Books by Caroline Heitz
OSPA - Open Series in Prehistoric Archaeology No. 5, 2023
OPEN ACCESS: https://www.sidestone.com/books/rethinking-neolithic-societies
Traditional archae... more OPEN ACCESS: https://www.sidestone.com/books/rethinking-neolithic-societies
Traditional archaeological ideas about Neolithic societies were shaped by questionable premises. The modern concept of social and cultural coherence of residence groups as well as the ethnic interpretation of ‘archaeological cultures’ fostered ideas of static and homogeneous social entities with fixed borders. Farming – as the core of the Neolithic way of life – was associated with sedentariness rather than with spatial mobility and cross-regional social networks. Furthermore, the widely used (neo-)evolutionist thinking universally assumed a growing social complexity and hierarchisation during prehistory. After all, such ‘top-down’–perspectives deprived individuals and groups of genuine agency and creativity while underestimating the relational dynamic between the social and material worlds. In recent years, a wide array of empirical results on social practices related to material culture and settlement dynamics, (inter-)regional entanglements and spatial mobility were published. For the latter the adoption of the relatively new scientific methods in archaeology like Stable Isotope Analysis as well as aDNA played a crucial role. Yet the question of possible inferences regarding spatial and temporal differences in forms of social organisation has not been addressed sufficiently.
The aim of this volume is therefore to rethink former top-down concepts of Neolithic societies by studying social practices and different forms of Neolithic social life by adopting bottom-up social archaeological perspectives. Furthermore, the validity and relevance of terms like ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘social group’ etc. will be discussed. The contributions reach from theoretical to empirical ones and thematize a variety of social theoretical approaches as well as methodological ways of combining different sorts of data. They show the potential of such bottom-up approaches to infer models of social practices and configurations which may live up to the potential social diversity and dynamism of Neolithic societies. The contribution shed light on spatial mobility, social complexity, the importance of (political) interests and factors of kinship etc. We hope that this volume, with its focus on the Neolithic of Europe, will contribute to the ongoing critical debates of theories and concepts as well as on our premises and perspectives on Neolithic societies in general – and the practices of social archaeology as such.
OSPA - Open Series in Prehistoric Archaeology No. 3, 2023
OPEN ACCESS: https://www.sidestone.com/books/keramik-jenseits-von-kulturen
Mobility is fundament... more OPEN ACCESS: https://www.sidestone.com/books/keramik-jenseits-von-kulturen
Mobility is fundamental to forms of social configurations. But what role did spatial mobility play in the past? Regarding prehistoric periods, such as the Neolithic, we still do know little about this. That also applies to the settlement areas of the northern Alpine Foreland. The wetland settlements there were labelled UNESCO World Heritage in 2011. With their excellently preserved remains in lakes and bogs they provide a unique research basis. The dendrochronologically dated settlements open a rare possibility to approach cultural, social, and economic processes based on a high temporal and spatial resolution. In the present volume, this is achieved based on pottery from contemporaneously dated settlements on Lake Zurich and Lake Constance from the period between 3950 and 3800 BC.
Process philosophical considerations on the (trans)formation of ‘things’ are combined with relational social theoretical concepts such as the habitus theorem to form a praxeological approach. The latter serves as the epistemological basis of the newly elaborated mixed method research methodology, which allows for a deeper understanding of mobility, social relations and configurations as well as transformations. Qualitative methods (classification of vessel designs) is utilised to understand pottery production practices from the perspective of the makers and quantitative methods (cluster analysis of vessel features) can be used to analyse transregional structures of ceramic consumption. Accordingly, patterns of spatial mobility and far-reaching relationships of settlement communities become apparent based on such material entanglements. Mobility-related appropriation phenomena and change in pottery practices can be approached in the rhythm of individual decades. Furthermore, the combination of a subjectivist with an ‘objectified’ stance during the research process based on Pierre Bourdieu’s epistemology, the praxeology, leads to an epistemological, metamodern ‘third way’ that mediates between the realism of modernity (processual archaeology) and the constructivism of postmodernity (post-processual archaeology). Finally, the research results deconstruct the common social models following the cultural-historical paradigm, which conceptualized ‘cultures’ as supposedly static, homogeneous, spatially distinct entities. Instead, the pottery points to translocal social configurations that related settlements in the northern Alpine Foreland with each other in the 4th millennium BC.
Beyond the Great Lakes. Archaeology and conservation of the Neolithic Unesco World Heritage Site ... more Beyond the Great Lakes. Archaeology and conservation of the Neolithic Unesco World Heritage Site Seedorf, Lobsigesee.
The site at Seedorf, Lobsigesee is situated on the edge of a small bog lake between Aarberg and Lyss in Canton Bern. The location of the settlement site away from the large lakes of the Jura region and their numerous extensively examined lakeside settlements makes it particularly interesting and was one of the reasons why it was inscribed on the list of Unesco World Heritage Sites as part of “Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps” in 2011.
It was known from numerous scatter finds and from excavations carried out in 1908/09 and again in 1953 that a Neolithic settlement stood on Lake Lobsige, whose preservation was increasingly threatened by drainage works undertaken in the bog to facilitate farming in the area.
In 2005 and 2007, the Archaeological Service of Canton Bern (ADB) carried out archaeological coring on the shoreline of the lake and mounted rescue excavations over an area of 75 m2. The aim was to evaluate the state of preservation of the finds and features with a view to developing an archaeological site monitoring project for the protection of such settlements, to record the settlement remains in the areas most at risk of drying out and to recover the finds. Sieving and soil samples for archaeobiological and geoarchaeological examination were also taken.
This book presents the results of an analysis of the finds and features recorded in the test trenches and excavations undertaken in 2005
and 2007, most of which were obtained between 2009 and 2011 as part of a Master’s thesis submitted to the University of Basel and of a research project run by the ADB. It provides an overview of the archaeological, archaeobiological, palaeoecological and hydrological insight gained on the Neolithic site on Lake Lobsige and establishes connections between the findings made by the individual disciplines. Initially the main focus was on presenting the finds and features and on learning as much as possible about the history of the settlement. Analysis of the archaeological and archaeobiological finds allowed us to trace the changes that occurred in the lifestyles of the community on Lake Lobsige and identify how they were integrated into the different regional and supra-regional networks that existed at the time.
Another focal point was the site monitoring project which aimed to evaluate the state of preservation of the site and to prepare for its future
protection. The analysis presented here also involved examining the state of preservation and level of water saturation of the layers excavated in 2005 and 2007. As well as hydrological and geoarchaeological aspects, archaeobiological indicators were also taken into account for the first time; these were brought to bear when it came to answering questions of preservation, as different states of preservation had been recorded and examined for organic and inorganic
materials within the archaeological layers.
2018 (unpubl.), Pottery beyond Cultures - A praxeological Approach to Mobility, Entanglements and... more 2018 (unpubl.), Pottery beyond Cultures - A praxeological Approach to Mobility, Entanglements and Transformations in the Northern Alpine Foreland (3950-3800 BC).
by Caroline Heitz, Regine Stapfer, Albert Hafner, Astrid Van Oyen, Loïc Jammet-Reynal, Ute Seidel, Isabel A . Hohle, Eda Gross, Nadja Melko, Daniel Albero Santacreu, Hans P Hahn, and Köhler Iris
Die Arbeit untersucht, wie Tätererinnerungen für die Geschichtswissenschaft nutzbar gemacht werde... more Die Arbeit untersucht, wie Tätererinnerungen für die Geschichtswissenschaft nutzbar gemacht werden können. Hans Münch, ein ehemaliger SS-Arzt in Auschwitz, hat sein Leben lang zahlreiche Interviews gegeben. Diese werden einer Sprach- und Diskursanalyse unterzogen und aus sozialpsychologischer Perspektive betrachtet. Dabei wird deutlich, wie die Methodenwahl die Ergebnisse mitbestimmt. Strukturelemente und Rahmenbedingungen, die das Denken und Handeln Münchs beeinflusst haben, werden herausgearbeitet. Dadurch werden die soziale Wirklichkeit der SS-Ärzte sowie die Beweggründe für diesen Genozid auf der Täterebene greifbarer gemacht. Es wird aufgezeigt, wie Münch Brüche in seiner Lebensgeschichte mit einem konsistenten Selbstbild, einer Sinnkonstruktion, zu überdecken versuchte.
Papers/Book Section by Caroline Heitz
Zusammenfassung Unlängst wurde die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die Archäologie in eine epistemologische... more Zusammenfassung Unlängst wurde die Frage aufgeworfen, ob die Archäologie in eine epistemologische Krise geraten sei. Ein neuer Realismus würde die idealistische Haltung der postprozessualen Archäologie herausfordern. Versteht man eine Krise als schwierige Lage oder Zeit, die den Höhe-und Wendepunkt einer bedrohlich erscheinenden Entwicklung darstellt, so wird deutlich, dass deren Diagnostizierung standpunktabhängig und daher stets strittig bleiben muss. Konsensfähiger ist die Beobachtung, dass sich die Archäologie in einer Phase tiefgreifender Transformationen befindet. In diesem Essay gehe ich der Frage nach, ob diese zu einem epistemologischen Paradigmenwechsel führen könnten, der die Archäologie über den Postprozessualismus der Postmoderne hinausführt. Die Archäologie-verstanden als ein dynamisches, über unterschiedliche Sprach-, Erkenntnis-und Wissensformen hinausreichendes materiell-diskursives Geflecht sozialer Praktiken-kann meiner Meinung nach nicht losgelöst von gesellschaftlichen Prozessen betrachtet werden. Eine breitere Perspektive einnehmend, scheint die postmoderne Strömung insgesamt an Zugkraft zu verlieren. Wiederkehrende bewaffnete Konflikte, Finanz-und Flüchtlingskrisen, die SARS-CoV-2 Pandemie, Ressourcenknappheit, Umweltverschmutzung und Klima erwärmung, die Entwicklung von künstlicher Intelligenz (AI) oder das Internet der Dinge mit seinen Technologien zur Verbindung von physischen und virtuellen Erfahrungsbereichen führen zu einer verstärkten Auseinandersetzung mit dem Realen. Diese gesamtgesellschaftlichen Prozesse könnten als epochaler Umbruch verstanden werden: Von der Post-zur Metamoderne. Letztere kennzeichnet das Oszillieren zwischen Idealismus und Materialismus, Realismus und Konstruktivismus und damit Modernismus und Postmodernismus.
Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East. Diversity in Collapse and Resilience, 2021
‘Resilience’, in addition to ‘collapse’, has become increasingly important as a concept for the s... more ‘Resilience’, in addition to ‘collapse’, has become increasingly important as a concept for the study of social challenges in archaeology since the turn of the millennium. In this paper, we critically examine both terms and their conceptualisations in archaeology and argue for a data-driven bottom-up approach that harnesses ‘resilience’ beyond system-theoretical approaches such as Resilience Theory and Adaptive Cycle Models. Using high temporal resolution data from the UNESCO World Heritage pile dwellings in the northern Alpine Foreland, this contribution examines how Neolithic communities coped with climatic challenges between 3500 and 3250 BCE. Rising lake-levels destroyed former settlement areas on the lakeshores and led to temporal interruptions of settlement activities. To question their causal relation to climatic fluctuations, we use archaeological information on settlement features as well as various global and regional paleoclimatic proxy data by applying qualitative and quantitative methods utilizing concluding statistics. It can be inferred that especially the longer-term lake-level rises of higher magnitudes hit the agricultural communities hard but did not lead to any form of social collapse. On the contrary, the immediate repopulation of the lakeshores after the lake floods suggests that spatial mobility and the temporary relocation of settlements to the hinterland were a successful social coping practice in dealing with these challenges. Since the frequent relocation of settlements was already immanent to these communities’ social practices, their capacity for residence-based spatial mobility served them as resilience capacity.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge –Resilience & Archaeology, 2021
Resilience has recently become an insightful conceptual framework that helps scholars explore how... more Resilience has recently become an insightful conceptual framework that helps scholars explore how communities respond to external shocks, such as environmental changes. In prehistoric archaeology, this notion has primarily been investigated using the Resilience Theory (RT) and the Adaptive Cycle model (AC), developed by Gunderson and Holling, which are applied to adaptive systems in order to understand the source and role of change. However, such systems-theoretical approaches, which derive from ecology and psychology, bear the danger of leading to a top-down application of deductive models when appropriated to the fragmented archaeological sources. In other words, the risk is to assume the RT and AC model first and then to fit archaeological data within those assumptions.
In this paper, we propose an alternative, inductive bottom-up approach in which we define resilience as a set of adaptive capacities grounded in social practices that enabled communities to cope with and respond to challenges. We use the Neolithic wetland sites from the Three-Lakes Region in the northern Alpine foreland of western Switzerland as a case study. These sites provide an abundance of archaeological and palaeoecological information, which can be used to examine the resilience of settlement communities to climate fluctuations. We will evaluate whether a causal relationship might have existed between climate changes in the period between 3600 and 3200 BCE and an observable decline of settlement activities on the shores of the large lakes. In addition to year-accurate reconstructions of settlement histories, we will apply statistical significance tests on archaeological and palaeoclimatic time series to question the correlation and causality between settlement activities and climate fluctuations. Besides the settlement frequency curve, we will use the radioactive beryllium-10 isotope (Be10) content in the GISP2 ice core from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the δ18O values of well-dated speleothems as proxies for temperature and precipitation, respectively. The inferred hypothesis, i.e. that periodically rising lake levels led to the flooding of former inhabitable spaces on the lakes’ shore zones and forced communities to relocate their settlements to the hinterland, will further be tested. Therefore, we apply multivariate statistics to pollen data to evaluate human influence on vegetation (land clearing) taken as settlement activity beyond the shores of large lakes. In addition, we examine the relevance of transformations in pottery styles as further indicators for spatial mobility.
2021, Itineraries of pottery. Theorising mobility and movement of humans and things. In: C.Gibson, K. Cleary and C. J. Frieman (Eds). Making Journeys. Archaeologies of Mobility. Oxford. Oxbow Books, 107–119
This paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural phenomena that are often referred... more This paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural phenomena that are often referred to in archaeological literature as ‘foreign things’ and to criticise this notion for fostering a rather mechanical narrative: that of pure, territorially-bounded and, thus, clearly distinguishable cultures, where the dynamics are reduced to cultural contact in the course of long-term migration. Drawing on different action-theoretical approaches from material culture and mobility studies we argue that human life is fundamentally characterised by gradual shifting between stasis and movement, dynamism and stability, while we are constantly engaging with our social and material environments. Humans live in a dynamic meshwork of experienced itineraries with knots of temporarily stabilised cultural forms, such as iterated practices and made things. While being on the move, humans might transgress boundaries and appropriate new practices and things, leading occasionally to mutual transformations. Taking Neolithic pottery of the Alpine Foreland as an example—and especially the pottery of the settlement Hornstaad-Hörnle IA (D) at Lake Constance (3918–3902 BC dendro)—we approach such transforming moments. They are traceable in their different material, technological and stylistic properties. While we follow these materialised itineraries empirically we keep expanding our theoretical approach that is currently still sketchy in parts.
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2020
Authors:
Mara Deza-Araujo, Caesar Morales-Molino,Willy Tinner, Paul D. Henne,
Caroline Heitz,... more Authors:
Mara Deza-Araujo, Caesar Morales-Molino,Willy Tinner, Paul D. Henne,
Caroline Heitz, Gianni B. Pezzatti, Albert Hafner, Marco Conedera
Anthropogenic pollen indicators in pollen records are an established tool for reconstructing the history of human impacts on vegetation and landscapes. They are also used to disentangle the influence of human activities and climatic variability on ecosystems. The comprehensive anthropogenic pollen-indicator approach developed by Behre (1981) has been widely used, including beyond its original geographical scope of Central and Western Europe. Uncritical adoption of this approach for other areas is risky because adventives (plants introduced with agriculture) in Central Europe can be apophytes (native plants favoured by human disturbances) in other regions. This problem can be addressed by identifying regionspecific, anthropogenic-indicator pollen types and/or developing region-specific, human-impact indices from pollen assemblages. However, understanding of regional variation in the timing and intensity of human impacts is limited by the lack of standardization, validation and intercomparison of such regional approaches. Here we review the most common European anthropogenic pollen-indicator approaches to assess their performance at six sites spanning a continental gradient over the boreal, temperate and Mediterranean biomes. Specifically, we evaluate the human-indicator approaches by using independent archaeological evidence and models. We present new insights into how these methodologies can assist in the interpretation of pollen records as well as into how a careful selection of pollen types and/or indices according to the specific geographical scope of each study is key to obtain meaningful reconstructions of anthropogenic activity through time. The evaluated approaches generally perform better in the regions for which they were developed. However, we find marked differences in their capacity to identify human impact, while some approaches do not perform well even in the regions for which they were developed, others might be used, with due caution, outside their original areas or biomes. We conclude that alongside the increasing wealth of pollen datasets a need to develop novel tools may assist numeric human impact reconstructions.
Mobility and Pottery Production: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives.
In this essay, I question current models of central European Neolithic societies that are informe... more In this essay, I question current models of central European Neolithic societies that are informed by concepts of sedentarism and cultural homogeneity. Based on pottery styles, they miss out two fundamental conditions of human life: the constant oscillation between movement and stasis and the ongoing engagement with materials. Drawing on T. Ingold's thoughts on the 'making' of things and P. Bourdieu's habitus-theory, I argue that everyday human action like the making of a pot (1), unfolds in spatially and temporally bounded movements and mobilities and (2), emerges from an engagement of humans with their material and social landscapes. Hence, the features of pottery vessels comprise histories of their becoming that intertwine the itineraries of geological materials and their human makers. Some vessels are made and used at the same place ('local vessels'), others are transported over various distances ('translocal vessels'). When humans and things are on the move, encounters with otherness can trigger creative processes , which might also become materialised in pottery ('inbetween vessels'): the appropriation of new materials, different techniques, styles etc. To follow the itineraries of things thus offers an entry point to a deeper understanding of past peoples' mobilities and the negotiation and transformation of temporarily stable cultural forms. I will develop my approach on the pottery of the Neolithic settlement of Hornstaad-Hörnle IA at Lake Constance (DE) (3918-3902 BC).
Mobility and Pottery Production: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives.
This edited volume deals with the mobility of humans, materials and things. Pottery studies of an... more This edited volume deals with the mobility of humans, materials and things. Pottery studies of ancient Europe and contemporary Africa are taken as examples to illustrate how pottery vessels were made in different ways. Whether they were used, sold, given away or passed on over generations, they participated in human practices and mobil-ities, ranging from everyday life to single long-term migration events. By studying the making and the mobility of pots, potters, pottery mongers and pottery users, the focus shifts from ideas of one-sided notions of stable 'cultures' to ideas of appropriations, transformations and thus the negotiation of cultural forms. In the book's first section, the relationship between anthropology and archaeology is illuminated and the disciplines' different takes on 'culture', 'practice', 'mobility' and 'things' throughout major paradigmatic shifts are addressed. The second section unites empirical, object-centred archaeological case studies in which the examination of materials and pottery styles reveals that notions of fixed cultural entities are empirically untenable. The contributions in the third part argue from more actor-centred or symmetrical perspectives. It can be shown how humans and things are intertwined through practices and various rhythms of movement and mobility. Thus, they offer alternative ways to approach the (re)production, negotiation and transformation of cultural practices and their material forms.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Morgane S... more This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Morgane Surdez, Gisela Thierrin-Michael, Caroline Heitz, Regine Stapfer, Albert Hafner English language editing: Morgane Surdez Layout: Designer FH in Visual Communication Susanna Kaufmann Photographs (front page): Firing Experiments to create black ceramics, Gletterens FR, CH. Gisela Thierrin-Michael 5.1. Water absorption measurements 29 5.2. X-Ray Diffractometry (XRD) 30 5.3. Characterisation of pot surfaces with binocular images 36 5.4. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) coupled with energy-dispersive spectrometry (EDS) 5.4.1. Fragment of pot NLT 267 G FBK 38 5.4.2. Fragment of pot NLT 267 R FBK 38 6. Conclusion 47 7. References 47 8. Appendix 1: Diffractograms with phase identification 48 9. Appendix 2: Results of the SEM-EDS analysis 57
Archives de l’Etat du Valais – Vallesia, 2020
Interdisciplinary examinations carried out on heterogeneous coarse ceramics from Neolithic lakeside settlements in the Northern Alpine Foreland (3900–3500 BCE): Analysis strategy and preliminary results from a test series using pXRF
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports , 2019
In recent decades numerous Neolithic lakeside and wetland settlements have been investigated in S... more In recent decades numerous Neolithic lakeside and wetland settlements have been investigated in Switzerland, southern Germany and eastern France. The finds from these settlements indicate that complex relationships and close contacts existed between the inhabitants of different settlements and regions. This can be seen in ceramic vessels that exhibit similarities to those from other regions based on their style, manufacturing technique and raw materials. Although the use of chemical and archaeometric analyses to determine the origin of pottery has been well established for years and despite promising investigations, such analyses have hardly ever been carried out in the study region; as a result, the topic of mobility has rarely been examined. In order to better understand mobility patterns in Neolithic societies by combining stylistic analyses with a chemical characterisation of the potter's clay used, this paper explores the use of portable energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analysis as a means of chemically characterising ceramics. Since studies on the use of pXRF to examine handmade, heterogeneous and coarsely tempered ceramics are rare, it seems necessary to evaluate the method. This paper presents the development of a strategy for the analysis of large series of handmade coarse ceramics from prehistoric settlements. Two examples illustrate the possibilities of and limitations to pXRF analysis on pottery for the detection of mobility patterns of Neolithic societies in the Northern Alpine Foreland.
https://boris.unibe.ch/148042/
https://boris.unibe.ch/148090/
https://boris.unibe.ch/148092/
Uploads
Books by Caroline Heitz
Traditional archaeological ideas about Neolithic societies were shaped by questionable premises. The modern concept of social and cultural coherence of residence groups as well as the ethnic interpretation of ‘archaeological cultures’ fostered ideas of static and homogeneous social entities with fixed borders. Farming – as the core of the Neolithic way of life – was associated with sedentariness rather than with spatial mobility and cross-regional social networks. Furthermore, the widely used (neo-)evolutionist thinking universally assumed a growing social complexity and hierarchisation during prehistory. After all, such ‘top-down’–perspectives deprived individuals and groups of genuine agency and creativity while underestimating the relational dynamic between the social and material worlds. In recent years, a wide array of empirical results on social practices related to material culture and settlement dynamics, (inter-)regional entanglements and spatial mobility were published. For the latter the adoption of the relatively new scientific methods in archaeology like Stable Isotope Analysis as well as aDNA played a crucial role. Yet the question of possible inferences regarding spatial and temporal differences in forms of social organisation has not been addressed sufficiently.
The aim of this volume is therefore to rethink former top-down concepts of Neolithic societies by studying social practices and different forms of Neolithic social life by adopting bottom-up social archaeological perspectives. Furthermore, the validity and relevance of terms like ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘social group’ etc. will be discussed. The contributions reach from theoretical to empirical ones and thematize a variety of social theoretical approaches as well as methodological ways of combining different sorts of data. They show the potential of such bottom-up approaches to infer models of social practices and configurations which may live up to the potential social diversity and dynamism of Neolithic societies. The contribution shed light on spatial mobility, social complexity, the importance of (political) interests and factors of kinship etc. We hope that this volume, with its focus on the Neolithic of Europe, will contribute to the ongoing critical debates of theories and concepts as well as on our premises and perspectives on Neolithic societies in general – and the practices of social archaeology as such.
Mobility is fundamental to forms of social configurations. But what role did spatial mobility play in the past? Regarding prehistoric periods, such as the Neolithic, we still do know little about this. That also applies to the settlement areas of the northern Alpine Foreland. The wetland settlements there were labelled UNESCO World Heritage in 2011. With their excellently preserved remains in lakes and bogs they provide a unique research basis. The dendrochronologically dated settlements open a rare possibility to approach cultural, social, and economic processes based on a high temporal and spatial resolution. In the present volume, this is achieved based on pottery from contemporaneously dated settlements on Lake Zurich and Lake Constance from the period between 3950 and 3800 BC.
Process philosophical considerations on the (trans)formation of ‘things’ are combined with relational social theoretical concepts such as the habitus theorem to form a praxeological approach. The latter serves as the epistemological basis of the newly elaborated mixed method research methodology, which allows for a deeper understanding of mobility, social relations and configurations as well as transformations. Qualitative methods (classification of vessel designs) is utilised to understand pottery production practices from the perspective of the makers and quantitative methods (cluster analysis of vessel features) can be used to analyse transregional structures of ceramic consumption. Accordingly, patterns of spatial mobility and far-reaching relationships of settlement communities become apparent based on such material entanglements. Mobility-related appropriation phenomena and change in pottery practices can be approached in the rhythm of individual decades. Furthermore, the combination of a subjectivist with an ‘objectified’ stance during the research process based on Pierre Bourdieu’s epistemology, the praxeology, leads to an epistemological, metamodern ‘third way’ that mediates between the realism of modernity (processual archaeology) and the constructivism of postmodernity (post-processual archaeology). Finally, the research results deconstruct the common social models following the cultural-historical paradigm, which conceptualized ‘cultures’ as supposedly static, homogeneous, spatially distinct entities. Instead, the pottery points to translocal social configurations that related settlements in the northern Alpine Foreland with each other in the 4th millennium BC.
The site at Seedorf, Lobsigesee is situated on the edge of a small bog lake between Aarberg and Lyss in Canton Bern. The location of the settlement site away from the large lakes of the Jura region and their numerous extensively examined lakeside settlements makes it particularly interesting and was one of the reasons why it was inscribed on the list of Unesco World Heritage Sites as part of “Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps” in 2011.
It was known from numerous scatter finds and from excavations carried out in 1908/09 and again in 1953 that a Neolithic settlement stood on Lake Lobsige, whose preservation was increasingly threatened by drainage works undertaken in the bog to facilitate farming in the area.
In 2005 and 2007, the Archaeological Service of Canton Bern (ADB) carried out archaeological coring on the shoreline of the lake and mounted rescue excavations over an area of 75 m2. The aim was to evaluate the state of preservation of the finds and features with a view to developing an archaeological site monitoring project for the protection of such settlements, to record the settlement remains in the areas most at risk of drying out and to recover the finds. Sieving and soil samples for archaeobiological and geoarchaeological examination were also taken.
This book presents the results of an analysis of the finds and features recorded in the test trenches and excavations undertaken in 2005
and 2007, most of which were obtained between 2009 and 2011 as part of a Master’s thesis submitted to the University of Basel and of a research project run by the ADB. It provides an overview of the archaeological, archaeobiological, palaeoecological and hydrological insight gained on the Neolithic site on Lake Lobsige and establishes connections between the findings made by the individual disciplines. Initially the main focus was on presenting the finds and features and on learning as much as possible about the history of the settlement. Analysis of the archaeological and archaeobiological finds allowed us to trace the changes that occurred in the lifestyles of the community on Lake Lobsige and identify how they were integrated into the different regional and supra-regional networks that existed at the time.
Another focal point was the site monitoring project which aimed to evaluate the state of preservation of the site and to prepare for its future
protection. The analysis presented here also involved examining the state of preservation and level of water saturation of the layers excavated in 2005 and 2007. As well as hydrological and geoarchaeological aspects, archaeobiological indicators were also taken into account for the first time; these were brought to bear when it came to answering questions of preservation, as different states of preservation had been recorded and examined for organic and inorganic
materials within the archaeological layers.
Papers/Book Section by Caroline Heitz
In this paper, we propose an alternative, inductive bottom-up approach in which we define resilience as a set of adaptive capacities grounded in social practices that enabled communities to cope with and respond to challenges. We use the Neolithic wetland sites from the Three-Lakes Region in the northern Alpine foreland of western Switzerland as a case study. These sites provide an abundance of archaeological and palaeoecological information, which can be used to examine the resilience of settlement communities to climate fluctuations. We will evaluate whether a causal relationship might have existed between climate changes in the period between 3600 and 3200 BCE and an observable decline of settlement activities on the shores of the large lakes. In addition to year-accurate reconstructions of settlement histories, we will apply statistical significance tests on archaeological and palaeoclimatic time series to question the correlation and causality between settlement activities and climate fluctuations. Besides the settlement frequency curve, we will use the radioactive beryllium-10 isotope (Be10) content in the GISP2 ice core from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the δ18O values of well-dated speleothems as proxies for temperature and precipitation, respectively. The inferred hypothesis, i.e. that periodically rising lake levels led to the flooding of former inhabitable spaces on the lakes’ shore zones and forced communities to relocate their settlements to the hinterland, will further be tested. Therefore, we apply multivariate statistics to pollen data to evaluate human influence on vegetation (land clearing) taken as settlement activity beyond the shores of large lakes. In addition, we examine the relevance of transformations in pottery styles as further indicators for spatial mobility.
Mara Deza-Araujo, Caesar Morales-Molino,Willy Tinner, Paul D. Henne,
Caroline Heitz, Gianni B. Pezzatti, Albert Hafner, Marco Conedera
Anthropogenic pollen indicators in pollen records are an established tool for reconstructing the history of human impacts on vegetation and landscapes. They are also used to disentangle the influence of human activities and climatic variability on ecosystems. The comprehensive anthropogenic pollen-indicator approach developed by Behre (1981) has been widely used, including beyond its original geographical scope of Central and Western Europe. Uncritical adoption of this approach for other areas is risky because adventives (plants introduced with agriculture) in Central Europe can be apophytes (native plants favoured by human disturbances) in other regions. This problem can be addressed by identifying regionspecific, anthropogenic-indicator pollen types and/or developing region-specific, human-impact indices from pollen assemblages. However, understanding of regional variation in the timing and intensity of human impacts is limited by the lack of standardization, validation and intercomparison of such regional approaches. Here we review the most common European anthropogenic pollen-indicator approaches to assess their performance at six sites spanning a continental gradient over the boreal, temperate and Mediterranean biomes. Specifically, we evaluate the human-indicator approaches by using independent archaeological evidence and models. We present new insights into how these methodologies can assist in the interpretation of pollen records as well as into how a careful selection of pollen types and/or indices according to the specific geographical scope of each study is key to obtain meaningful reconstructions of anthropogenic activity through time. The evaluated approaches generally perform better in the regions for which they were developed. However, we find marked differences in their capacity to identify human impact, while some approaches do not perform well even in the regions for which they were developed, others might be used, with due caution, outside their original areas or biomes. We conclude that alongside the increasing wealth of pollen datasets a need to develop novel tools may assist numeric human impact reconstructions.