THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS
Aside from the information which can be drawn directly from the objects themselves, the analysis of archaeological objects depends above all on information about the find contexts of the objects.
Virtually all of the European Neolithic figurines were found in settlements, and thus we can follow the usual archaeological method. Only in the Hamangia Culture (ca. 5000-4300 BCE) in Dobruja (a historical region shared today by Bulgaria and Romania) or the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture (ca. 4600-3800 BCE) in Moldavia and the Ukraine were figurines regularly placed with the deceased in graves (Hansen 2007: 334 fig. 188). In these cultures, figurines are in any case relatively rare - and not very striking - grave goods, reserved for only 1 per cent of the dead (Vajsov 2002).The ancient surface upon which people walked in the Neolithic is not generally preserved in most European archaeological sites. Floors of this type can only be found - and the original contexts excavated - in the buildings of tell settlements which appear between the Great Hungarian Plain and Thessaly, and in the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture. Figurines were found in their original contexts in a very few cases, as in Veszto-Mägor in the Great Hungarian Plain, Ovcarovo in Bulgaria and Sabatinivka in the Ukraine (Movsa 1971; Todorova et al. 1983: 91- 93; Hegedüs & Makkay 1987: 87 figs 3-4). In these cases, they were found in small groups displayed with other objects, such as pottery. Superficially, these groups are not dissimilar to the household shrines (Herrgottswinkel) of modern European Catholic peasants.
In the excavation of settlements where the original surfaces have been lost, the finds were all from pits and thus we have no certain information about the original context. The figurines recovered in such cases are generally either broken or incomplete. It is usually proposed that such fragmentation can be accounted for by assuming the intentional and targeted destruction of the figurines (Hockmann 1965: 3-4, 1988: 21; Dobiat 1975: 40-42; Kaufmann 1989: 126-9).
Many different motives for this alleged destruction have been proposed, ranging from destruction by enemy communities to the ritual binding of the figurines to the houses of the owners. However, it is now generally agreed that the broken figurines have to be interpreted as substitutes for human sacrifice (Hockmann 1988: 21; Kaufmann 1989: 126-9). Analyses of the figurines from well-excavated and published sites such as the settlement in Tesetice-Kyjovice of the MMK in southern Moravia (Kazdovä 1984; Podborsky 1985, 1988) have, however, not confirmed this hypothesis. Along with some 25,000 potsherds, the large settlement pit No. 4 yielded fifty-five fragments of anthropomorphic figurines (Kazdovä 1984: tab. 15, pls 51-61). Of these, only one is practically complete. Three further female figurines are well preserved, but the heads and parts of the arms and legs are missing. All of the other figurines - meaning 90 per cent of the material - are much more fragmentary (Kazdovä 1984: pls 58-61; Petrasch 2002: 870-71 figs 5-7). Thus, the state of the figurines corresponds more or less to the pottery, where the 25,000 shards produced only a couple of dozen complete vessels (Kazdova 1984: pls 39-58 and 61-7). The figurines are generally broken at sensitive spots - that is to say, the arms, legs, neck and waist. These are the points where accidental breakage is most likely, and there is no indication whatsoever of any deliberate destruction. It follows that the figurines found in pits must be understood as rubbish which cannot be distinguished from the rest of the content of the pits.It is remarkable that the severe fragmentation of the figurines is also typical of those sites where the Neolithic living surfaces are preserved. The majority of the figurines found in such sites are not found in their original contexts, and probably not even near the places where they originally stood. We will elaborate on this, taking as an example Dragugeni “Ostrov” in Upper Moldavia, a settlement of the Cucuteni Culture (Marinescu-Bilcu & Bolomey 2000).
One hundered and fifty figurines were found here, and the fragmentation corresponds exactly to what we know of the MMK - and thus to that of all the other Neolithic cultures of Europe. Only sixty-three figurines were found in the nineteen buildings {ibid.: 132). When taking into account the fact that the buildings will have had a significantly longer lifespan than that of the figurines, it follows that on average only a few of the figurines will have been used in any one building. At the present time, it is impossible to establish the distribution of the figurines with respect to the individual buildings. The results of the settlements hitherto excavated suggest that one can more probably expect an irregular than a regular distribution of the figurines. In some of the buildings from Neolithic Europe, there were larger numbers of figurines whereas many other buildings have not yielded any at all.It is far more difficult to make any judgements for those Neolithic settlements where the original living surfaces have not been preserved. It is useful to recall the proportions of figurines to pottery known from settlements where the living surfaces were preserved, such as the just mentioned Dragugeni “Ostrov”. The 150 figurines found there contrast significantly with some 200,000 shards (Marinescu- Bilcu & Bolomey 2000: 110; Petrasch 2006), giving a proportion of roughly 1:1000. In Tesetice-Kyjovice of the MMK, the proportion of figurines to potsherds in the large pits of the settlement varies from none at all to fifty-five fragmentary figurines to 25,000 shards (Kazdova 1984: tab. 15). This is an additional source stressing the irregular distribution of the figurines. The proportions for the entire settlement with its 299 figurines (Podborsky 1985: 21-36) will probably correspond more or less to those known for the Cucuteni settlements.
The picture is entirely different in the area of the LBK to the west of the Carpathian basin. The figurines are generally distributed across the region (Hbckmann 1965; Hansen 2007: 292-302), but they are not found in every settlement. Furthermore, in most of the settlements, there were only individual figurines, or at the most several. In this fashion, the average proportions lay much higher (by a factor of ten) than those of the Lengyel and Cucuteni Cultures. Of the several thousand LBK sites known, there is only one single settlement which differs significantly: Bad Nauheim-Nieder-Morlen in the Wetterau (Schade-Lindig 2002). The forty-six anthropomorphic and theriomorphic figurines found there are incomparably more abundant than at any other site. As the site was unusually densely inhabited and correspondingly built-up, finds were correspondingly rich but the proportion of figurines to shards will probably not have approached that of the Lengyel and Cucuteni Cultures.