The Early Mediterranean Village: Agency, Material Culture, and Social Change in Neolithic italy

by John Robb

• ISBN13: 9780521842419
• ISBN10: 0521842417
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-07-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

What was daily life like in Italy between 6000 and 3500 BC? In this book, John Robb brings together the archaeological evidence on a wide range of aspects of life in Neolithic Italy and surrounding regions (Sicily and Malta). Exploring how the routines of daily life structured social relations and human experience during this period, Robb provides a detailed analysis of how people built houses, buried their dead, made and shared a distinctive cuisine, and made the pots and stone tools that archaeologists find. He also addresses questions of regional variation and long-term change, showing how the sweeping changes at the end of the Neolithic were rooted in and transformed the daily practices of earlier periods. Robb links the agency of daily life and the reproduction of social relations with long-term patterns in European prehistory.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xiii
List of Tables	p. xix
Preface	p. xxi
Theorizing Neolithic Italy	p. 1
A Sense of Loyalty	p. 1
Some Necessary Concepts	p. 4
Social Reproduction	p. 4
Material Normality	p. 8
Frameworks and Orientations: Time, Space, Landscapes, and Histories	p. 9
Tools of Thought: Bodies, Habitus, Identity, and the Senses	p. 11
Fields of Action and Projects of the Self	p. 13
From the Point of View of Things	p. 18
Making History: Creativity, Commitment, and Gulliver's Dilemma	p. 20
The 1st of September, 5000 BC: A Note on Methodology	p. 22
Time Travel	p. 24
Neolithic Beginnings	p. 24
The World at 5000 BC	p. 27
Neolithic Italy: The Rough Guide	p. 28
Neolithic People	p. 35
Ideal Lives	p. 35
Refractions of the Neolithic Body	p. 36
Bodies Themselves: Skeletal Evidence of Social Biology	p. 36
Presencing the Living Group: Model Demography	p. 40
The Represented Body	p. 43
The Corporeal Corpus	p. 43
The Materiality of Figurines	p. 46
Gendered and Ambiguous Bodies	p. 50
Abstracting the Body: Communities of Figurine Practice	p. 52
People in Death	p. 56
Neolithic Italian Burial	p. 56
Burial, Status, and Identity	p. 61
A Meaningful Burial Programme	p. 63
Being Neolithic	p. 65
The Human Career	p. 65
Gender and Its Limits	p. 67
Politics and Difference	p. 70
The Road Ahead	p. 73
The Inhabited World	p. 75
Places of Life: Houses and Villages	p. 76
Houses and Households	p. 77
The House as Embedded Technology	p. 81
Houses and Meaning	p. 85
The Lifespan of Houses	p. 87
From Houses to Villages: Settlement Size and Boundedness	p. 90
Houses, Sites, and the Dead	p. 95
Heads in Houses	p. 95
Burial at the Boundaries?	p. 96
Villages as Ancestral Places	p. 96
The Microgeography of Dwelling	p. 98
Economy and Frequentation	p. 98
The Perception of Time in the Landscape	p. 102
Macrogeography: Cultural Landscapes, Regional Identities, and Translocal Action	p. 107
Cult Sites, Cosmology, and Gender	p. 107
Gendered Spaces?	p. 110
Natural Places and the Inhabitable World	p. 112
People Create Spaces; Spaces Create People	p. 116
Daily Economy and Social Reproduction	p. 119
The Archaeology of Foodways: From Calories to Cuisine	p. 120
Cuisine	p. 120
The Italian Neolithic Food Economy	p. 122
Not on the Menu	p. 122
Grains and Legumes: The World of Starches	p. 129
Notes of Flavour	p. 133
Animal Choices	p. 137
The Sociality of the Food Economy	p. 142
The Sociality of Herds	p. 142
Eating: Rhythms and Tastes	p. 144
Cooking	p. 148
Culinary Prehistory: Neolithic Cuisine as Habitus and Taskscape	p. 152
Material Culture and Projects of the Self	p. 159
Archaeological Classics	p. 159
Pottery and Meaning	p. 161
Italian Neolithic Pottery: A Social History	p. 161
A Bit of Historiography	p. 161
The Genealogy of Pottery Traditions	p. 163
Skill, Orientation, and the Layering of Local Knowledge	p. 172
The Social Geography of Italian Neolithic Pottery	p. 178
Fractal Styles and Impressionist Maps	p. 178
Creative Process and Archaeological Patterning	p. 181
Difference, Situated Perception, and Local Knowledge	p. 184
Foreshadowing Patterns of Social Action	p. 185
Obsidian and Flint	p. 186
The Lithic Economy in Neolithic Italy	p. 186
The Obsidian "Trade"	p. 192
Obsidian and Cultural Practices: The Alternative View	p. 197
Axes and Their Life-Paths	p. 204
Axe Basics	p. 204
Contexts of Axe Deposition	p. 208
Axe Biographies and Agency	p. 214
A Methodological Note on Artefact Analysis	p. 218
Neolithic Economy as Social Reproduction	p. 219
People at the Center of a Decentered Narrative	p. 219
A Quick Recapitulation	p. 221
Bodies	p. 221
Places	p. 222
Food	p. 223
Artefacts	p. 225
The Social Senses	p. 226
Unfinished Business: Space, Time, Projects	p. 230
Projects of the Self	p. 237
Difference and the Organization of Value	p. 239
The Commonwealth of People and Things	p. 245
Neolithic Italy as an Ethnographic Landscape	p. 250
Spatial Demography	p. 252
Travel, Trade, Warfare	p. 254
Culture Areas and Differing Lifeways	p. 260
Village Farmers	p. 261
Dispersed Farmers	p. 264
Mixed Mountaineers and Lake Villages	p. 265
Interpreting Regional Differences	p. 267
Social Networks: The Calabrian Stentinello World	p. 269
The Social History of Unique Places: Lipari	p. 275
The Great Simplification: Large-Scale Change at the End of the Neolithic	p. 286
Practice and History	p. 290
Historical Practice: Life without a Primum Mobile	p. 290
Temporal Scale, Regional Analysis, and Patterns of History	p. 291
The Late Neolithic and Copper Age in Peninsular Italy and Sicily	p. 295
Material Culture and Exchange	p. 295
Settlement and Productive Economy	p. 300
Burial, the Body, and Politics	p. 305
The Great Simplification	p. 311
Social Production and Intensifying Pastoralism	p. 311
Place and Relatedness	p. 313
Gendered Bodies	p. 315
Agency, Aesthetics, and the Organization of Value: A New Synaesthesia	p. 317
Processes of Change	p. 320
Always in Transition	p. 320
Re-Reading the Sequence	p. 322
Causality and Spread	p. 326
Coda: Malta - The Road Less Taken	p. 329
Wandering through Tribespace: The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Italy	p. 334
Notes	p. 343
Bibliography	p. 347
Index	p. 373
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