World Archaeology

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Aspects of settlement diversity and its

classification in Southeast Europe before the
Roman period

Timothy Taylor

To cite this article: Timothy Taylor (1987) Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification
in Southeast Europe before the Roman period, World Archaeology, 19:1, 1-22, DOI:
10.1080/00438243.1987.9980020

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1987.9980020

Published online: 15 Jul 2010.

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 Aspects of settlement diversity and its
classification in southeast Europe
before the Roman period

Timothy Taylor
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Introduction

There are few satisfactorily excavated prehistoric settlements in southeast Europe.

Nevertheless, those known appear to show a remarkable diversity of type over space and
time: there are tells more than 15 metres thick, and ashlar masonry fortresses; concentric
rings of hundreds of small houses, and promontory forts with mud-brick ramparts; lake-
villages, open entrepôts, and great planned cities.
After the colonization of the Black Sea coasts by the Greeks, Greek authors described
the customs of the Scythian and Thracian tribes of the hinterland. Sometimes they
described a type of settlement or gave a native name for one. From these names, and
from other linguistic scraps, some idea of the language of the inhabitants can be arrived
at. Elements of such tentatively reconstructed language can then be sought in modern
place-names, and on this basis old foundations for modern settlements proposed.
The evidence for the survival of ancient Thracian names or terms in the Greek and
Roman authors and in modern place-names is reviewed by Sorin Paliga in his article
'Thracian terms for "township" and "fortress", and related place-names' (cf. pp. 23-9).
In it he tries to establish derivations from both Indo-European (IE) and non-Indo-
European language roots. Associating non-Indo-European with pre-Indo-European
(pre-IE), and pre-IE with the Neolithic population (by considering the Bronze Age
Kurgan cultures as the introducers of IE language, out of the east, over the steppe), he
then suggests the possibility of associating surviving terms of pre-IE derivation meaning
'township' with particular Neolithic settlement types.
This is a fascinating endeavour — to try to work from place-names towards the names
of places, to the words that might have been used by prehistoric people to describe their
own settlements. But is it possible?
This article is intended to serve as an introduction to that of Sorin Paliga by providing a
general archaeological and linguistic background to it. In addition, it suggests where the
theoretical limits may lie for any joint archaeological and linguistical epistemology for
dealing with past schemes of settlement classification.
Much of the archaeology of later prehistory in Romania and Bulgaria is studied under
the heading 'Thracology' (see Taylor 1985: 129ff). Thracology takes its name from the
Thracians, a group of people known from classical texts. The Thracians lived in the

World Archaeology Volume 19 No. 1 Urbanization

 2 Timothy Taylor

regions to the west of the Black Sea. To their south were the Greeks, to their north the
Scythians. Herodotus distinguished a number of tribes or tribal confederacies among the
Thracians, of which the most important were the Odrysae of the Thracian Plain, the
Getae of the Lower Danube Basin and the Agathyrsae (probably Thracian; certainly not
Scythian: Hdt IV, 49-50) of Transylvania. In the later part of the first millennium BC,
Celtic tribes, among them the Scordisci, settled areas of the Lower Danube Basin region.
Towards the end of the millennium the Thracians or Getae came to be known as
Dacians.
The Thracians are known to have spoken a language different from Iranian, Greek or
Celtic, which was recognised by the Greeks as distinct also from that of the Thracians'
northern neighbours, the Scythians. But Thracian language is not easy to reconstruct.
Although quite a large body of onomastica — proper names of individuals, peoples
(ethnonyms), places (toponyms) and rivers (hydronyms) — exists, only twenty to thirty
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glosses are known (Hamp 1986 and pers. comm.). (Glosses are words which occur in a
text written in another language in a position which allows an original meaning to be
inferred.) This paucity of glosses means that neither the structure nor the vocabulary of
Thracian can be known to any great extent. Paliga recognises this and sensibly dismisses
the arguments for distinct north and south Thracian languages.
Apparent uncertainty among the classical authors about where the northern boundary
of Thrace lay — sometimes the Haemus (Stara Planina), sometimes the Danube,
sometimes the Carpathian mountains (Katiöic 1986: 129ff) — encouraged Georgiev to
defend a theory of two languages (1972): Thracian, spoken in the south, and Daco-
Mysian, spoken in the north. Georgiev claimed a clear geographical distinction between
place-names ending in -dava in the north and -bria, -para, and -diza in the south. This
theory has not been generally accepted: Russu (1969), Crossland (1980) and Rädulescu
(1984) all support the idea of a common Thraco-Dacian language. Even though Daco-
Mysian may turn out to be more closely related to Illyrian (which is partly preserved in
modern Albanian) than to Thracian proper, 'we will eventually have to conclude that we
deal with three dialects of the same language' (Rädulescu, 1984: 85). And, as Paliga
notes, the -dava ending is present in the south (Pulpu-deva — modern Plovdiv), whilst
the -diza ending is probably preserved in the north (Dezna — County Arad,
W. Romania).
English words such as house, town and city, or market, port and capital, express our
ideas of how human settlement may be classified in our own country and our own time.
Broadly speaking, it is physical size on the one hand and social function on the other
which provide the dimensions of a more or less matrix definition of settlement types. In
Figure 1 a number of terms principally related to settlement size are shown (1-5)
intersecting with a number of terms principally relating to specific social function (A-E).
Each increase in settlement size has been correlated with the addition of a general
cultural function (I-V). Thus a farm might be a farmhouse (1A), whilst a larger farm
(2A) might constitute a hamlet (small churchless village). Category 2A has no common
name in English, but in Norwegian it would be a tun (pi. tunet). Moving from 1A to 2A,
we move from familial to communal. A tun consists of a number of families, but is not a
village because it does not fulfil the religious function (III): on Sundays the communities
of many tunet converge by boat along and across the fjords towards their common
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 3

SETTLEMENT SIZE
1 2 3 4 5
HOUSE -^> HAMLET - ^ V I L L A G E - > T O W N -*• CITY

A LC)W

CONSTANCY OF OCCUPATION
FARM • • •
SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS

B
FORTRESS • • •

C
MARKET • • •

D
PORT • •

E
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CAPITAL •
HI 3H
I II III IV V
FAMILIAL+COMMUNAL+RELIGIOUS + J U R A L + POLITICAL

ADDITIVE GENERAL FUNCTIONS

Figure 1

church. Just as a tun is not exactly equivalent to any word in common English, so too we
find that the best English equivalent for Norwegian st0l (pl. stplen) is 'seasonally used
vertical transhumant pastoralist summer farm' (see further Taylor 1987b).
In Figure 1, the specific social functions of settlements are correlated with a gauge of
their likely degree of constancy of occupation. This scale is intended to be suggestive
rather than explicit — a reminder that while farms may be of a slash-and-burn or of a
seasonal type, and fortresses may be sporadically garrisoned and often moved, special
locations are chosen for ports and capitals (such as Piraeus and Athens) and celebrated in
their monumentality. This makes them more enduring 'places' and in part assures a
greater constancy of occupation.
As we have to introduce foreign words, such as tun and stpl, into our language in order
to describe foreign settlement types properly, so too will we need special words if we are
to describe prehistoric settlement types accurately (at least from an etic point of view —
to describe them properly we would need to reconstruct an emic category; see below).
Initially such special words need be no more than our common words for which a
qualified sense has been explicitly defined.

Prehistoric settlement diversity in southeast Europe

Using a number of more or less inaccurate common words as headings we can begin to
look at individual examples of prehistoric structures which have been uncovered by
archaeologists and considered to be the remains of settlements. The locations of all the
 4 Timothy Taylor

sites discussed in this section of the text can be found on the map (Figure 2).
Chronological arguments are peripheral to the purpose of this article, thus they are not
rehearsed here. The dates given indicate the major phase of site occupation discussed in
the text.

1. Villages
Villages seem to be defined archaeologically as small agglomerations of residential
structures, with no great internal heterogeneity. Lepenski Vir in Yugoslavia (Figure 3) is
one of the earliest in southeast Europe, dating to the 6th millennium BC. Situated on the
Yugoslav side of the Danube in the Iron Gates gorge, the site was excavated and
published by Srejovic (1969). A palimpsest of stone-reinforced trapezoidal hut
foundations with central fireplaces was found. The phasing of successive building was not
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made entirely clear during excavation. Lepenski Vir I and II (illustrated) were
considered by Srejovié to be the remains of a hunter-gatherer-fisher (H-G-F)
community; later phases to reflect a farming community. However, there is another view
that the trapezoidal huts were built by farmers who dug down into the earlier layers of
seasonally deposited mesolithic debris, causing a degree of stratigraphie admixture (e.g.
Milisauskas 1978: 96). Such antitheses between H-G-F and fanning communities are
unhelpful. The location of the site suggests that it was not chosen for its arable or stock-
driving potential. The quantities of red-deer and chamois bones indicate that Lepenski
Vir served as a year-round base-camp, with a temperate river-moderated climate and a
fish-stocked garden, from which seasonal forays to other zones were mounted. The
period of use of the site, whatever the succession of its structural layout, clearly spans the
transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic.
Village sites are common in the region throughout the Neolithic: the site of Vinöa,
comprising a number of small rectangular houses with wattle and clay walls typifies such
small open settlements. In Romanian Moldavia and South Russia by the beginning of the
fourth millennium BC settlements of considerable size had begun to emerge from a
background of small scattered villages. The Late Tripolye Culture site of Majdanets'ke,
USSR (Figure 4) is one such. A mixture of excavation and aerial survey shows between
1200 and 1700 rectangular structures arranged in ten to twelve concentric elipses. Some
of the larger buildings, towards the outside of the settlement, probably had two storeys
(Ellis 1984: 189). By analogy with the site of Petreny in Moldavia, these two-storied
buildings may have been specialized ceramic workshops. Petreny consisted of 498
structures, not all of which were residential: Ellis considers 2000 people to be a
reasonable estimate of population size (1984: 188).
The large Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture sites are still not well enough understood to be
classified satisfactorily. Wheat and cattle seem to have been the mainstays of the
economy, but with a considerable contribution from red deer. Whether settlements such
as Majdanets'ke were the religious, jurai and political capitals of their surrounding
territories (therefore cities), or just overgrown villages, perhaps agglomerated for
defence, is unclear. Certainly the evidence of specialized craft production, continued in
distinct quarters of the settlements, suggests that further (perhaps archaeologically
invisible) functional specialization was present.
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 5
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km . 5.0 100 150

miles^ 50 100

Figure 2 Map of southeast Europe showing the major sites discussed in the text. Contours at 500,
1000 and 2000 metres..
 6 Timothy Taylor
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Figure 3 Lepenski Vir, phase II. Scale in metres. After Srejovié 1969.

In Bulgaria, at Ezerovo on the outskirts of Varna, a number of villages of the Late

Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age have been discovered (Toncheva 1981). These
settlements appear to have been of a classic lacustrine type (unlike the reedswamp
villages known from Neolithic Switzerland and from Iron Age Glastonbury, England, to
the west) like those recorded for fifth century BC Thrace by Herodotus, who gives a
description of the way of life of the tribes who lived on and around Lake Prasias, in the
neighbourhood of Mt. Pangaeum (see Figure 2):
"The houses of these lake-dwellers are actually in the water, and stand on platforms
supported on long piles and approached from the land by a single narrow bridge.
Originally the labour of driving the piles was presumably undertaken by the tribe as a
whole, but later they adopted a different method: now the piles are brought from Mt.
Orbelus and every man drives in three for each wife he marries — each has a great
many wives. Each member of the tribe has his own hut on one of the platforms, with a
trap-door opening on to the water underneath. To prevent their babies from tumbling
in they tie a string around their legs. Their horses and other pack-animals they feed on
fish, which are so abundant in the lake that, when they open the trap-door and let
down an empty basket on a rope, they have only a minute to wait before they pull it up
again, full.'
(Hdt. V, 16; translated by A. de Sélincourt)
Daily life on the gulf of Varna three-and-a-half thousand years before may not have
been much different; but was the language? Early Bronze Age Ezerovo III was occupied
around the turn of the fourth and third millennia BC, at the time of the Kurgan III and
Kurgan IV cultures in South Russia (Gimbutas 1985: 189). According to IE language
theory, the inhabitants of Ezerovo III should have been speaking a form of IE. Thus they
might have used a word for their lake-village similar to that used by their fifth century BC
pile-driving counterparts. But even if it existed we do not now know what it was.
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 7

2. Tells
Although a tell settlement may be laid out in exactly the same way as a village, each
rebuilding raises the site above the level of the surrounding country. As each successive
layer adds to the real physical defences of the settlement so it adds to its monumentality.
As Chris Evans has said (1985: 85), 'we assign the quality of "monument" to sites which
physically endure' and this quality of endurance has a value even after the site is no
longer in active use. (An example of such a continuity of associated 'place-value' is the
modern Bulgarian village of Dve Mogili (lit: Two Barrows), which takes its name from
the two great fourth century BC burial mounds on the outskirts of the village.) The tell of
Polyanitsa appears to have been deliberately created as a domestic monument, with an
entrance at each of the cardinal points and houses built in each quarter (Todorova n.d.
Eneolit Bolgarii: tab. 13).
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; ^

I \

A;
i

i I » ? 7

• / o

.1
WrW !
ct,

500
S^ m
Figure 4 Majdanets'ke. Site mapped from excavation, magnetometer and aerial survey. Scale in
metres. After Ellis 1984.
 8 Timothy Taylor

Some of the Bulgarian tells are indeed monumental. Karanovo was built up over
seventeen metres before its abandonment in the Early Bronze Age. The plan of the tenth
level at Ovcharovo (Figure 5), uncovered during recent multi-disciplinary excavations in
Bulgaria (Todorova et al. 1983) shows well the internal organization and developed
topography of a small tell settlement: seven houses, measuring about six by ten metres
each, cluster together on top of the debris of their predecessors. Each house has one or
more hearth-places, and each appears to have had some kind of partition wall.
The development of tell-site occupation from the Early Neolithic through the Late
Neolithic and Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age in the Maritsa valley near Plovdiv has been
plotted by Andrew Sherratt (Figure 6). By linking nearest neighbours from one period to
the next, Sherratt gives an indication of the underlying patterns of spatial expansion that
caused new settlements to be founded (even though not all settlements can be supposed
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Figure 5 Ovcharovo, level X. House-walls are shown hatched; hearths are shown in black. Scale in
metres. After Todorova et al. 1983.
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 9

W EN
nearest
• LN neighbour
links
o Eneol

O BA

PLOVDIV REGION
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Settlement Evolution

Figure 6 Patterns of tell-site occupation in the Plovdiv region: EN = Early Neolithic; LN = Late
Neolithic; Eneol = Eneolithic (Chalcolithic); BA = Bronze Age. Scale in kilometres. After
Sherratt (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge).

to have survived or been discovered). On the map the initial 'parent' settlements
continued in use except where an arrow indicates that a new location completely
superseded the old. Thus about half of the Bronze Age settlements were on tell sites
which had been continuously occupied since the Neolithic, whilst the other half were on
fresh locations.
This particular pattern of tell settlement ceased to be the norm during the Bronze Age,
but settlement tells continued to be formed during later periods. The site of Babadag in
 10 Timothy Taylor

the Romanian Dobrudja has a continuous sequence of vertical stratigraphy from the
thirteenth/twelfth to the eighth centuries BC (Morintz 1964). Correspondences have been
sought between the earliest Babadag phase and Troy VII b2, especially in the pottery
types in use. From the tenth century BC at Babadag, iron-smelting and iron-working
were practised (Taylor 1986). This would suggest that the site was in some sense a
'central place'; however, because no systematic settlement survey has yet been carried
out in the surrounding region, the broader social functions of the site cannot yet be
defined.

3. Fortresses

The site of Nebet Tepe (Figure 7), one of the three hills which form an isolated cluster
sticking up out of the Thracian Plain, and around which the modern city of Plovdiv
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sprawls, is at once a settlement tell, a fortress and an acropolis. The naturally defended
site, which commands views of the wide plain to either side, has been almost
continuously occupied from the Middle Bronze Age (Mihalich Culture) until the present
day. At some stage a series of massive stone fortifications was begun, and it was added to
at times up until the Byzantine period (Plate 1: D indicates sections of Byzantine date).
Because excavations have not been able to demonstrate convincing stratigraphie
relationships between the layers of cultural deposit (the 'tell') on the hill and the stone
walls which surround it, there is controversy over the dating of the various fortification
phases: Botucharova (1963) argued that there was a sixth century BC fortification (not

. 4 '

Plate 1 Nebet Tepe, the fortress above the modern town of Plovdiv. Dr. Atanas Peikov's
excavations in progress. See text for explanation.
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 11

shown on Plate 1), followed by a more massive second century BC construction (Plate 1:
A, B, C); Peikov, whose excavations are still in progress (see his 1978), believes part of
the latter construction (Plate 1: A) to date to the twelfth century BC, on the basis of both
its 'cyclopean' appearance and its stratigraphy (pers. comm.), and further building to
have taken place in the fourth century BC (Plate 1: B, ?C). Clearly these two accounts
are incompatible. Although Peikov's twelfth century BC phase is contentious, his later
phase makes sense. By 341 BC, Philip of Macedon had conquered most of Thrace south
of the Danube, including Pulpudeva, the Thracian settlement around Nebet Tepe, which
he renamed Philippopolis. Two observations follow from this. First, the architecture
considered by Peikov to be of fourth century BC date, such as the section of gateway of
Hellenistic appearance (Plate 1: B), could well be a remnant of a Macedonian re-
fortification of the site after its conquest. Second, that Philip designated the settlement a
polis may imply that a functional correspondence was perceived between Greek polis
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and Thracian deva.

Not all defended sites are as archaeologically problematical as Nebçt Tepe. The much
earlier fortified sites of the Early Bronze Age Otomani Culture in western Transylvania
represent a particular period of the earlier Bronze Age in the region when ninety per
cent of known settlement was in fortified locations (Ordentlich 1969: 469). The 'citadel'
site at Otomani itself (Figure 7), dating to the early second millennium BC, is a naturally
defended location on a narrow spur looking out over the Great Hungarian Plain, which
has been fortified further with ditches and ramparts. Such sites, like British hillforts,
were probably the local seats of power of tribal chiefs, but, unlike them, they do not

Figure 7 Otomani, the citadel. A = rampart; B = ditch. Scale in metres. After Ofdentlich 1963.
 12 Timothy Taylor

appear to have been nodes within a more dispersed pattern of open rural settlement. If
the archaeological work is to be trusted, almost everyone during this period lived within
their own fortified village.
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P/a/e 2 Cotofenii-din-Dos, the remains of the outer bastion. Prof. Vlad Zirra's excavations in
progress.

The Iron Age site of Cojofenii din Dos (Plate 2) in Oltenia has a location similar to
Otomani, a spur above the flood plain of the river Jiu, defended by a triple rampart
(Zirra 1983) forming a kind of éperon barré defence. But the outer rampart is different
from those of the Bronze Age sites, being built from large bricks to form a vertical wall
strengthened by towers. The start of occupation at Cojofenii din Dos can be dated to the
fifth century BC, on the basis of Greek pottery which was imported to the site. Cultural
contact with the Greek World, suggested by this pottery, may in part have been
responsible for the adoption of a mud-brick fortification. In central Europe at the same
time, Kimmig has argued (1968: 54ff), the construction of the mud-brick bastions at the
Heuneburg may actually have been directed by a Greek architect. However, whereas the
Heuneburg is unique in central Europe, Cojofenii din Dos in southeast Europe is not.
Other nearby sites have defences constructed in the same manner, and there are
probably many more examples awaiting excavation. Although the idea of a 'city wall',
Teixoç, may have come from the Greeks, its adoption was probably for reasons other
than prestige alone (cf. Kimmig 1968: 50ff): in the hot baking summers of the Lower
Danube Basin, and at a time when timber may have been scarce (Taylor 1987a), such a
construction would have been both effective and cheap.

4. Markets
Greek influence was certainly critical in the development of specialized market centres in
Thrace during the first millennium BC. Greek colonization from the seventh century BC
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 13

onwards created a new economic order in the interior. The Milesian colony of Histria
(Figure 8) was founded on the Black Sea coast just to the south of the Danube Delta.
Excavations this century have uncovered the settlement and its defences in successive
periods. After the foundation of Histria, many new indigenous settlements (such as
Tariverde) sprang up in the immediate hinterland to service the needs of the colonists.
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Figure 8 Histria, on Lake Sinoe by the Black Sea, showing walls of successive periods: A =
Archaic, B = Classical; C = Hellenistic; D = Roman; E = Romano-Byzantine. Scale in metres.
After Suceveanu 1969 and Coja and Dupont 1975.

By the beginning of the fourth century BC the Thracian settlement of Zimnicea,

situated at a nodal point in the Lower Danube Basin riverine network (Figure 2) had
developed to take advantage of the trade in hides, slaves, timber, furs and woollens from
both north and south of the Danube, goods for which the Greek colonies paid in silver
(Taylor n.d.). Some of the Greek colonies may have been founded where there was
already a Thracian settlement. Velkov (1983: 200) cites Mesambria as an example of a
Greek colony which retained its pre-colonial Thracian place-name.
In southern Thrace native states grew up, the most powerful being the Odrysian
 14 Timothy Taylor

kingdom with its capital at Seuthopolis, named after its founder King Seuthes III (Figure
9). The site was excavated between 1948 and 1951 (Dimitrov 1960; Dimitrov et al. 1984),
before being flooded by a dam. The photographs of the excavation which appear in the
literature (the clearest and most accessible being Hoddinott 1981: Fig. 122) are
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us!

50
m

Figure 9 Seuthopolis. Scale in metres. A = Agora. After Dimitrov et al. 1984.

 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 15

misleading; what at first sight appear to be pillar-bases and the outlines of buildings are in
fact no more than the earthen stumps supporting the excavation grid-posts and the sides
of Wheeler boxes aligned exactly on the main axes of the settlement itself. The published
plan (Figure 9) shows that very little of the internal structure was mapped, but from it it
is possible to see that Seuthopolis was conceived as a type of planned polis following the
Hyppodamian system. As at Cojofenii din Dos the bastions were of mud-brick. The
Agora is clearly visible to the north (Figure 9: A), and within it the royal residence.
Velkov (1983: 206) considers this building to be the thyrsis — the fortified residence of
the Thracian ruler around which other structures were built. But what were these other
structures? Hoddinott (1981:124) states 'Seuthopolis was not a Greek polis, but the seat
of a ruler and his court. The majority of the people lived outside'. The lack of excavation
or survey outside the walls, as well as within them, leaves one in doubt.
Kabyle (Plate 3) was part of a similar development. The 'acropolis' (Plate 3, in the
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distance) was first fortified in the earlier first millennium BC. It was captured by Philip II
during his Thracian campaign of 342-341 BC and grew into a lively Hellenistic
stockbreeding, agricultural and trade centre. The lines of successive city walls dating to
the Hellenistic period are visible in the middle distance in Plate 3, with the ruins of later
structures in the foreground. Excavations and surveys of the site have been carried out,
but no systematic report has yet been published.

Plate 3 Kabyle: Acropolis in background; remains of consecutive city walls in middle distance
(running horizontally); Roman period gateway and modern reconstruction in foreground.

5. Diffuse urban settlement

A brief descriptive tour of some of the most important prehistoric settlement sites in
southeast Europe could not end without mentioning Dacian Sarmizegetusa and its
related settlements.
 16 Timothy Taylor
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Figure 10 Grädi§tea Muncelului. Identified with Dacian Sarmizegetusa. A = Fortress; B = Paved

Way; C = Sacred Precinct; D = Circular Sanctuary. Scale in metres. After Diacoviciu 1981.

The site of Grädi§tea Muncelului (Figure 10) was excavated and identified with Dacian
Sarmizegetusa, the capital of Burebista in the first century BC, by the Diacovicius
(1963). It consists of a large fortress (Figure 10: A), built of timber-laced ashlar masonry
(murus dacicus), through which a smooth flagstone pavement runs (Figure 10: B) down
to a sacred precinct (Figure 10: C) filled with temples and various calendrical devices,
arranged on a series of terraces, artificially created on the steep slopes of a mountain in
the middle of the high Carpathians. In the surrounding country there are a number of
similar fortresses with temple areas, such as the one at Coste§ti (Plate 4). All were
destroyed by Trajan, in his campaign against the Dacians under Decebalus, in AD 106.
The fortified sites were part of a wider pattern (H. Diacoviciu 1981: Abb. 50) which
might best be described as 'diffuse urban settlement'. On the southern slopes below
Grädi§tea Muncelului were hundreds of small terraces, each of which supported a house
and garden. A reconstruction of the whole system is most reminiscent of that of the Maya
lowlands during the Classic period (Adams 1980): sacred sites which were also the
political, jurai and military focuses of communities living in residential areas whose
dispersed nature was dictated by natural topography and the specific mode of
production. The Dacians were transhumant pastoralists who had both summer stîne (cf.
st0l, croft, sheiling, etc.) and permanent valley-side dwellings. This form of settlement
appears to have been quite widespread in Transylvania during this period. Circular
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe YJ

structures like the one at Grädi§tea Muncelului (Figure 10: D) occur on the other sites
round about, but they have also been found elsewhere, as at Pecica on the Lower Mures,
(Figure 2). A set of silversmithing tools was found within the fortifications at Pecica, and
it seems that generally these 'sanctuaries' were associated with specialized metalworking
(especially of iron and silver) in their immediate vicinities (Trohani, 1987). Thus,
sites such as Grädi§tea and Pecica apparently provided a wide range of facilities for their
dispersed populations, both secular and religious.
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Plate 4 Costeçti, a view of the ashlar masonry defences (munis dacicus), and the local terrain.
 18 Timothy Taylor

6. Pastoral buildings
Khazanov (1984) suggests that true nomadic pastoralism did not emerge on the steppe
until c. 1000 BC; indeed the steppe may not have been formed until then (chernozems
are now considered to be mainly the result of anthropogenic factors). But before this
date there must have been many semi-nomadic or transhuming pastoralist economies in
southeast Europe. Many of the sorts of structures built by pastoralist communities are
difficult to detect archaeologically. The prehistoric counterparts of the pine and
beechwood hut shown in Plate 5, standing in a Carpathian upland meadow, would show
up only through phosphate analysis, and perhaps not at all. Metal and wood would be the
preferred materials for utensils at both sites, and at neither would butchery or the burial
of either animal or human remains be common.
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Plate 5 A pine and beechwood hut in the Ora§tie mountains (Transylvanian Alps/South
Carpathians) near Grädi$tea Muncelului.

Xenophon (Anab. VII, 4) describes how a band of Thracians came down out of the
mountains to launch an attack on a settlement: 'The master of each house acted as a
guide for them, and indeed in the darkness it was difficult without a guide to find where
the houses were in the villages, as they were surrounded by high fences to keep in the
cattle'. The houses were set fire to before 'the Thracians ran away, slinging their shields,
as their way is, behind their shoulders. Some of them, as they were getting over the
fence, were caught suspended there, with their shields entangled in the stakes.'
(translated by R. Warner). How permanent a settlement was this 'village'? Xenophon's
description implies that the houses and related structures were built of wood, but that the
perimeter fence was a fairly substantial high palisade. As elsewhere in the classical
authors, the impression is given of a country populated by heterogeneous socio-
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 19

economic groups: 'mountain Thracians', who may well have been transhumant sheep
pastoralists, and the 'village dwellers', who may have been semi-nomadic cattle
stockbreeders, or more sedentary mixed farmers.

Conclusions

One way of classifying settlement types in the first millennium BC period is by reference
to Greek terminology. Velkov writes (1983: 202): 'Generally it is assumed that the
Thracian para corresponds to the Greek kome, the Thracian diza to horion, a fortified
settlement. . . Bria and dava correspond to the Greek polis, denoting a larger Thracian
settlement, and later, a Thracian town, although both terms are not identical because
their social and economic contents differ, as do the economic and political systems of
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Hellas and Thrace.' This last is an important limitation: if we say that dava is
terminologically equivalent to polis, but that functionally it is not, then all we have done
is to find out the Thracian name for a type of settlement which we understand no better
than did the Greeks.
Paliga (pp. 23-9) attempts to go back much further: by defining the 'Indo-European-
ness' of various known Thracian terms for types of settlement, he concludes that
'oras/uras "city, township" . . . should be traced back to a pre-Thracian (pre-IE) idiom
spoken in the Neolithic' Thus we can say that perhaps the inhabitants of Majdanets'ke
gave their settlement an oras ending. What seems clear is that there are a number of
Thracian terms designating 'agglomerated settlement', dating to various stages in the
development of the language, which have stayed in use up until the present. Their
longevity does not bode well for their specificity.
Both Paliga and Velkov are trying to find out what the Thracians called various sorts of
settlements, and their efforts are worthwhile. As Maher has put it (1981: 341): 'Calls to
defer the integration of the findings of archaeology and linguistics are not fruitful, for a
language is a sign-system. It follows that a language cannot be effectively studied.. .without
reference to the world represented by the signs.' But archaeology cannot yet
satisfactorily reconstruct this world, and we may never be able to reconstruct Thracian
Weltanschauung to any great extent, because 'understanding [alien perspectives] just
means incorporating alien utterances and behaviours into categories comprehensible to
us.' (Roth 1986: 252); see also Taylor, forthcoming. The mere attachment of names to
various forms of settlement, such as Paliga's suggested link between -leba (related to
Latin lapis, stone) and the stone-built murus dacicus can never in itself provide a
satisfactory emic classification.
The archaeological priority in southeast Europe is to define an accurate etic
classification of settlement types, their constituent structures, and the way in which they
fitted in to the broader landscape. For particular areas of the region, during particular
periods, this work has already been begun. But Sherratt's mapping of the tell-settlement
patterning through successive periods of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age,
which in his fuller account is related to variations in soil and hydrology at a regional level,
is exceptional. For other areas and periods the picture is far less clear.
What can be said with some certainty is that there was a very great diversity of
 20 Timothy Taylor

settlement type in the region during the prehistoric period. The number of surviving
Thracian language terms which relate to settlements is small, and seems not to have
changed much over very long periods. Thus, trying to sort out what the Thracians called
various types of settlement is, generally speaking, an impossible (though interesting)
task.
This said, in the future it should be possible to construct more rigorous archaeological
classifications for excavated structures. Ethnographies, both ancient and modern,
suggest some of the sorts of buildings which may leave no trace in the record, or which
will require specialized techniques for their recovery. Ethnography could also provide
the basis for a more detailed terminology for the prehistoric period. However, the
present ethnographic classification of structures, both on the basis of classical accounts
and from modern fieldwork, is inadequate. For pastoralist communities, Nandris has
attempted a division of Carpatho-Balkan sites into stîna and katun: 'The Stina is
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characterised as much by its human and animal relations as by its morphology, which is
quite variable. Women are not allowed on these sites; yet there are also types of Stine to
be found which are composed only of women . . . By contrast at the Katun, as denned
here, complete families are present as an integral part of the site' (1985: 258). In fact,
the human and animal relationships at these sites seem to be as variable as is their
'morphology': men, women and children may be present together at many stine.
Different structures in different regions may be denoted by the same term, whilst similar
structures are denoted by different terms: thus a goatherd's building, for example, would
be called a mandra in Modern Greek (compare the plan of the Greek goat mandra:
Nandris 1985: fig. 5), whereas in Bulgarian a mandra is usually a dairy for milch-cows.
Already there is much more environmental work being done on sites in southeast
Europe. This, along with the application of other new techniques for sourcing materials
and for locating settlements, should help to produce fuller accounts of regional
settlement developments. The philologists have tried hard to isolate particular local
terms for settlements; it is now up to archaeologists to find out what these settlements
really were.

Acknowledgments

There is not enough space here to thank all those individuals and institutions who have
encouraged my studies and travels in southeast Europe. I would particularly like to
acknowledge the help of the late Prof. Hadrian Diacoviciu (University of Cluj) and to
thank Prof. Vlad Zirra (University of Bucharest), Dr. Atanas Peikov (Plovdiv
Archaeological Museum) and Dr. Andrew Sherratt (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). I
would also like to thank Anders Bergquist, Prof. Barry Cunliffe, Dr. Linda Ellis, Dr.
Eric Hamp, Christo Terjiev, Dr. George Trohani, Chris Unwin and Sarah Wright for
their help, and The British Council, The University of Sofia, St. John's College
(Cambridge), Christ Church (Oxford), The Queen's College (Oxford), and the
Meyerstein Research Fund (Oxford) for their assistance.
27.x.1986 Institute of Archaeology
Oxford
 Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe 21

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Abstract

Timothy Taylor
Aspects of settlement diversity and its classification in southeast Europe before the Roman
period
There are many problems associated with the modern cross-cultural classification of settlement
types. Even greater difficulty is experienced in dealing with the prehistoric period, and this is
especially true in southeast Europe, for at least four reasons: 1) few regional surveys or large-scale
excavations of settlements have been undertaken, 2) various Thracian language terms relating to
settlements have been preserved in ancient texts and modern place-names, 3) prehistoric
settlement appears to have been remarkably diverse, and 4) some types of settlement can be
inferred which do not survive archaeologically.