OVCHAROVO

Ovcharovo, a Bulgarian settlement tell and cemetery dating from the fifth millennium b.c., was excavated in the early 1970s under the direction of Henrietta Todorova of the Archaeological Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Positioned at the eastern edge of a small streambed, close to both adjacent arable land and forested uplands, the site was a large, multilayer settlement, typical for this period in the Lower Danube region.

Ovcharovo is significant in that it remains the only completely excavated settlement with fully published Late Neolithic material from the north Balkans. Other contemporary sites in the region, such as Polyanitsa, Golyamo Delchevo, and Vinitsa in Bulgaria, and Gumelnit̅a and Caˇşcioarele in southern Romania, either have been excavated incompletely or have not been published fully. The intentional burning of houses in Ovcharovo's later phases conserved large assemblages of material, preserved in situ, unlike abandoned houses that have been emptied of useful contents. Multinational interdisciplinary studies, especially of flora and fauna but also of radiocarbon dates, further establish Ovcharovo as an exception to the methods applied to sites in this region.

Within the 6-meter height of the tell thirteen major building horizons were identified, although recent reanalysis of the site has questioned inherent assumptions of the homogeneity across each building phase and the contiguity between each (assumed) successive phase. At least one major hiatus in occupation occurred. The site was occupied during the final stage of the Late Neolithic Ovcharovo culture (building horizon II), the early and middle Eneolithic Polyanitsa culture (horizons III–VII), and the late Eneolithic Kodzhaderman–Gumelnit̅a-Karanovo VI culture (horizons XI–XIII). Radiocarbon analyses of seeds and also of large wooden beams document site use from 4900 to 4300 b.c.

A center for long-term habitation, as evidenced by repeated repair and rebuilding of buildings, Ovcharovo was the focus for a range of domestic and agricultural activities, especially large-scale field cultivation of wheat and barley and the herding of cattle, sheep, and goats. Domestic animals always outnumbered wild ones; among the domesticated species, cattle, sheep, and goats were in the majority. Several houses had large silos (3 by 4 meters) that contained significant quantities of carbonized cereal grain; most houses had large, lidded storage pots (up to 20 liters), grinding stones, and ovens. Spindle whorls and loom weights (almost two hundred) document textile production, and the mortality patterns of cattle suggest that they provided traction for plowing or for transportation.

Individual settlement horizons (each covering an area c. 40 by 50 meters) consisted of half a dozen or more buildings, each with several rooms. Walls were made from large posts set into the ground around which were intertwined smaller branches and twigs that, in turn, were covered with a mixture of mud, clay, grasses, and other plants. In some buildings of the earlier phases, wooden planks were used to make floors, roofs, or both, and it is possible that some structures had a second story. Buildings shared a common orientation (north-south by east-west) and a similarity in size, although some were particularly large (up to 10 by 10 meters). Most had one or more internal rooms. Almost all had large ovens or hearths, grinding stones, clay platform benches, large quantities of bone, stone, and horn tools (many of which were suitable for digging or working the soil), and ceramic vessels. Almost one hundred ceramic anthropomorphic figurines were found, as were many house models and a few zoomorphic figurines.

Post-excavation interpretation of the floor plans of the buildings has had a major impact on our understanding of social organization for this region in this period. Douglass Bailey and John Chapman have used spatial data from site plans to reconstruct life at the tell, highlighting an increase over time in privacy, exclusion, and incorporation. Many houses had several internal rooms, and particular parts of houses had specific economic functions or social values. At the village level a perimeter bank demarcated the area deemed appropriate for habitation. The very small amount of space left open from construction suggests not only that settlement space was highly valued but also that most activities took place within the closed, private places of individual buildings and involved small groups of people. These reinterpretations of the spatial record have contributed to larger discussions of the rise of the house and the household as the primary social institution in Balkan life during the sixth and fifth millennia b.c.

The evidence for large-scale cultivation and the cramped internal organization of village and house space suggest that complex rules and mechanisms for organizing labor and its products structured life at Ovcharovo. Conflict, tension, and disagreement would have been inevitable. Attempts to resolve tension or at the least to project authority and leadership are clear in the contemporary emergence of a new set of expressive objects (especially jewelry but also pottery of increasingly complex form and brilliant decoration). Novelty in material form was complemented by new raw materials (copper, gold, marine shells, and graphite). The ceremonial deposition of these objects in the burials of particular individuals in extramural cemeteries (another novel element for this period in this region) was one attempt to resolve conflict and to promote preferred social relationships of power.

Questions of site origin and abandonment have attracted traditional answers. These have been attributed, respectively, to the immigration of culture groups that already were used to settled village life and violent invasions from the northeast. Work on similar sites in southern Romania indicates that settling down to permanent village life more likely was linked to gradual geomorphic stabilization of river valley floodplains. Additional work at the contemporary Bulgarian tell at Podgoritsa suggests that the end of occupation of sites such as Ovcharovo may be tied to rises in the water table and consequent losses of arable land at the end of the fifth millennium b.c. Whatever the causes of tell origin and abandonment at Ovcharovo, the same pattern is evident in these times across the northern Balkans (i.e., north of the Stara Planina mountains and south of the Carpathians).

See alsoLate Neolithic/Copper Age Southeastern Europe (vol. 1, part 4).

bibliography

Bailey, Douglass. Balkan Prehistory: Exclusion, Incorporation, and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000. (The standard text for the Neolithic of southeastern Europe; includes discussions of Ovcharovo and other contemporary settlement tells.)

——. "The Life, Times and Works of House 59 from the Ovcharovo Tell, Bulgaria." In Neolithic Houses in Northwest Europe and Beyond. Edited by T. Darvill and J. Thomas, pp. 143–156. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1996.

——. "The Living House: Signifying Continuity." In TheSocial Archaeology of Houses. Edited by R. Samson, pp. 19–48. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.

Bailey, Douglass, R. Andreescu, A. J. Howard, M. G. Macklin, and S. Mills. "Alluvial Landscapes in the Temperate Balkan Neolithic: Transitions to Tells." Antiquity 76, no. 292 (2002): 349–355.

Bailey, Douglass, R. E. Tringham, J. Bass, M. Hamilton, H. Neumann, M. Stevanović, I. Angelova, and A. Raduncheva. "Expanding the Dimensions of Early Agricultural Tells: The Podgoritsa Archaeological Project, Bulgaria." Journal of Field Archaeology 25, no. 4 (1998): 373–396.

Boyadzhiev, Yavor. "Chronology of Prehistoric Cultures in Bulgaria." In Prehistoric Bulgaria. Edited by D. W. Bailey and I. Panayotov, pp. 149–192. Madison, Wis.: Prehistory Press, 1995.

Chapman, John. "Social Inequality on Bulgarian Tells and the Varna Problem." In The Social Archaeology of Houses. Edited by R. Samson, pp. 48–92. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.

Todorova, Henrietta. "The Neolithic, Eneolithic, and Transitional Period in Bulgarian Prehistory." In Prehistoric Bulgaria. Edited by D. W. Bailey and I. Panayotov, pp. 79–98. Madison, Wis.: Prehistory Press, 1995.

——. "Kultzene und Hausmodell aus Ovčarovo, Bez. Targovište." Thracia 3 (1974): 39–46.

Todorova, Henrietta, V. Vasilev, Z. Janusević, M. Kovacheva, and P. Valev. Ovcharovo. (Razkopki i Prouchvaniya 9). Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1983. (This is the original excavation publication.)

Vasilev, V. Izsledvane na Phaunata ot Selishtna Mogila Ovcharovo. Interdistsiplinari Isledvaniya, no. 13. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1985. (A detailed report on the animal remains from the site.)

Douglass W. Bailey