Linear Pottery Culture Houses: Reconstruction and Manpower

Abstract

The Linear Pottery Culture (LPC), dated from the mid-fifth millennium bc, is generally held to have originated to the north of the Hungarian Plain (Case 1976, 48) and has a distribution stretching westwards to the Netherlands. One of its distinctive type fossils resides in the consistent forms of its houses (fig. 1).The archaeological evidence for reconstruction consists almost entirely of ground plans (examples in Modderman 1958–9, 1970) although we can also consider house models of ancestral and derivative cultures. Modderman (1970, fig. 12) has shown that LPC houses in the Netherlands can be divided into single-unit, bipartite, and tripartite structures (fig. 1). Their alignment is generally consistent so that in the case of tripartite structures we can speak of northwest, central, and southeast sections. The ground plans are made up of five longitudinal rows of postholes. We may define wallposts (rows 1 and 5) and inner posts (rows 2–4). The end sections were more heavily constructed than the central unit; although the number of posts decreased in later periods a tripartite division was often maintained. Transverse lines of posts were frequently slightly offset and the inner postholes in the central unit of earlier structures often form a Y-configuration, with the top of the Y invariably on the northern side.