Opovo Resurrexit: Archaeological Projects have Life-Histories Too (Ruth Tringham, UC Berkeley)
An exploration of Opovo Ugar-Bajbuk (in present-day Serbia) as a place that has been the focus of lives, events and projects during the 5th millennium BC and in the 20th and 21st centuries CE.
REFERENCES:
Slide 3:
Chapman, J. (2020). Forging Identities in the Prehistory of Old Europe. Sidestone Press.
Whittle, A., Bayliss, A., et al (2017). A Vinca potscape: formal chronological models for the use and development of Vinča ceramics in south-east Europe Documenta Praehistorica 43
Slide 4:
Tringham, R. (2022). On the Digital and Analog Afterlives of Archaeological Projects. In K. Garstki (Ed.), Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age (pp. 185-200). Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Slide 5:
Tringham, R. (2023). Acknowledging Inspirations in a Lifetime of Shifting and Pivoting Standpoints to Construct the Past [Perspective]. Annual Reviews of Anthropology, 52. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-062320-015836
Slide 6:
Tringham, R., Cooper, G., Odell, G., Voytek, B., & Whitman, A. (1974). Experimentation in the formation of edge-damage: a new approach to lithic analysis. Journal of Field Archaeology, 1(1-2), 186-196.
Slide 7:
Tringham, R. (1978). Experimentation, Ethnoarchaeology and the Leapfrogs in Archaeological Methodology. In R. Gould (Ed.), Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology (pp. 169-199). University of New Mexico Press.
Slide 15:
Stevanovic, M. (1997). The Age of Clay: The Social Dynamics of House Destruction. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 16, 334-395.
Slide 16:
Tringham, R., Brukner, B., Kaiser, T., Borojevic, K., Russell, N., Steli, P., Stevanovic, M., & Voytek, B. (1992). The Opovo Project: a study of socio-economic change in the Balkan Neolithic. 2nd preliminary report. Journal of Field Archaeology, 19(3), 351-386.
Tringham, R., Brukner, B., & Voytek, B. (1985). The Opovo Project: a study of socio-economic change in the Balkan Neolithic. Journal of Field Archaeology, 12(4), 425-444.
Tringham, R. (2010). Forgetting and Remembering the Digital Experience and Digital Data. In D. Boric (Ed.), Archaeology and Memory (pp. 68-104). Oxbow Books.
Tringham, R. (2012). Households through a Digital Lens. In B. Parker & C. Foster (Eds.), New Perspectives on Household Archaeology (pp. 81-120). Eisenbrauns Publishing.
Slide 18:
Tringham, R. (1991). Households with Faces: the challenge of gender in prehistoric architectural remains. In J. Gero & M. Conkey (Eds.), Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory: Women and Prehistory (pp. 93-131). Basil Blackwell.
Slide 19:
Joyce, R., & Tringham, R. (2007). Feminist Adventures in Hypertext. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 14(3: special issue: Practising Archaeology as a Feminist, edited by Alison Wylie and Meg Conkey), 328-358.
Slide 20:
Bailey, D., Tringham, R., Bass, J., Stevanovic, M., Hamilton, M., Neumann, H., Angelova, I., & Raduncheva, A. (1998). Expanding the Dimensions of Early Agricultural Tells: The Podgoritsa Archaeological Project, Bulgaria. Journal of Field Archaeology, 25(4), 373–396.
Slide 22:
Tringham, R., & Stevanovic, M. (Eds.). (2012). Last House on the Hill: BACH Area Reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Çatalhöyük vol.11). Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Publications, UCLA.
Slide 26:
Tringham, R., & Danis, A. (2023). Forgotten Products of Labor: a Ritual of Many Lives. In H. Barnard (Ed.), Archaeology Outside the Box (pp. 206-215). Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, UCLA.
Slide 28:
Hofmann, R., Medović, A., Furholt, M., Medović, I., Pešterac, T. S., Dreibrodt, Stefan , Martini, S., & Hofmann, A. (2019). Late Neolithic multicomponent sites of the Tisza region and the emergence of centripetal settlement layouts. Praehistorische Zeitschrift, 94(Issue 2), 351-378.
Hofmann, R., & Müller-Scheessel, N. (2020). Orientation of Neolithic Dwellings in Central and Southeast Europe: common denominator between the Vinca and Linearbandkeramik worlds. Quaternary International, 560-561, 142-153.
Many of you have run archaeological projects in the field. Many of you have participated in archaeological projects in the field and regarded them as a model or as something you would have done differently had you been the PI. This talk is about the life-history of one archaeological project. The life history of a
Project has certain expectations. In the Reality of the project these expectations are often not fulfilled, and much of that is the result of the PI whose focus on the project may get distracted, or opportunities come up, and blockages happen, and other external challenges
Prevent the smooth trajectory of the project from its birth to its closure. If I had to provide the elevator pitch for the Opovo Archaeological Project this is what I would tell you: active in field 1983-1989 summers
It was a project directed and carried out jointly by a team from UCB (me as PI) and the University of Novi Sad and the Museum of Panchevo, both in Northern Serbia (was Yugoslavia during active period) Tisza-Danube-Tamis watershed prehistory: “Old Europe” late Neolithic, Vinca culture period C, 4800-4600 BCE,
Village, dominated by clay, and really good at playing with fire: pyrotechnology (ceramics, smelt copper, etc.), burned wattle-and-daub houses, and by the way they were farmers, hunters, and gatherers: domesticated and wild animals and plants Not sure how many of you have any familiarity with Neolithic Balkan
Prehistory. Hopefully an interest in it in Berkeley did not die out with my retirement. But this will be another elevator pitch about the Neolithic of SE Europe and will serve to set Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk in its broader historical context. I owe a lot to John Chapman 2020 for
Summarizing the story, as well as the massive chronometric data increase provided by Alasdair Whittle and his Times of the Their Lives project. The chart on the right anchors you in a familiar way of thinking about culture history. I don’t need to tell this audience
About the downside of such charts. I have grossly simplified John Chapman’s scheme. What the left-hand image will show you, however, is that “Old Europe” is anything but a static entity; there are important shifts across southeast Europe in what seems to be the growth and
Creative focus during this period. Starting with the earliest pioneer Neolithic farming settlements moving northwards not very far and not very fast (for 1000 years) , there was an explosive growth around 5300BC in which large settlement aggregations fixed in place for several generations- some forming mounds or tells -; along with a
Proliferation in the use of the local clays and pyrotechnology skills to create the features that we identify as Old Europe: more substantial building, more ceramics, more figurines, ever more brilliant in their variation, intensive use of local mineral resources, more burning of houses, less frequent (rarity) burials in settlements. This early intensification
Was located especially in the West Balkans and includes the red dot of Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk. At about 4600 BC the focus of exchange networks and center of intensified settlement and production gradually moved eastwards. At the same time began a long period of transformation,
Starting in the west Balkans, seen in the smaller hamlets in the latest Vinca period and the increasing importance of the burial domain in the early Copper Age cultures. Meanwhile, in the east Balkans which had by no means been dormant before 4600 BC reached heights of
Material brilliance afterwards, with a variety of settlement forms in tells and flat sites, and a resource network that provided exotica from a large variety of locations. There too, however, by 4000bc, a trend towards smaller houses and settlements with fewer materials deposited, and more focus on burial deposition impoverished the
Rich archaeological evidence of the domestic domain of the previous thousand years. But in the eastern margin of Old Europe, the Ukraine not only kept on the old domestic traditions but intensified them as seen in the Tripillya Mega-sites during the fourth millennium BCE. You’ll see this chart several times in this presentation, illustrating various
Issues at different points in the life of an archaeological project. The trajectory represents the expectations (not all of the options obviously) of the second half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. What is missing from this chart = because
It was created for a different set of questions ( ) – is why. How and why does an archaeological project get started? How did I come to start the project at Opovo? Opovo was not the first project of excavation that I directed and it was designed to address
A specific archaeological question – the universal presence of burned houses in the Balkan Neolithic. How did we (the Opovo team) get to the burned houses question? The path towards the Opovo project was not at all direct, nor smooth. A lot of serendipity
Was involved. It starts at least two decades before we set foot in Opovo’s cornfields in 1983. There are a couple of threads in my own history that started very early and had a significant effect on the history of the project.
First of all: I chose to focus my curiosity and research energies on eastern Europe when I was still an undergraduate at University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Pause for a commercial: You can read more about that in the Perspective article for
The Annual Reviews of Anthropology that was just published. You can download the digital version for free on their website since it’s Open Access. Stuart Piggott (remember the movie of Sutton Hoo) was the supervisor for both my Senior Thesis and PhD dissertation. As a student,
Thanks to him, I participated in the excavation of the archaeological site of Bylany (a significant Neolithic settlement in Czechoslovakia). The excavation’s director, Bohumil (Bobik) Soudsky, was a brilliant archaeologist, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Neolithic and a love of energetic debate and folksongs. He was an inspirational mentor who guided me in
A PhD project that encompassed a large swath of eastern European prehistory and led to my only single-authored book. This is my favorite pic during my Ph.D. research; its in a railway station in Bulgaria and I fancy myself in a John LeCarre novel….
On Bobik Soudsky’s advice, in my dissertation research I came to focus not on the more obvious figurines and pottery, but on the unattractive flaked stone assemblages, as a way of gaining access to primary data without treading on any local archaeological bunions.
But it was not until my post-doctoral fellowship in then Leningrad that I focused on a specific aspect of the flaked stone tools – their contact traces, otherwise known as microwear. And this was the direct result of meeting Sergei Semenov. His seminal book was translated in 1964 (2
Years before the photo). While I was in the Soviet Union, his assistant Galina (Galya) Korobkova gave me personal training in their technique, especially during our participation in an excavation in Moldavia; experimentation and observation went hand in hand for them, with the aim to construct tool function. For me, starting in London, and continuing
At Harvard, the main aim was to identify the used area versus handle/haft vs intentional modification, as a way to be freed from the traditional assumption that “looks like an axe, therefore it is”. I was less concerned what it had been used on.
At Harvard, I jumped enthusiastically straight into the middle of New (Processual) Archaeology with this chart of using “controlled” scientifically designed experiments in order to take logical steps from the empirical data to interpretive conclusions , in order to avoid leapfrogging in your impatience to go straight from empirical observations
To general theories. I later turned the chart on its head to create a more familiar epistemology of Middle Range Research and the value of empirical hypothesis testing. In this case the middle range research was provided by observations on contact traces to construct the use-lives of artifacts.
By now, the main aim of my middle range research was to have a robust empirical framework to address the theme of production, in its broadest sense in the Neolithic; this meant a need for empirical data on consumption and discard practices in addition to manufacturing
And procurement. The only way to obtain such data was through micro-wear observations. I was carrying out this experimental archaeology and thinking about its ramifications for history and prehistory at the same time as applying it practically in archaeological fieldwork in Southeast Europe. In the 1970s, fieldwork, especially excavation,
Was more or less required of faculty members in the US university system. So it was for me when I was hired by Harvard. I was initially drawn towards the topic of my dissertation: Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Southeast Europe. At this time (1970s) Yugoslavia was the most feasible in my study area (behind the Iron
Curtain) for a truly collaborative venture involving US and local teams. After several failed attempts to satisfy my ideal choice of site, I grasped the opportunity presented to me to excavate at Selevac, even though it was NOT ideal: it was a later Neolithic – Vinca culture
Site – in Serbia, dated 1500 years after the initial introduction of food-production in Europe. Going back to the slide with the SE European transformations, these three sites (Opovo and its two immediate precursor projects) are all from the period of intensification in the West Balkans:
The Vinca culture, 5300-4600 BC with their spectacular array of archaeological remains of domestic life, some of which you see here, and almost all of which are found and retrieved because they have been in or near a house fire. Welcome to the BHH (the yellow),
BUT you should know that I was not aware of any BHH until the end of the Selevac project. With the Selevac project (1976–1979), I expanded contact trace observations beyond flaked stone tools to micro wear on several other classes of artifacts, including those of polished stone,
Bone and antler, and even ceramics and other fired clay artifacts such as figurines. The overarching research strategy of the Selevac project was the construction of use-lives (procurement, production, re-distribution, consumption), in order to monitor artifact changes and investigate increasing sedentism and intensification of production throughout the 500
Years occupation of the settlement. At Selevac-Staro Selo Farmers found Neolithic burned rubble across 52 hectares of the south-facing hillside. We excavated only a tiny sample. We excavated in a trench strategy to investigate change through time, with only a limited exposure of burned houses. The enormity of the question of
Burned houses was not on our radar. It was a classic taken-for-granted. But I did start to ask questions of my Serbian colleagues about why so many burned houses. I was not particularly was not satisfied their explanation of accident (granaries in the house attic) or invasion.
By the end of Selevac, however, Mirjana Stevanovic (at that time an undergrad participant) and I started to devise a method to investigate the burning of the wattle-and-daub houses in which an essential part was to be played by the systematic excavation of the burned
Collapsed superstructure. Mirjana saw this as the focus of her future career in archaeology. We started our new strategy of investigating burned houses at Gomolava, a stratified “tell” settlement, by Sava river where we volunteered after the end of the Selevac project. We were
Given two small fragments of houses for our experimental excavation. We investigated the superstructural rubble, excavating and recording rubble very slowly including the angle of collapse, tree impressions, color etc. Much too slow for the Gomolava field team, we were slowing down the progress of getting to the house floors and their wealth of materials..
But one of the directors of Gomolava – Bogdan Brukner, was interested in what we were doing and proposed a collaboration with Mirjana and me. Together we designed a project of excavation of a Vinca culture settlement at Opovo-Ugar bajbuk, in which the burned houses would be a dominant focus of our investigation.
The location chosen for the new project at Opovo-Ugar Bajbuk could not have been more different from the gentle hills of Selevac in terms of geography and ecology. It was in the predominantly flat seasonally waterlogged area where the drainages of the Danube,
Tisza, and Tamis rivers meet. This area called the Banat is a modern cultural meeting place, on the northern periphery of the Vinca culture. The settlement seemed to be much smaller than Selevac 5ha 250×250 m. The presence of burned houses was assured and with Bogdan Brukner’s
Support and collaboration, we would be able to carry out the research at the detailed slow pace we wanted. Moreover, we chose to excavate in a broad gridded 16x20m Block rather than trenches to be able to expose complete buildings if possible.
In the research design of the Opovo project, Middle Range research, as at Selevac, was at its heart, but now included a focus on the use-lives and life histories of architecture and buildings in which the burning representing their end of life.
At this time, I was finding that the Marxist concept of social reproduction resonated with a change in the scale at which prehistory could be effectively interpreted, in which the history of individual households played a role in the variability of their archaeological remains.
The ephemeral social inequalities created by the vagaries of household cycles noted in the literature of household anthropology and history became a guiding theme for my research design of the archaeological project at Opovo (1983–1989). So Opovo was at the beginning of household archaeology in the Old World (Mesoamerica elsewhere).
We designed the project at Opovo not only to investigate deliberate or accidental burning, but also to identify whether the fires occurred as single or multiple coeval burning events. Mirjana Stevanovic and I elaborated the strategy of excavation and analysis that we had started at
Gomolava. We excavated and systematically mapped the superstructural rubble of the burned wattle-and-daub buildings layer by layer until the underlying floor and all its rich array of ceramics etc. was revealed. We excavated very carefully in the area around the burned rubble. From the first season we retained control profiles that
Would pass through the burned rubble mass at various points. We were keen to observe the stratigraphic relationship between the different burned houses (in addition to their horizontal overlap) as a means to identifying even slight chronological separation, as a way of distinguishing between multiple and single burning events.
We noted that where the rubble has not been spread by post-Neolithic ploughing, it is clear that it is localized to a square or rectangular area corresponding to the area of a building. It is this characteristic that has led to the conclusion that the building walls were
Collapsed inwards during the conflagration, forming a rubble heap on top of their floors. In the 16x20meter area exposed we identified 3 complete buildings and the corner of a fourth. H4 – is the deepest, possibly had two stories produced a piece of vitrified linen (stuck
Between the two collapsed floors) (earliest?); the house is associated with (red) pits, including a possible well 2 m diameter; H4 was slightly overlapped and superimposed by two later house H1 and 2. These two houses were quite close to the ground surface.
Between these two building phases (BH 1 and 3) was a corner of H3 (BH2). All the houses fall within a few generations or couple of centuries of each other and after the most recent C14 dates from ToTL (Orton) and now from the Kiel-Panchevo team, they fall neatly
Within the Vinca C period at about 4800-4600 BC (earlier than we thought originally). For her dissertation, Mirjana Stevanovic mapped the burned rubble of wall collapse and floor(s); she mapped the impressions of the wattle and timber framework captured in the burned clay daub
From which to identify its role in construction and the process of wall collapse. She also noted the color of the daub on a Munsell scale from which – thanks to some control experiments on local clays – she could estimate its temperature of firing from 700C to 1100C (vitrification).
In effect, our project at Opovo took the form of an arson investigation in that its ultimate aim was to produce Fire Maps for each burned building. Mirjana was able to create such maps using the data collected in the field which showed in each case, as seen here in House 4
Map and in the photo of its cross-section, the hottest spot was low down on the floor level with a high temperature of 1000C or above. Each map followed the fire path from floor to upper parts of the superstructure. and showed fairly unambiguously that (at least in the
Houses we investigated) the burning of the house was deliberate and as a single event. Later (2000s) experiments (Vadastra, Cucuteni, Nebelivka) that burned wattle and daub buildings would provide the needed confirmation of what Mira’s research in burning wattle-and-daub houses suggested, that the temperatures at which the houses burned were much too
High to have been produced by a fire that was not helped by added fuel and/or accelerants. At the end of the Opovo excavation in 1989, the project moved activities predominantly to our home institutions in California, and elsewhere in the US, Novi Sad and Panchevo.
Our colleagues in then Yugoslavia soon became enmeshed in the events of the unfortunate civil wars that ensued throughout most of the 1990s. We published two interim reports in JFA 1985 and 1992. After the final 1989 season we set about preparing the final printed monograph
That was planned to be ready in 1997. Half of the 35 mm slides were scanned professionally in the late 1990s, along with the full digitization of the field drawings. We had started in the second season (1984) recording the field data using Filevision on
One of the first Mac personal desktop computers (you can see it if you watch the one project video on YouTube), so there was some born digital data, but most of the data was recorded on paper 80-col Fortran forms that were later entered into a mainframe, and in the early 1990s converted to
Excel spreadsheets. These were eventually partially converted into a Filemaker DB. So from what I am saying you can gather that at the end of the Opovo field seasons, the consumer digital revolution – including the Internet – was upon us.
We were on the path to ending the Opovo project in the traditional way, assemble the data, the media, prepare the publication. In the life history of an archaeological project its culmination and end is marked traditionally by its final printed monograph – the definitive final narrative of the
Project. Whether we want to conform with that tradition can certainly be debated, but not here. Selevac ended with its monograph in 1990. But what about Opovo? Where is its final monograph? What happened? The first disruption to the traditional path was a 1988 conference (organized by Joan and Meg
Resulting in this book) in which I was invited to reformulate my familiar research questions so that gender was an “explicit analytic category”. This resulted in a dramatic, inspired a long-lasting reformulation of my archaeological research. My household archaeology was transformed into prehistory constructed at an intimate scale with stories of individual people (with tasks,
Faces, and feelings), in which the traditional boundaries in the interpretation of archaeological data were dissolved. For example, I was no longer subject to the limits of empirical use-lives of archaeological materials, but instead could reformulate use-lives as the life-histories of people, places, and things (including architecture) in
Which imagination was transparently employed to enable the interpretation to go beyond the formal restrictions of scientific empiricism and still be scientific. At exactly the same time, the seductive world of Digital Archaeology provided the perfect tools to link empirical data with the imagined life histories. I mentioned earlier that the end of
The Opovo project coincided with the consumer digital revolution in audio-visual media, and I – along with Michael Ashley, a student then colleague in the 1990s, and faculty colleague Rosemary Joyce – thoroughly embraced it. George Landow’s Hypertext showed that different
Media (including text) can be brought together in a web of data and narrative by linking and generally entangling the elements in a way that cannot be reproduced by analog formats. I dreamed of doing this with the Opovo project. For me this took precedence over the printed
Monograph and was the second factor that derailed it. Mea culpa but I could not resist! This concept plan of the relationship between the components of the Chimera Web shows the close relationship between data and narratives in which the stories emerge from the data.
The characters who I imagined in the Chimera Web can be seen in this multiscalar chart , in which Opovo (the yellow square) can be viewed at an increasingly detailed chronological scale from the millennium on the left through the 3 Building Horizons, broken down into generations,
And finally the individual residents life histories themselves emerge. A third disruption: that I could not resist was the opportunity to excavate a Neolithic tell site in Bulgaria. Temptation was put before me by Douglass Bailey! In the end this was not a happy project and ended after one season (1995).
However it did provide the best photo I have with Meg Conkey, and an opportunity to work with Michael Ashley on the Opovo Database. After Podgoritsa, I could/should have returned to the Opovo publication and sent it to press. But an even greater temptation had already come my way.
Because now I had been invited by Ian Hodder to start with Mirjana Stevanovic a sub-project under the umbrella of the Catalhoyuk Archaeological Project. From 1996 until 2018 my research, creativity, and attention was taken up with the retrieval, publication, and interpretive afterlives of the BACH project. The periods of the Bach project’s
Life that took place in Turkey was 1996 to 2005 when we excavated the Building 3 in the north area. But it continued to engage me until very recently. The BACH project at Catalhoyuk had a more traditional life trajectory than Opovo,
Ending in 2012 in a print publication titled Last House on the Hill. An important difference, and what certainly speeded up the print-production process was that the BACH project coincided (for us) with the transition from born analog to born digital documentation of the research.
This meant that our records and media were all digital and could be transferred to a database with much greater ease than Opovo or Selevac, or even Podgoritsa. We (Michael Ashley and Cinzia Perlingieri and I) created the Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA, a non-profit,
Around the BACH project and its data and media. As well as developing the database of LHotH, CoDA was important in the creation of the website edition of LHotH. In both the database and the website, we were interested in integrating the narratives
Of the BACH printed monograph – fragmented into individual digital entities – with the enormous body of media-rich data from the BACH database. Sadly, the website edition was hacked in 2018 and has been inaccessible ever since. I mention these details because a similar digital
Publication for Opovo could be created now, that could not have been done earlier (in mid 1990s). Çatalhoyuk and the BACH project and its afterlives are relevant for this talk only in that in the new millennium they have changed how I think about the Opovo project
And how I would go about its publication. We were invited to work at Catal because of both Mira’s and my research interests and skills in the intricate investigation of the life-histories of houses as seen in their architectural remains. The focus of
The main Catal project led by Ian Hodder starting in 1995 was the understanding of histories of individual houses. The plastered mud-brick architecture was very different from wattle and daub of Serbia and offered far greater rewards for such an investigation.
Several years were spent in the investigation of specific houses – Building 3 in the Bach Area was excavated in its entirety in 7 summer seasons. This was Slow Archaeology, which I felt very comfortable with. Single context excavation and Harris Matrix documentation made
A huge difference in this endeavor, and I wished we had used it at Opovo. In 2003 – just as the Bach project was finishing its field investigation – the 3rd Cycle of fieldwork began at Catal which considered individual buildings in their local neighborhood,
Focused on the North Area of the East Mound. The aim of this cycle was to understand the life-history of the neighborhood, by connecting the life-histories of its buildings. Intensive collection of carbon 14 dates from the sequences within buildings combined with Harris Matrix
Documentation of the stratigraphic links between houses in the neighborhood provided a peek into the complexities of the formation of the mound and the history of the neighborhood. These act as a cautionary tale to those who might take the distribution of house remains as
Representing houses that are coeval in their construction, residence, and/or destruction. This was one of the most important lessons from Catalhoyuk applicable to any settlement site. These trajectories of my own changing skills, experience, passions and interests against a background of changing events and
Field projects form the context in which I find myself here. In the last five years, several events have contributed to drag me back from Catal to the Neolithic of Southeast Europe, the Burned House Horizon, and the life in Limbo of the Opovo Project. These include requests for book chapter contributions, conference contributions,
Public lecture invitations, panels about the destructiveness of fire. Some of these were surprises, others to be expected. One case was inevitable but had been put off and concerned the excavated physical remains and what happens to them. In 1987 we exported a large sample of burned house rubble for Mirjana’s PhD project of
Fire and architectural investigation. The sample was taking up a lot of space in the room that was planned to be the new bioarchaeology lab here in the ARF. Now Mirjana was back in Serbia, and I was retired, and we were asked to move out it of lab.
Annie Danis had the idea of depositing the archaeological materials that had become homeless with another set of homeless architectural rubble ((20th century AD construction bricks) at the Albany Bulb in a ceremony of closure of the Opovo project. In September 2019 we did just that with a procession and ceremonial deposition.
You can see a few pieces of KL that were not deposited ritually in the display cabinet outside Room 101 I had a feeling at the time that this was perhaps really the end of the Opovo Project But I was wrong!
None of the events that brought me back to Opovo was more surprising than the event that has led me to its resurrection. I was astounded in April 2022 to get an email from a young doctoral researcher at Kiel university (Germany) Fynn Wilkes, telling me about his archaeomagnetic survey taking place at Opovo-Ubgar Bajbuk.
The group in University of Kiel is led by Martin Furholt. (introduce them) This particular team have been using advanced geophysical prospection methods (especially involving archaeomagnetism) in Neolithic Central and Southeast Europe since the 2010s. In 1983-84 at Opovo we carried out a limited archaeomagnetic survey from which we chose the
Area where to focus our excavation block. From the 1960-80s archaeomagnetic survey had been seen as potentially useful when prospecting burned wattle-and-daub houses. But the proton magnetometers that were used at that time were very slow, not very sensitive and labor intensive.
We also carried out limited soil probing with auger transects across the larger area surrounding the “hillock” to determine the limits of the settlement by evidence of burned rubble below the surface in the cores. This imagined boundary enclosed an area of 250x250m 5ha.
The Kiel team used an advanced system in all their surveys, including Opovo: a 3-person team operating a fluxgate gradiometer in an 8-sensor setup, recording 0.5m intervals. With the Kiel-Panchevo geophysical survey superimposed: the area of the settlement becomes larger, the number and frequency of houses greater, and there are ditches around periphery;
Our 1980s Block 1 always in the center. When I remove the superimposition, the array of anomalies and ditches becomes clearer Via Zoom in October 2022, I met the Kiel team and I was invited to visit in Kiel itself. I spent a week there in June 2023, where I
Was kept busy with several days of brainstorming and sharing data and ideas of how this changed my ideas of Opovo, the settlement. They were interested in what kind of ground-truthing I could provide for their survey results. Our excavation was what motivated Fynn to bring
Their array to Opovo. I had been aware of the advances since the mid 1990s in Geophysical prospection but it was still a surprise and their results are spectacular. Twin (sometimes triplet) ditches surround the settlement of 9.4 hectares – almost double the 5
Hectares we calculated in 1984. This in itself is not a big surprise. It is still much smaller than the 52 hectares of Selevac in southern Serbia. There are no building-like anomalies outside of the area enclosed by the largest ditch. Within this large enclosure, a solid smaller
Inner ditch encloses a 4 hectare area (close to our 5 hectare estimate), that Fynn thinks of as the core of the settlement. An interesting smaller ditch encloses an area that, according to C14 dates might represent the original area of settlement, including the houses
In our excavation block. which amazingly, almost dead-center in the settlement. I always knew that there must be other houses beyond our tiny sample, but to see them there brings it somehow more vividly to life. Yes, our excavations provide a depth of detail and
Complexity of time frame and the immediacy of the burning events. But this very fast survey in a few weeks shows another dimension of a neighborhood or a village that also had a life-history (rather like at Catal when we understood how our one Building 3 with its complex life-history,
Was part of a web of so many more lives). This added dimension to our knowledge has been provided not only by the pattern of house remains, but also the ditches, which were quite invisible during our excavation, even to our geologists working with the river’s historical landscape.
During 2023, Fynn’s team carried our Auger coring across the site. C14 from many cores. The dates confirmed Orton samples from our excavation block as earlier in Vinca sequence ©,4800-4670 BCE, so a duration of 200 years at the most . More than that, however: the smallest
Enclosure has only early (red) dates around 4800BC. The later dates are all outside. Fynn calculates about 100 houses in total can be seen in the survey, maybe 35 active at any one time. Is there village wide organization? I still don’t think so. it
Still looks as though each household is separate. Remembering that we noted a definite stratigraphy and pattern of horizontal displacement of sequential houses during the excavation of Opovo, I would still caution that it is very difficult – perhaps impossible – to
Say how many were inhabited at any one time. But I am impressed by Hofmann’s use of changes in orientation as one path to understanding the internal chronology of the settlement (without excavation There is still one (perhaps two) more questions remaining: What are these ditches for at Opovo? and at
Most of the other Neolithic sites that have been subjected to these surveys? To separate family or household clusters, to mark the outer limit of building; some would like it to be defense. What has really inspired the resurrection of the Opovo project is the work of the archaeologists
From Kiel in collaboration with Serbian colleagues. The latter need the Opovo project database and some kind of final report that brings the interpretations together, especially since much of the physical data that was stored in the Panchevo Museum was damaged or destroyed in the
Bombings and fires of the 1990s Civil War. Until the Kiel-Opovo project I had not been motivated to make it a priority to publish and share the data and media from the Opovo excavation. Now that I am, what kind of publication should it
Be? I could take the original book manuscript that was all but ready to publish in the traditional way in 1996. But must it be a book/monograph report? A linear longform narrative? Since 1996, the world of digital publication, Open Access, digital multimodal compositions, and so on now
Provide alternative options involving media rich narratives – books without ends – that cater to non-linear lateral thinking. The traditional way would be the simplest and quickest. The slowest and – for me – most interesting would be one that goes back to
My 1990s dream of a narrative, or narratives, that links to the primary data of the project. After all, in some ways, I like to think of the project database as the most important item to be published and should even have priority of preparation, publication, curation, and accessibility. Thank you!