Thinking outside the Box: Life beyond ‘House – Farmstead – Village’ in Neolithic Wetland Sites

Abstract

The approach to analyse Neolithic settlement structures only on a strict scale of ‘house – farmstead – village‘ is unrewarding in our opinion. Even individualisation, and therefore reconstruction, of separate houses in Neolithic wetland sites is much more problematic than commonly assumed (e.g. distinction of architectural units, rate of dated vs. undated piles, scarce evidence for superstructures and their connection to the house layout). Many current reconstructions of houses and village layouts are mostly based on unproven presumptions. Taphonomic complexity in wetland layers is so difficult to understand that trivial connections between layers and architectural structures cannot be assumed. Concerning its basic hypothesis and the consequential economical and social implications, this paper focuses on discussing settlement patterns in the Canton of Zug (Switzerland) and highlighting two examples of current research in pile dwellings at Lake Zug (Cham-Eslen, Zug-Riedmatt). The high density of (potentially) contemporary sites in certain periods as well as the evidence of specialised ‒ and possibly only or predominantly seasonal ‒ lake dwellings speak in favour of complex patterns of settlement, exploitation and communication structured on a large scale as opposed to small, economically autarchic and self-contained village units. Hence we would like to contrast the traditional hierarchical model (‘house – farmstead – village‘), based on historic analogies, incorrectly perceived as obvious, with a relational network-model, which is close-knit especially in the bodies of water as lifelines (routes of transport and communication, important food resources). This approach opens a broad interpretive framework regarding the results of many disciplines like archaeology of economies, demography and settlement geography.