Burned House Horizon
In the archaeology of Neolithic Europe, the burned house horizon is the geographical extent of the phenomenon of intentionally burned settlements.
This was a widespread and long-lasting tradition in what is now Southeastern and Eastern Europe, lasting from as early as 6,500 BCE (the beginning of the Neolithic) to as late as 2000 BCE (the end of the Chalcolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age). A notable representative of this tradition is the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, which was centered on the burned-house horizon both geographically and temporally.
There is a consensus in the study of Neolithic and Eneolithic Europe that the majority of burned houses were intentionally set alight
Although the reasons behind why house burning was practiced are still debated, the evidence seems to support that it occurred in such a way as to indicate it was highly unlikely to have been as a result of accidental cause. If these regularly occurring burnings, in which the entire settlement is destroyed, were deliberate, then there has still been a debate about why this happened. However, in recent years, the consensus has begun to gel around the Domicide theory supported by Tringham, Stevanovic and others.
Cucuteni-Trypillian settlements were completely burned every 75–80 years, leaving behind successive layers consisting mostly of large amounts of rubble from the collapsed wattle-and-daub walls. This rubble was mostly ceramic material that had been created as the raw clay used in the daub of the walls became vitrified from the intense heat that would have turned it a bright orange color during the conflagration that destroyed the buildings, much the same way that raw clay objects are turned into ceramic products during the firing process in a kiln. Moreover, the sheer amount of fired-clay rubble found within every house of a settlement indicates that a fire of enormous intensity would have raged through the entire community to have created the volume of material found.
Evidence
Although there have been some attempts to try to replicate the results of these ancient settlement burnings, no modern experiment has yet managed to successfully reproduced the conditions that would leave behind the type of evidence that is found in these burned Neolithic sites, had the structures burned under normal conditions.
There has also been a debate between scholars whether these settlements were burned accidentally or intentionally.
Whether the houses were set on fire in a ritualistic way all together before abandoning the settlement, or each house was destroyed at the end of its life (e.g. before building a new one) it is still a matter of debate.
The first theory, holding that the burning of the settlements was due to reasons resulting from accident or warfare, originated in the 1940s, and referred only to some of the Cucuteni-Trypillian sites located in Moldova and Ukraine ). The second theory that holds that the settlements were burned deliberately is more recent, and broadens the focus to include the entire region of the culture, and even beyond
Although the phenomenon of house burning is pervasive throughout the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture's existence, it was by no means the only southeastern European Neolithic society that experienced this.[ The British-American archaeologist Ruth Tringham has coined the term Burned House Horizon to describe the extent of the geographical region that indicates this repetitive practice of house burning in southeast Europe. She, along with Serbian archaeologist Mirjana Stevanović, mapped out this phenomenon from archaeological sites throughout the entire region, and came to the conclusion that:
Although I have referred to the ubiquity of burned building rubble in south-east European Neolithic settlements as the burned house horizon , it is clear from Stevanović's, Chapman's and my own analyses, that 'the burned house horizon' is neither a chronologically nor regionally homogenous phenomenon Stevanović and Tringham 1998[14]). For example early Neolithic houses have more artifacts deposited in them, and it is in these early Neolithic phases that burned human remains are most likely to occur . Human remains occur again in the late Eneolithic (Gumelniţa/Karanovo VI). The presence or absence of human remains in the rubble of burned houses is clearly of great significance.
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