Engaging with soil,past and present

Abstract

From raw material to sacred clay, from wall plaster to garden plots, soil plays an intimate role in the lives of agriculturalists. In the lives of archaeologists, however, soil too frequently plays the role of overburden, or the stuff holding the more important things, like stones and bones. At best, soil studies are seen as essential for environmental reconstruction or coming to grips with formation processes. A more grounded approach to interpreting agrarian life involves an understanding and appreciation of soil as a partner. In turn, thinking about soil opens new terrain in the study of landscape perception, ideology and memory. This article explores the potential offered by the materiality of sediments and soilscapes.

Keywords

community farmers Neolithic soil soilscape

Introduction

Leonardo da Vinci once said that ‘we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot’ (Leonardo Da Vinci’s Water Theory, c. 1510). Today we possess a virtual universe of knowledge about soil formation, deposition, erosion and degradation. However, it remains true that we know more about the influence of celestial bodies on human culture and ideology than we do of any similar inspiration by the soil underfoot. Material culture, and the materiality of cultural entities of all kinds, have been the subject of much debate within archaeology, anthropology and material studies. On the other hand, traditional archaeological definitions of material culture often ignore the potential for physically or cognitively altered ‘natural’ entities to influence people. In archaeological landscape studies, this error has been addressed to a large degree (e.g. Bradley, 2000, 2002; Tilley et al., 2000), but for the single largest category of material in most settings, i.e. soil, such recognition by archaeologists is generally lacking. Notable exceptions exist, for example the volume edited by Boivin and Owoc (2004) and recent work by Wells (2006; Wells and Mihok, 2010). Knowledge about soil and its role in many societies, past and present, continues to be developed outside archaeology (e.g. McNeill and Winiwarter, 2006; Warkentin, 2006; Winiwarter and Blum, 2006). Yet for all the attention given to stratigraphy and, more recently, to the capacity for sediments to inform us about subsistence, settlement structure and past environments, archaeologists typically overlook the influence of the materiality of soil on identity, place or memory. This article sets out a theoretical framework and one methodological approach, building on this previous work to incorporate soils fully within archaeological research.

As an archaeologist, my artefact is soil and I believe that in interpreting soil we can reach a more nuanced understanding of how community identity forms, how memory is inscribed through the mundane tasks of everyday life, and how the intersubjective phenomenological experiences that farmers share influence their notions of place. In archaeological practice, samples of sediments are often handled in the same way as other, more traditional material culture. Archaeological sediments are recorded, analysed to a greater or lesser degree and sometimes curated. However, in theory and discourse we do not give sediments the same prominence that we give to material remains such as lithics or ceramics. Lithics and ceramics are proxies for identity, symbolism, exchange, gender, power, diffusion, migration and a host of other vital social qualities. Soil, on the other hand, informs us about agricultural fertility and site formation processes, or acts as a container holding climate proxies. The soil forms part of the background on which social things happen, rather than being an integral part of those social happenings. Therefore, in spite of several calls over the past decade for greater inclusiveness of soil studies in archaeology, explicitly sedimentary research is still perceived by most archaeologists as the realm of specialists, and useful primarily for site formation studies and environmental reconstruction.

There are several pressing reasons why we should abandon this bias and express more interest in sediments as a material category. Sediments are the largest class of material remains at archaeological sites. Stratigraphy, the layers and relationships between layers that appear as we remove sediments, is one of the most complex material reconstructions we deal with. Most importantly, changes in soilscapes, or small-scale soil landscapes (Wells, 2006), can have a profound effect on the people who interact with them. The materiality of soil, frankly, is under-theorized, although recent years have seen the beginning of a shift towards perceiving the dialectic between sediments and people. In this article, this shift is made explicit by formulating theoretical and methodological frameworks for understanding engagement with soil in the past and the present. Drawing from historical and ethnographic examples, I argue that soils and soilscapes play an essential role in the formation of memory, identity, community and worldview. An archaeological case study from the Körös River basin in eastern Hungary provides an example of how sediment-based analyses can be used to infer the role of soil in the formation of places and identities of Neolithic communities.

Why soil as material culture?

The term ‘material culture’ is broad, with multiple definitions and extensive debate regarding the appropriateness of ‘materiality’ or ‘material culture’ (Boivin et al., 2005; Hicks and Beaudry, 2010; Ingold, 2007 and responses; contributions in Miller, 2005a). Rather than reinventing the philosophical wheel of materiality (to paraphrase Miller, 2005b: 14), I wish to accept here the position that material culture exists and is a useful interpretative construct. At the same time, I do not dismiss Ingold’s (2007) suggestion that we study materials themselves. On the contrary, the case study I present involves direct analysis of material sediments, and the interpretations rest on corporeal contact between people and soil. Some material, however, receives little theoretical or interpretative power, and treating soil as material culture helps to overcome this conceptual barrier.

Despite debate, or perhaps because of it, material culture is a concept with room to include myriad entities in our world. Contemporary definitions in archaeology typically focus on the idea that material culture represents the things people produce and use on a daily basis; that is, the material products of culture. For example, in the Collins Dictionary of Archaeology, material culture is defined as ‘the physical remains of humanly made traces of past societies, which constitute the major source of evidence for archaeology’ (Bahn, 1992: 313). Outside archaeology, the meaning of material culture as man-made physical objects has also been presented as straightforward. Prown (1995: 1) begins his essay ‘The truth of material culture’ with the statement that ‘material culture is just what it says it is – namely, the manifestations of culture through material production.’ While this certainly defines material culture, it also begs the question of what we mean by production, not to mention what we might mean by culture.

To approach a meaning that encompasses cultural production, we can start with the definition Deetz first gave in 1977 (see Deetz, 1996: 35):

that sector of our physical environment that we modify through culturally determined behaviour [including] cuts of meat … since there are many ways to dress an animal; ploughed fields; even the horse that pulls the plough, since scientific breeding of livestock involves the conscious modification of an animal’s form according to culturally derived ideals.

Deetz provides a very positive definition, under which sediments on archaeological sites neatly fit. On the negative side, Deetz’s definition is one-sided, giving culture the capacity to produce material, but with no explicit awareness that materials produce new aspects of culture. This interplay of culture and material was addressed in the 1980s and 1990s, and it is now accepted that material not only reflects social reality but also plays an active role in constructing social reality (Miller, 1987, 1998a; Thomas, 1991). We now recognize words like ‘produced’ or ‘constructed’ as including social action: the construction of landscapes and cosmologies as well as the manufacture of axes. The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology defines material culture as ‘the generic term that summarizes and identifies all kinds of tangible things manufactured and modified by human beings’, and ‘at its most basic level, material culture consists of physical objects that provide insight into how culture operates and human beings behave’ (Parezo, 1996: 747). Parezo has moved beyond the focus on how physical objects come to exist towards the role they play in human life; things modified by people can include soil and a slew of other entities. In this light, in his book Material Culture and Sacred Landscape (2003: 276), Jordan defined material culture as ‘the bringing of symbolic meaning to physical matter, either through physical transformations or the incorporation … into the symbolisms of social practices’, which includes cultural landscapes as well as artefacts. This focus on materiality as a way to understand human society is perhaps most simply put in the definition given by Thrift (2000: 492) in the Dictionary of Human Geography, where he says that material culture is ‘the relationship between people and things’.

Relationships are the key to understanding how soils influence the people who create and use them. People and things exist in networks wherein both people and things are mutually transformative (Ingold, 2000). Buchli (2002) also sees material culture as the way that we interact with the world and as an essential concept in understanding people and society. This is because the unconscious ways in which we relate to the things we work and live with create and reify traditions. One of the more detailed discussions of the relational role of material culture in archaeology has been Knappett’s Thinking Through Material Culture (2005). A common theme can be seen in Knappett’s work, as well as in Evans’s (2003: ch. 3, 45) work: ‘Textures help a person think’, which is that the material world is part of how people think about themselves and their social world. Transformations in the material world, as in textural transformations of sediments, change the ways that people think. Following McLuhan (1967), modifying the medium of expression, in this case the soil, alters the expression itself. Thus, we have not only the intended action but also an unintended action. For example, the topography of your garden and the care with which the grass and shrubs are maintained form a powerful symbol of status in modern USA; to get the lawn that marks you as socially significant in the USA requires the alteration of both the chemistry and the life of the soil. In turn, the lawn gives you a sense of identity and places your property within the larger community. Further, the perfect lawn not only reflects one’s social standing, but also has the power to exclude people without lawns. The intended action is to have a lawn at least as good as the neighbours’ and to mark one’s self as successful. The unintended actions are that you mark yourself as suburban, individualistic and exclusive; your lawn delineates your space and your social standing. You begin to identify most strongly with other people who have ‘good’ lawns, denigrating those who do not take the ‘proper’ care. In addition, people from neighbourhoods with no lawns, e.g. urban dwellers, may actually feel uncomfortable around your lawn, not being part of your community.

Soil acts as material culture in similar ways, especially for agrarian communities, and contributes to identity formation. We can study what people do with soil to understand ‘the way that the people we study create a world of practice’ (Miller, 1998b: 19). How the soil exerts influence, or how soil acts to produce identity and place, is also worth considering. An initial answer might be to suggest that soil exerts agency, following Gell’s concept of distributed agency, wherein people attribute agency to material, often unconsciously, and the material then acts as a secondary agent (Gell, 1998: 20–21). However, agency is but one way to think about human/material interaction. Ingold (2010: 94–95) suggested that we consider the ‘vitality of materials’ and how they interact in the ‘generative currents of the world’. People and material together generate material objects, an especially relevant concept for understanding cultural soilscapes. We can also consider how soil presents itself, supposing that soil is meaningful rather than thinking of soil as signifying or representing some abstract meaning (following Henare et al., 2007: 2–3). We need to acknowledge that modern industrial agricultural practices create homogenized landscapes (Figure 1), which do not reflect the experiences of small-scale farmers. These approaches have the advantage of eliminating debates around whether things really have intrinsic agency or meaning, moving instead to a discussion of how material articulates meaning.

Figure 1.

Modern industrialized farming creates an homogenized agricultural soilscape such as this one near Békés, Hungary, which is unlike those experienced by small-scale agrarian communities. © Photograph: Roderick Salisbury.

My suspicion is that people are impacted by and draw inspiration from interactions with the materiality of soil. I also believe that soilscapes are material culture and should be considered and treated as such. Soil, and archaeological sediments, can be viewed as material culture at two different temporal and conceptual resolutions. The first is the scale of long-term history and it involves the ways that people create things, both intentionally and unintentionally. The second is at the scale of archaeological research; short-term and scientific, it involves the ways that archaeologists create soils with terms like ‘context’ and ‘stratigraphy’, reducing soil to units of analysis, placing sediments into taxonomies and inventing categories of ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’ soil. By envisioning new attributes for soil, archaeologists can begin to consider how soils influenced people in the past and may do so in the present. I now provide examples of a few of the cases where soil is the medium, and the message, of cultural life.

Soil and culture

Up to this point, and for the remainder of this article, I use the terms ‘soil’ and ‘sediment’ fairly interchangeably, although every soil scientist will observe that soils and sediments are distinct categories of geological entities with specific attributes. Soil is unconsolidated material, composed of water, air, inorganic and organic elements, that forms in situ at the earth’s surface through various atmospheric, biological, chemical, geological and hydrological processes. Soil is dynamic in that material is continually and simultaneously added, removed and transformed in place. Soil is alive in the sense that it is filled with millions of micro-organisms living out their lives – lives that include forming and altering their soil world. Sediments, by comparison, are a collection of geological and/or organic materials, including former soil, which have been removed from their original source and redeposited elsewhere by natural or human activities. ‘Natural’ in this sense means the action of wind, water, ice or geologic upheaval. Therefore, the redeposited loess found as lag surfaces along relict water channels in Hungary’s Körös River system, for instance, are sediments. After deposition, sediments are subject to in situ soil formation processes, becoming parent material for the soils that now form the agricultural fields of the eastern Carpathian Basin.

We can see from this that the strict definitions of soil and sediment are important for analysing site formation history and landscape development, although the definitions are rarely used the same way in geomorphology, geoarchaeology, geology and other soil-related disciplines (Cremeens and Hart, 1995). The distinction matters for pedology, but does it also matter when discussing how people use the soil? Do farmers differentiate between soil and sediment, or do they differentiate among levels of fertility or ease of cultivation? How many of us ask whether the mud on our boots is sediment or soil, or recognize that what may have been soil when we walked across it has become sediment on our kitchen floor? While I do believe that we should treat archaeological sediments as a class of material culture and use the terms correctly during analysis, I also believe that we too frequently bury ourselves under a layer of strict definitions and usage. We create a culturally sterile soil and we reinforce dualistic thinking. Soil is objectified when we create definitions of sediments and soils but it is the material of the earth that people engage with. For interpretations of how soils/sediments affect people, we should reflect on the role that soil plays, consider the possibility that soils and sediments had, and retain, culturally imbued meanings and that farmers and builders differentiate between soils based on what they afford. The terms ‘soil’ and ‘sediment’ are culturally constructed concepts and indiscriminate use here reflects their potential affordances and more abstract cultural meanings.

The first, and most obvious, example of soil as material is when soils are used as raw materials for traditional artefacts, such as containers, figurines or houses, or early mediums for art and writing (e.g. the clay objects in Figure 2). Archaeologists, along with sociologists, anthropologists and others, will have no difficulty in identifying these objects as material culture. Some societies did not use soil for these products, turning instead to wood, bone, animal hides or basketry. For those that did, however, soil was an essential raw material for the necessities of everyday life. It is in this sense that soil as material is most frequently and readily understood, but this sense does not engage with the materiality or significance of the soil itself.

Figure 2.

Artefacts made of clay. Is soil simply the medium of expression, or part of the message? Photographs of vessel and figurine taken at the Krahuletz Museum, Eggensberg, Austria, with permission. Photograph of daub from Late Neolithic site of Csárdaszállás-26 in eastern Hungary. © Roderick Salisbury.

Soil was used to construct mounds and earthworks in Europe and the Americas; while this could be seen as another example of soil as raw material, we should briefly examine the available evidence that soil was more than simply a physical resource to be exploited. Naturally occurring mounds and other landforms often have cultural significance. One Seneca Indian myth maintains that the ancestors came out of Bare Hill (or South Hill) near Canandaigua Lake in central New York State, and their own name, Onöndowága, means ‘People of the Great Hill’ (Engelbrecht, 2003). Salisbury and Niemel (2005) propose that glacial landforms, especially kames (mounds of stratified sediments left by a retreating glacier) were special, and perhaps sacred, places in the central New York landscape because of their unique form and structure. Earthwork features are more easily recognizable as cultural constructions and often served one or more social functions. One of these social functions appears to be the manipulation and interaction with specific soils. Some archaeologists, either explicitly (e.g. Owoc, 2001, 2004) or implicitly (e.g. Holst, 2005) recognize the soil itself as an important component in the ideology of construction. In one case, Owoc (2001: 34) describes the placement of yellow kaolinized granite, from a very local source, on top of the Bronze Age mound at Caerloggas Downs III in Cornwall in southwest England. This material was positioned in such a way as to both make part of the mound more visible and emphasize the path of the sun. Another example of this phenomenon comes from Davidstow Moor, north Cornwall, where Owoc (2004: 116) details the use of yellow subsoil laid out in rings to replicate the movements of the sun. Owoc also notes that, in many mounds and earthworks, sediments were placed in such a way as to reverse the natural stratigraphic profile. Of particular interest is the description of Trelen 2 in west Cornwall, where the natural stratigraphy was recreated, with yellow clay subsoil placed on the natural ground surface and then covered with topsoil and turf (pp. 112–113). In each of these cases, different soils offer different affordances and the materiality of soil was manipulated to create a cosmology as part of material expressions of local traditions. It also seems likely that, within this symbolism, the medium is part of the message. The simple use of yellow soil against the background of darker topsoil and turf, reconstructing the formation of the earth and the movement of the sun, would make powerful representations even more powerful through the use of that container of fertility and renewal – the soil itself. Based on these observations, one might therefore ask: does the mound in Figure 3 represent merely a pile of dirt, or a structured assemblage of material culture?

Figure 3.

Was this Bronze Age mound from Denmark the result of cultural ideology regarding soil? What if it has been excavated and reassembled? © Photograph: Roderick Salisbury.

The special nature of soil is not restricted to prehistory. In everyday life, we treat certain sediments as special, even though most of us have probably never considered this consciously. For example, we need grit on the roads in the winter. When we run out of this category of sediment, we face crisis, as marked by complaints during the fearsome 2009 and 2010 snows in the UK. Then the grit must be cleaned up because it is unsightly after it has finished its task. The grit, therefore, has both unambiguous and fuzzy properties, including that of being undesirable once its task is accomplished. White sand is sediment of a similar consistency, but of a different sort, as white sand beaches are claimed to be the paragon of beach virtue. Yellow sand beaches are nice but white sandy beaches are found in our dreams (with apologies to Iz Kamakawiwo’ole, 1993). In gardening, we have special words for specific soil characteristics, such as sweet and sour for alkaline or acidic soils, respectively, and much is made of understanding and manipulating the soils in one’s garden. Various soils clearly have unique roles in our society based on their own peculiar qualities. The significance of soil as material culture worthy of serious consideration, materials that help to organize society, can perhaps best be described through concrete examples of soil as part of cultural ideology. Two such examples are presented, followed in the next section by an archaeological case study. Note the active role played by soil in these examples.

Hungarian kings – the coronation ceremony

Our first example comes from the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The crowning of the King of Hungary was a highly ritualized event that included soil as representative of the people of Hungary. After a pre-coronation oath and mass inside a church and a coronation oath outside the church, the King (or Queen in the case of Empress Maria Theresa) was required to gallop up an artificial hill – the Coronation Hill – riding a white horse while wearing the crown of St István. Once on top of the hill, the newly crowned monarch points a sword towards each of the four winds to symbolize willingness to defend the entire country of Hungary. The crowning ceremony originally took place in Székesfehérvár, the country’s mediaeval seat of coronation. During the period 1541 to 1784, when the Ottoman Empire occupied much of Hungary, these ceremonies took place in Bratislava and the importance of the monarch swearing to defend all of Hungary, including occupied areas, is self-evident. Of consequence for our discussion is the construction of the Coronation Hill. To make the hill, a sack of soil from each county (Megye in Hungarian, Komitat in German) of Hungary was brought and deposited on the mound in what is now Štúr Square. After the Carpathian Basin returned to Hapsburg authority, coronations of the Hungarian monarch took place in Budapest and a new mound was constructed there. Emperor Franz Joseph, crowned King of Hungary in Budapest in 1867, rode up the mound in his coronation robes and crown and slashed his sword in each of the four cardinal directions (Chroscicki, 1998: 212; Von Klimó, 2003: 115). The mound is visible under Franz Joseph in Figure 4. This scene, including the construction of the hill, is reproduced in all its romanticized glory in the 1956 Austrian film Sissi – die junge Kaiserin (Sissi – the Young Empress) starring Karlheinz Böhm and Romy Schneider, and dubbed in English in 1962 as Forever My Love, available in 10-minute segments on YouTube.

Figure 4.

Ferenc Kollarz: Franz Joseph on horseback on the coronation mound at Budapest, drawing, 1867. Courtesy of Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H. © Photograph: Sascha Rieger.

For the coronation mound in Bratislava, the story does not end here. The mound remained in place for a few decades and was finally removed in 1870 to make space for a plaza and monument. Today, the mound is being rebuilt a few metres closer to the Danube, and with a new twist. Rather than representing the defunct Hungarian monarchy, the Integration Mound contains soil from every country in the EU, a monument to a new inclusiveness of national communities (albeit not without controversy: Miloš Gregor, personal communication).

Hans Haacke’s Bundestag art

The second example comes from the modern era. In 1999/2000, the artist Hans Haacke produced a garden ‘to the population’ (Der Bevölkerung) for the courtyard of the former Reichstag building in Berlin. Haacke’s garden expresses the unity of the modern German state through soil, consisting of deposits of earth from each of the constituencies represented in the German Bundestag, the soil representing each community. Construction, much like the Hungarian coronation mound, involved political leaders bringing soil from their constituencies and depositing it in the garden (for a detailed discussion of the work, see Åhr, 2010; Wagner, 2007). Simultaneously, and most important for our discussion, the work reminds viewers of past political abuses of using soil to symbolize identity. Does it reify, or satirize, the old ideology of ‘Blood and Soil’ (Åhr, 2010)? The garden, like much of Haacke’s work, reveals the complexity of social/soil relations. Soil symbolizes community, participates in identity construction at several levels and unleashes memories. This connection of soil and society is again not without controversy and the work was approved in parliament by just two votes. According to Åhr (2010), it intends to satirize but has become many things to many people, as the meaning of any art after construction is no longer under the control of the artist.

Soil as archaeological material

In the two preceding examples, soils jump out as facilitators for memory and community identity. In addition, for all of the examples thus far, there is an aspect of material that we recognize as an intentional transformation of soil. The physical transformation into figurines or coronation mounds is obvious. In other cases, the transformations are less material, as in recognition of a hill as a sacred place. Finally, there is another category: soil that is unintentionally transformed. Through everyday tasks, soils are transformed physically in ways that we as archaeologists can find and interpret, and that would have been apparent to people through visual or textural change. When the Inuit butcher seals in Alaska, they leave a distinct chemical signature, including fats, in the soil (Brunborg et al., 2006). Chemical and lipid signatures also develop when people keep cattle in their houses, as in Iron Age Denmark (Hjulström and Isaksson, 2009). When a Tiszapolgár family cooked over a hearth in what is now eastern Hungary, they altered the magnetic susceptibility of the soil and left a chemical signature as well (Parkinson et al., 2010; Sarris et al., 2004). And feasting in Mesoamerican plazas leaves different chemical signatures for food preparation and food consumption areas (Wells, 2004). In fact, we quickly realize that most daily activities will physically and chemically alter the soil. We can ask how the characteristics of sediments that people have moved and mixed are different in their geophysical or geochemical properties compared to ‘natural’ soilscapes. Such soils or sediments may be more or less porous or compacted, or more or less conductive or magnetic compared to other local sediments. In addition, lived space typically has more complex stratigraphy than surrounding soilscapes (Dalan and Bevan, 2002: 781). The chemical, physical and perceptual qualities of sediments therefore form another sort of artefact that directly relates to human activity.

It is this artefact that I examined in my doctoral dissertation (Salisbury, 2010), with the goal of showing how sediment analysis could provide both a comprehensive view of settlement structure and give some insight into how community identity was maintained during periods of settlement disaggregation. Six sites dating to the Late Neolithic (c. 5000 BC) and Early Copper Age (c. 4500 BC) in the Körös-Berettyó river basin in Békés County, eastern Hungary (Figure 5) were hand-cored at regular 10-metre intervals for stratigraphic characterization and soil sample collection. Sediment profiles seen in the cores were described in the field, based on soil colour, soil texture and the presence of cultural material. Samples were collected from the bottom of the plough zone or top of the cultural layer and from the top of the subsoil. All samples collected were tested for available phosphates (Pav) using a ring-chromatography test (Eidt, 1973) to determine relative levels of Pav across sites to ascertain vertical and horizontal site limits and gain a general idea of activity areas. Multi-element characterization of subsamples was carried out using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). Because the aim was to identify areas of human activity within known sites, a weak acid extraction method was used for the ICP-MS (Salisbury, forthcoming; Wells, 2004). These results give some indication of activity areas within the settlements. Multivariate statistics of the multi-element data, including Principal Components Analysis (PCA), were performed in Minitab 15. PCA works under the assumption that correlated elements covary because they are related to the same input. The resultant components can then be mapped, providing a more accessible picture of spatial patterning than can be achieved by examining each element individually. Results of geochemical data and their principal components, as well as the stratigraphic characterizations, were interpolated in ESRI’s ArcView 9.2 spatial analyst to produce prediction maps. Kriging, or ‘optimal interpolation’, produces an estimated surface from a scattered set of points with z-values (Figure 6). These results formed the basis for the following interpretations.

Figure 5

Location of examined sites in the Körös-Berettyó basin in eastern Hungary (Salisbury, 2010).

Figure 6.

Interpolated patterning of chemical enrichment at the Late Neolithic settlement Csárdaszállás 8. Geochemical changes in soils indicate the locations of activity zones and the prehistoric development of cultural soilscapes. © Roderick Salisbury.

A cultural soilscape was identified at each site, resulting from a series of interconnected activity areas that caused the enrichment or depletion of chemical elements, pH, organic matter, and fragments of bone, daub, charcoal and ceramics. The soilscape is centred on a household cluster, a house and associated pits, burials, thermal features and/or middens (building upon Winter, 1976). Outside this cluster are other activity zones, including middens, pasture and presumably garden plots or cultivated fields.

The picture that emerges is one of a fairly consistently structured use of space, with three general areas within a household cluster or hamlet; open spaces, intensively used pits and activity areas, and household and/or communal refuse locations. Results indicate that people maintained traditions of activity and house location within small farmsteads during both the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age, as seen through patterns of chemical enrichment and sediments in household clusters. These patterns also indicate that small farmsteads from both periods share a different spatial organization from large, nucleated Late Neolithic villages. I argue that this continuity in one aspect of life produced deep-seated beliefs about community and place, beliefs that are related to intimate connection with the soil and are not necessarily reflected in ceramic decorations. Through these, the relations between different scales of communities and variability in regional settlement patterns, exchange and mortuary customs can be seen as changes that are in some degree possible and socially acceptable because of the continuity afforded by cultural soilscapes. Settlement space was developed through everyday practice and used as an avenue for negotiation and change following the aggregation and boundedness of the period c. 5000–4500 calBC. The structured use of space within Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age farmsteads and the creation of cultural soilscapes in and around them serve to affirm identity while allowing for divergence from cultural norms. The materialization of everyday practice in the texture, colour, consistency and fertility of soils in and around the house or hamlet would have made physical the social reality of the community, even as house size changed and populations dispersed. Thus, the soilscape provides an alternative source of collective standardization to offset some variability, for example in construction technology of Early Copper Age houses observed by Gyucha et al. (2006). Differentness could have been expressed through construction techniques, ceramic decorations or less observable traits, such as painting houses, within an accepted structure of communal and family areas.

Soil, identity and Neolithic communities

Boivin (2004) has postulated that soil developed into a key resource during the Neolithic and that this new development is related to other important changes associated with sedentary lifestyle and agricultural innovation. I agree, and I believe we can express this a bit more forcefully and in a more specific manner. People and soil entered into a new partnership, wherein soil acted to create identity and was perceived as a reflection of life itself. Soil is a medium with meaningful qualities symbolic of both a sacred and secular identity (if we allow for a moment an analytical duality of sacred and secular). In the Early Neolithic, it was a new medium that arose with the construction of pottery and relatively permanent mud dwellings, and from an increased emphasis on the fertility of soil. Of course it is likely that hunter–forager populations had for millennia recognized that plants grew from some soils and not others, but with the increasing sedentism and population aggregation that arose during the Early Neolithic, this quality of soil would take on more significance. People shifted from an economy of going to where one knows plants grow best to putting plants where they would both grow and be convenient. Different soils afford different opportunities and different soils also offer varying constraints. One of these constraints is that, unlike herd animals and broad-spectrum gathering, certain soils occur in specific places. To go to another place requires finding other suitable soils and sometimes these soils are difficult to identify. Similarly, houses of wattle-and-daub or mud bricks are not like yurts or tipis in that they are not transportable. People therefore become bound to the soil through their increasing reliance on the affordances of soil. People are now linked to place in a relatively permanent manner (Boivin, 2008; Carsten and Hugh-Jones, 1995; Haaland, 1997).

A community is a relational entity, composed of (among other things) networks of people and affordances functioning at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Among the affordances are institutions, traditions, landscapes and soilscapes. The characteristics of the network, or of any social system, are not the same as the combined characteristics of parts. The catch is to identify measurable material remains that reflect both the cultural system and the relations between its parts. Soils have these measurable material remains. Miller (1987: 85–108) argues that objects can be important not because they are obviously there or obviously constraining/enabling, but because in many cases they are not obviously there. That is, objects are most powerful when they are acting through our subconscious, as part of an exterior environment that both habituates us and incites us to act. It is through this kind of approach that we can understand how soilscapes act on people. The rich soilscape mosaic of the Körös basin includes many different soil affordances. People selected settlement location based on well-drained soil in slightly elevated locations near waterways and on the boundaries between different soil types. The results derived from sediment analyses indicate that soils within settlement areas were substantially altered through the addition of organic matter and ash. The processes of clearing vegetation, adding soil, cleaning, trampling and tilling, although not readily visible in cores after a few centuries of ploughing, fundamentally alter the qualities of the earth (and are visible, for example, through soil micromorphology; e.g. French, 2003). The resultant cultural soilscape would have been an alteration of the pre-existing surface, akin to other settlements and different from unsettled places in the surrounding landscape. The earth within the village becomes domesticated (cf. Hodder, 1990). I do not want to put too much emphasis on this ‘taming’ of the ‘wild’, but it is the case that the earth at settlements would look, feel and smell different from the earth of pasturelands or ‘natural’ areas. These changes would be obvious but, for people working on and in these soils every day, collecting clay for house walls and storage vessels, tilling the earth or digging for tubers and molluscs, the changes would occur slowly, over several years, and would be sensed rather than dispassionately considered. Farmers, through their daily interactions with the soil, are most likely to be affected by subtle differences. Moreover, many of these textural qualities are felt through the feet as well as the hands (Ingold, 2004), providing a complementary arena of soil perception.

Evans (2003, 2005) urged us to reflect on these phenomenological aspects of ‘the closest, most intimate, scale with the land surface that can be experienced under everyday practices of living’ (Figure 7), the ‘experience of textures’ beneath our feet and in our hands (Evans, 2003: 45). These sensory experiences were made possible through people’s conscious decisions and unconscious practices. Moreover, the constant inundation and alluvial deposition of the seasonal floods would have created new textural conditions, providing a striking visual symbol of renewal and regeneration that can also be seen in the re-plastering of house floors, which occurred during the Late Neolithic in Eastern Hungary. These qualities become part of how people identify their locality and how they fit into the world. As Evans put it, they help people to think.

Figure 7.

The texture of soil is experienced through hands and feet. © Photograph: Roderick Salisbury.

We can further consider the way soils help people think by considering the work of psychologist Csikszentmihalyi (1993: 22–23), who argues that we use material objects to organize and regulate our mental processes. In the modern world, this is accomplished through signposts, clocks, televisions and mobile phones, as well as through more personal and intimate items such as paintings or musical instruments. This is not a simple matter of telling us when and what we should do; rather, Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes the role of objects in focusing attention, modulating moods and maintaining mental equilibrium. ‘Most of the things we make these days do not make life better in any material sense but instead serve to stabilize and order the mind’ (p. 22). They help us locate ourselves in the world and contain meanings about ourselves. For example, the sight, feel and smell of a saddle can evoke happy memories of a youth spent on horseback, roaming the hills of New York’s Hudson Valley. When discussing Neolithic villagers, it is immediately obvious that architecture serves some of these roles and personal items, such as figurines, may fill others. In part, this is immediately obvious to us because we experience these same effects in our own lives and have adopted the concept for our interpretations. When discussing the role of Neolithic soilscapes, however, we must envision a different world, where the textures, sounds and smells of sediments, livestock and wood fires serve to organize and modulate a sense of self. They can tie us to a community of place and provide the foundation for identity.

In the context of Bourdieu (1977), Evans (2003), Ingold (2000) and Tilley (1994), sediments played a significant role in the process of the construction of community through the practices of soilscape formation, sensual experience and via social memory. We can now see that in the production of new textures and topography, soil both gives and is given meaning. Soil becomes a medium of expression, relaying strong symbols about the world. As Cohen (1985: 14) says, one of the most important things about symbols is that they allow those who interact with them to supply some of their meaning. Cohen’s focus is on the symbolic structure of community and the set of values and conventions that give meaning and a sense of identity to its members. We can follow this path, specifically with respect to how sediments provide some of the symbolism and act as a medium for the communication of ideas of community and tradition that lead to the experience of community. Seeing soil as material culture allows us to extend our explorations in directions of both the intersubjective phenomenological experience of sediments and the role that they play within networks of people, communities and materials.

Conclusion

The material world affects people just as much as people affect their world and a material culture approach allows consideration of the ways of thinking and living that soils reveal. Thus, we have not only the intended action, perhaps clearing off and cultivating a Neolithic garden plot next to a small house on a loess island in a boggy river meander, but also an unintended action. The visual appearance and tactile sensation of the soil is transformed. The message this plot gives is that it is now part of the built environment. It feels, looks and acts differently than it did before. The same space has become a different place and people will receive a different message from it and think differently about it. It becomes part of ‘their’ community and they become part of the soilscape. We can start to treat the agentive properties of soil in a similar manner to the way we treat architecture or pottery: as an organizing principle for and remnant medium of human life and interaction. Physical artefacts like lithics, ceramics, foundations, standing stones, earthworks, etc. are each produced through only a few of the daily tasks that people participate in. Geochemical, geophysical and stratigraphic alterations of soil are also produced during the course of everyday life, albeit sometimes through unintended consequences. From a cultural perspective, the history of community life is more than merely a collection of pots, tools or food remains, and also more than a description or interpretation of household activities or of the hardships of common people. On the contrary, it is the comparative reconstruction of historical processes, of repetitive situations in the lives of people. We therefore cannot be satisfied with simply collecting and accepting the message of the sources. We also need to understand the message of the medium through which so many features of daily life are performed. Soil is the stage upon which life is enacted, but it is also a prop, an actor and the cement that binds it all together.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Oliver Harris, Matt Edgeworth and two anonymous reviewers helped to clarify the paper. Thanks to Miloš Gregor of the Slovakian Geological Institute in Bratislava for discussion about the location of the old coronation mound and the future of the new Integration Mound in Bratislava. I also would like to thank Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H., Vienna, for providing the image in , and Dr Franz Pieler for permission to use photographs taken at the Krahuletz Museum, Eggensberg, Austria. This work was partly supported through a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Hungary. Responsibility for errors and omissions lie with the author.

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