BYLANY

Bylany is one of the key sites of the Linearbandkeramik (Linear Pottery or LBK), which is probably the best-known culture of Neolithic Europe, a remarkably uniform phenomenon across a vast area from France to Hungary. Although many large LBK settlements have been excavated, the importance of the Bylany project resides in its pioneering nature, its scale and longevity (excavations and analysis spanning nearly fifty years), and the ideas it continues to generate.

Bylany is located near Kutná Hora in Bohemia (Czech Republic), some 70 kilometers east of Prague. A series of settlement "microareas" lie in the valley of the Bylanka stream. The soil is now, as in the Neolithic, a fertile brown chernozem on a loess base. The main settlement at Bylany 1, the focus of this article, lies on a gentle north-facing slope cut by smaller stream channels that were active during the Neolithic. Discovered in 1952, the site was excavated by Bohumil Soudský as the first major project of the Czech Archaeological Institute. Between 1953 and 1967, 7 hectares of the 30 hectare site were uncovered. The work set new standards in archaeological excavation and had an international impact. Only one excavation comparable in size had taken place previously, at Köln-Lindenthal in Germany. But Köln-Lindenthal was excavated at a time when Neolithic houses were thought to be pit dwellings, so the post-built structures were misinterpreted as granaries. Bylany therefore represents the first large-scale modern excavation of an LBK settlement. While Soudský later moved on to research the LBK of the Paris Basin, work continued at Bylany, led by Ivan Pavlů and others, to analyze and publish Soudský's data, and to explore the regional landscape.

Pavlů sees the work at Bylany in terms of several distinct phases of research, gradually expanding the area and periods represented. Since the 1970s a small LBK settlement, a Stichbandkeramik (Stroked Pottery, or SBK) cemetery, an SBK circular ditched enclosure (or "rondel"), and an Eneolithic (Copper Age) settlement have been excavated, all within 1.5 kilometers of Bylany 1. Much can now be said about two millennia of settlement and ritual activity at Bylany. No Mesolithic remains have been found, despite intensive fieldwalking; the LBK occupation begins in that culture's earliest phase, marked by organic-tempered pottery, and it spans the second half of the sixth millennium b.c. The succeeding SBK and Lengyel phases cover most of the fifth millennium b.c., while the Eneolithic settlement dates to around 3000 b.c.

At Bylany 1 some 130 house plans were uncovered, along with several hundred pits and other features. Only a few of these are the typically trapezoidal or apsidal SBK and Lengyel structures. The LBK houses conform to the standard pattern: rectangular timber longhouses averaging 20 meters in length, all uniformly oriented north-south (the entrance presumed to be at the southern end), with a tripartite, modular ground plan, the smaller buildings comprising just one or two of these modules. Some of the later houses had their external walls set in a continuous bedding trench rather than a row of discrete postholes. The largest houses (more than 45 meters long) were formerly interpreted as communal structures ("clubhouses"), but their associated finds are not qualitatively different.

Around most houses, usually flanking the long sides, are irregular pits containing large quantities of artifacts. They are assumed to be borrow pits, dug to provide clay for the walls and then left open to collect contemporary household rubbish (although the occurrence of intrusive SBK sherds may indicate more complex formation processes). Pavlů has defined a "building complex" as all features within an arbitrary 5 meters' distance of the house; farther away lay other groups of pits, perhaps marking areas of communal activity. Finds from the pits are dominated by pottery, but ground and chipped stone is also present. It is the latter assemblage, including flint imported from Poland, that hints at the networks of exchange and interaction that sustained the LBK as an entity.

Despite the great density of structures at Bylany they rarely intercut: like many, but not all, LBK settlements, old house sites were not built upon, whether for practical (if a mound remained) or symbolic reasons. Rather than stratigraphy, the basis of the site phasing is a quantitative analysis of the banded motifs on the pottery, based on the proportions of impressed (Notenkopf, or "music note") and incised decoration. Already in the 1950s Soudský was using a computerized system of finds recording, based on punched cards. More recently, discriminant analysis has tested and refined the sequence of occupation and by the 1980s some twenty-five settlement phases were recognized, with up to ten houses within the excavated area in any one phase.

The Bylany chronology has sparked much debate about the nature of LBK society and economy. Following earlier scholars, Soudský saw discontinuities in the ceramic phasing as evidence of "cyclical" agriculture, based on slash-and-burn cultivation: the community abandoned the site when the soil was exhausted and returned periodically when vegetation had regenerated. The economy was seen as primarily agricultural, supplemented by animal husbandry, although there is little direct evidence: bone rarely survives on the acid, loess soils favored by LBK communities. The cyclical model was heavily criticized in the 1970s; other sites, such as Elsloo in the Netherlands, did not show these breaks, and the analogy with tropical agriculture was inappropriate. The theory was replaced by a model of settled horticulture, with large settlements giving rise to "daughter" sites as population increased—the archetypal example being the vast Aldenhovener Platte excavations in the Rhineland.

Although the hiatuses at Bylany remain, Pavlů now argues, less dogmatically, for an irregular development of settlement, with breaks marked by the increased deposition of (nonportable) grindstones in the preceding phase and a planned layout of houses at each reoccupation—this layout became less ordered over time as houses went out of use and were replaced. The new understanding fits with Alasdair Whittle's critique of the sedentary horticulture model for the LBK: instead he sees "tethered" or "restrained" mobility (both seasonal and periodic) articulated through a "commitment to place" encapsulated in the formality of the longhouse. There remains the paradox, first expressed by Gordon Childe, that these "commodious and substantial" houses often lack evidence for prolonged occu pation—but this now has to be understood in social and symbolic terms, not the perceived constraints of economy and environment. Perhaps the longhouse served primarily as a metaphor for the construction of social order. Further insights will only come, as in recent publications on Bylany, through linking detailed analysis of data with innovative interpretations. Once the basis for a narrow economic model, Bylany in the twenty-first century is producing new stories about life in the Neolithic.

See alsoFirst Farmers of Central Europe (vol. 1, part 3); Bruchenbrücken (vol. 1, part 3); Transition to Agriculture in Northern Europe (vol. 1, part 3).

bibliography

Buttler, Werner, and Waldemar Haberey. Die bandkeramische Ansiedlung bei Köln-Lindenthal. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1936.

Childe, Vere Gordon. The Dawn of European Civilization. 6th ed. London: Routledge and Paul, 1957.

Lüning, Jens. "Research into the Bandkeramik Settlement of the Aldenhovener Platte in the Rhineland." Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia 15 (1982): 1–30.

Modderman, P. J. R. "Linearbandkeramik aus Elsloo und Stein." Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia 3 (1970).

Pavlů, Ivan. Life on a Neolithic Site: Bylany: A SituationalAnalysis of Artefacts. Prague: Institute of Archaeology, 2000. (Detailed material-culture studies.)

——, ed. Bylany: Varia 1: Forty-five Years of NeolithicStudies at Bylany. Prague: Archeologický Ústav, 1998. (Site reports and studies of formation processes, pottery technology and eco-data.)

Pavlů, I., J. Rulf, and M. Zápotocká. "Bylany Rondel: Model of the Neolithic Site." Památky Archeologické Supplement 3 (1995): 7–123. (Excavations at the SBK enclosure, and its landscape context.)

——, eds. "Theses on the Neolithic Site of Bylany." Památky Archeologické 77 (1986): 288–412. (A series of papers on chronology and methodology.)

Pavlů, I., M. Zápotocká, and O. Soudský. Bylany Katalog:Výzkum 1953–1967. 5 vols. Prague: Archeologický Ústav, 1983–1987. (Illustrated catalog of features and finds from Bylany 1.)

Rulf, J., ed. Bylany Seminar 1987: Collected Papers. Prague: Institute of the CAS, 1989. (Papers on various aspects of Bylany and the Neolithic of central Europe.)

Soudský, B. "The Neolithic Site of Bylany." Antiquity 36 (1962): 190–200. (First English-language summary.)

Soudský, B., and I. Pavlů. "The Linear Pottery Culture Settlement Patterns of Central Europe." In Man, Settlement and Urbanism. Edited by Peter J. Ucko, Ruth Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby, pp. 317–328. London: Duckworth, 1972. (Classic statement of the "cyclical" model.)

Whittle, Alasdair. Europe in the Neolithic: The Creation ofNew Worlds. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (For the LBK, see chap. 6.)

Jonathan Last