlement site of the
Tiszapolgr culture located about 2 km south of the well known tell-site of Vszt o-
Mgor. The research was carried out by a team of Hungarian and American students and
specialists from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, the University of
Parkinson et al. Vszto-Bikeri
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Michigan, the Jzsef Attila University in Szeged, and the Etvs Lornd University in
Budapest.
Previous Research at the Site
The site initially had been identified by Hungarian survey teams in the early
1960s, as part of the Archaeological Topography of Hungary project (Ecsedy et al. 1982),
but no systematic work had occurred at the site until 1998 when, as part of my
dissertation research, we conducted systematic surface collections at several Early
Copper Age sites in the Krs River drainage (Parkinson 1999). During those surface
collections, we were able to identify and map several surface features on the site that led
us to believe that unlike most other Copper Age settlements on the Plain a good deal
of the subsurface deposits here had not been entirely destroyed by the plow. Most
notable among these were two burnt daub smears that almost certainly were the remains
of prehistoric wattle and daub houses. There also was an area that produced a
significantly higher quantity of ceramics and bone indicating the part of the site that
probably served as a refuse area or midden. In addition to these settlement features, we
also identified a human burial eroding into the plowzone at the southwestern edge of the
site.
The ceramics we collected indicated a single-component, Early Copper Age
habitation at the site, with only a handful of sherds that dated to the reign of King rpd,
and probably were associated with the 11
th
century monastery located just to the north of
the site at Vszto-Mgor (Hegedus 1977, 1982; Hegedus and Makkay 1987).
Parkinson et al. Vszto-Bikeri
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Goals of the Research
Our test excavations in the summer of 2000 were designed to answer a few
specific questions about the site:
1. We wanted to know whether there were, indeed, any subsurface deposits in
primary contexts at the site. This was important because in general Early Copper
Age sites, which tend to be single-component and therefore seldom have any later
material on top of them, are frequently plowed out entirely, leaving behind only
subsurface features, such as pits, in primary contexts.
2. We also wanted to determine how the information we had obtained from the
surface collections at the site would relate to the subsurface deposits. We were
especially interested in whether the site was, indeed, single component, and
whether the surface features could be associated with subsurface features.
3. Finally, we wanted to collect ceramic, radiocarbon, and faunal samples that
could help us both to fit this site into the greater regional context, and also to
guide us in future investigations at the site.
The site lies on a small rise on the edge of a previous meander loop of a tributary
to the Krs. There is now a modern canal in the defunct meander that runs to the south
and west of the site. The surface materials cover an area of a little under a hectare, and
we focused our test units on the center of the site, where we had identified the possible
houses and midden area.
Preliminary Results of the Research
We used 2 x 2 m units and by the end of the first week of excavation, we had
doubled the number of excavated Early Copper Age houses on the Plain from 3 to 6.
Two of the units came down directly on the corners of two houses. One we were able to
identify in section, which apparently just clipped the wall of a house in Block 1. Another
Parkinson et al. Vszto-Bikeri
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came down directly on a thick layer of burnt daub in Block 2, where we were able to
expose the northeastern corner of a house that extended beyond the edges of the unit to
the south and west. The third block revealed a dense concentration of ceramics and daub,
that suggest we are on the edge of another structure that is almost certainly located just to
the east of the block. The fourth block came down on a dense fill of ceramic and bone
that allows us to identify the location of the prehistoric refuse area, or midden, on the site.
While we were excavating the wattle and daub matrix of the structure in Block 2,
we came down upon a small group of tanged bone points that almost certainly were used
as arrowheads. These points were calcined, and probably were burned and incorporated
into the daub matrix as the house itself burned. Although bone tools are not uncommon
throughout the prehistory of the region, and large bone harpoons occur commonly in
Neolithic sites throughout the region, small bone arrowheads are unknown from the
Neolithic and Copper Age. The Hungarian media made quite a big deal about this, and
proclaimed us an archaeological sensation in the press (Bks Megyei Nap, July 19,
2000; Bks Megyei Hrlap, July 20, 2000; Npszabadsg, July 20, 2000; Blikk, July 21,
2000)
2001 Field School
This year, Richard Yerkes from Ohio State University and I have developed an
archaeological field school component for the project. Beginning this summer, we will
take ten American undergraduate students to participate as active members of the project.
In addition to receiving intensive training in modern archaeological method and theory,
the students also will be able to live and work side-by-side Hungarian students, some of
whom we are fortunate to have in our audience today. In addition to working on the
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excavations, the students also will work with the various specialists who will be
conducting different types of research throughout the region, including:
paleoenvironmental reconstruction, geophysical prospection, petrographic analysis of
clay sources, geomorphological reconstruction, faunal analysis, and paleoethnobotanical
analysis.
Future Research in the Krs Region
Our goal this year is to open larger excavation units across the site to define more
clearly the various features we identified last year. Our research will focus primarily on
the several houses we identified last year. In addition, we will begin testing the Early
Copper Age settlement located just across the canal, to clarify the temporal and social
relationships between these two sites. Our immediate goal is to develop a model of
economic and social organization within the Vszto microregion, and to place that model
within the greater context of the study area. Over the next few years, we will apply for
additional funding that will allow us to expand the project in temporal and geographic
scope, in order to explore these patterns at a more regional level.
By slowly building a model that will allow us to understand the various changes
that characterize the transition from the Neolithic to the Copper Age in this one small
corner of the Great Hungarian Plain, we feel we are doing our part to contribute to our
anthropological understanding of the wide range of variability that characterizes tribal
societies in different cross-cultural contexts.
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