Diversity, Uniformity and the Transformative Properties of the House in Neolithic Greece

Spread of domestic animals across Neolithic western Anatolia: New zooarchaeological evidence from Uğurlu Höyük, the island of Gökçeada, Turkey

“…There has been a recent movement, however, toward a consensus acknowledging the complexity of the processes and mechanisms that spread the Neolithic across Europe. Toward this end, it is now recognized that farming spread into Europe by a mixture of expansion, diffusion, and adoption as the predominant mechanisms [ 20 – 25 ]. Neolithic dispersal was not a unidirectional phenomenon sweeping across the land, replacing everything on its way, and delivering the “Neolithic package” of domesticated plants and animals, ground stone tools and ceramics everywhere simultaneously with the same components.…”

“…Neolithic dispersal was not a unidirectional phenomenon sweeping across the land, replacing everything on its way, and delivering the “Neolithic package” of domesticated plants and animals, ground stone tools and ceramics everywhere simultaneously with the same components. Özdoğan [ 9 , 26 ], Souvatzi [ 25 ], and Perlès [ 23 ] concur that different regions in southeast Europe followed different rates of adoption of agriculture and sedentism and that multiple Neolithic packages successively spread from central and northwestern Anatolia to Europe. On the other hand, some researchers suggest that the term Neolithic package is misleading and does not reflect the heterogeneity and variety of the Neolithic lifeways [ 27 – 29 ].…”

Kinship and Social Archaeology

“…Equally, as with any interpretation, the correlation of data with social practices depends on a contextual understanding of the way space, activity, and what constitutes kin are structured. I have also been particularly concerned with the issue of variability (Souvatzi, 2008a, 2013a) and the distinction between the ideal and the real (Souvatzi, 2008b). What follows is based principally on the spatial patterning of the remains of practices and relationships from a number of sufficiently exposed settlements.…”

“…In my own work, I have focused on the household as a much more flexible and socioculturally wide analytical concept (see next section) than the more bounded notion of house and have examined it as a social process and as an analytical means through which we can interpret prehistoric social organization from the bottom up (Souvatzi, 2008a, 2008b, 2013a). This work led me to realize that the household cannot be fully understood without considering the active role of kinship in the construction of social relationships.…”

The settlement history of Alsónyék–Bátaszék

“…Hodder 1990;Bailey 1990;Tringham 1995;Bailey 1996;Stevanović 1997;Perlès 2001;Nanoglou 2008;Naumov 2013;Souvatzi 2013;Bickle et al 2016. 12 Tringham 1995Bailey 1996, 146.…”