Upscaling the Neolithic house.Trends in house size and function in Anatolia and the Balkans
This study dwells upon a dataset of 325 rectangular and sub-rectangular buildings from ten sites in Central and Western Anatolia to offer a discussion of house size in the Neolithic and contextualize unusually large buildings in Anatolia and the Balkans. The article highlights: (1) a marked increas...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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National Archaeological Institute with Museum of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
2021-12-01
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| Series: | Studia Praehistorica |
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| Online Access: | https://publications.naim.bg/index.php/stprae/article/view/146 |
| Summary: | This study dwells upon a dataset of 325 rectangular and sub-rectangular buildings from ten sites in Central and Western Anatolia to offer a discussion of house size in the Neolithic and contextualize unusually large buildings in Anatolia and the Balkans. The article highlights: (1) a marked increase in residential floorspace from the 8th to the 6th millennium cal. BC; and (2) a tendency to scale up the house, without actually increasing the number of rooms. Further west than Cappadocia, not a single Neolithic building differed markedly in shape or elaboration from contemporary residential structures, and it is safe to assume that all were for domestic use only. A few outlier rooms from Nea Nikomedeia, Kovačevo and Sofia-Slatina (‘big house’) reached, however, dimensions of circa or slightly over 100 m². The paper addresses the function of these extra-large rooms: how did they fit into the residential landscape? Were they still used as domestic spaces? Parallels are drawn with an unusually large building at Çukuriçi Höyük, near Ephesus, to characterize a new category of Neolithic structures, referred to as ‘houses plus (+)’.
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| ISSN: | 0204-9880 2815-2697 |