An investigation of Neolithic settlement pattern and vegetation exploitation at Dikili Tash: reconsidering old and new data from the late 5th millennium BC settlement

Friday, May 29, 2015, 4:00pm – 4:20pm
Presented by Dimitra Malamidou, Zoi Tsirtsoni, Maria Ntinou, Soultana-Maria Valamoti, Haido Koukouli-Chrysanthaki, and Pascal Darcque
In track I. SOCIAL SPACES, COMMUNITIES, AND LIFEWAYS

Dikili Tash appears today as one of the prehistoric settlements with the longer occupational sequences in the Aegean and the Balkans (ca. 6500-1100 BC). Thanks to the researches of the last fifty years within the site itself and in the surrounding plain of Philippi, Dikili Tash offered information (already presented elsewhere) for understanding the formation process of the tell and the role of physical and anthropogenic processes in landscape formation.
In this paper we focus on a particular time-window of this long sequence, the years around 4300-4200 cal BC, for which we dispose of a large range of high-resolution data from the same context. Indeed, open excavation of sector 6 in big surfaces allowed the exploration of the spatial arrangement and household organisation of the settlement of this date. The buildings that were fully excavated in this sector had been destroyed by fire, thus preserving in situ evidence for a wide array of activities in many cases related to organic materials that otherwise would have been lost from the archaeological record.
The architectural, artefactual, anthracological and archaeobotanical evidence from these buildings are examined together in an interdisciplinary and integrated approach of the interaction between human societies and their natural environment towards the end of the 5th millennium B.C. Among other issues are discussed the exploitation of vegetation (for food, construction, crafts), in connexion with the specific circumstances under which we perceive it in the archaeological contexts.
The evidence discussed here allows a consideration of new and old data from one of the last Neolithic phases at Dikili Tash, within a framework of a long process of landscape modification that began, based on recent evidence, with the onset of the Neolithic in this region.