Enclosures of the Mind (Turek, 2017)

This is a hugely interesting subject matter, and it might be helpful to read this first: Hofstede's social dimensions paradigm.  That may be a bit beyond this current topic, but it relates to the ability to quantitatively infer social habits and worldviews from material facts.

If we plugged Beakers into Hofstede's social dimensions, where would they land, and what material facts would we use?  This paper does that generally, looking at the landscape and seeing what that tells us about the mindset of its inhabitants.

Fig 2. (Michelsberg Beaker)

The ditched enclosures, Turek argues, are safe places that concentrate spiritual power and people power in one place.  In that way, they have a feminine element as opposed of the wild man.

"The domestic space defined by Ian Hodder [3] as Domusis representing the mild, peaceful, domesticated and feminine principle. Such inner peaceful area is usually divided from the wild, undomesticated, aggressive and masculine space that Hodder named Agrios."

Neolithic Europeans were in many ways foreign to an undeveloped and temperate Europe: its tough natives, dangerous animals and cold climate.  While they may not have had a 'siege mentality' they may have compartmentalized the spiritual world as they did the material world.

"The enclosures are, however, not only functional artefacts designed to divide human world, the also represent certain state of mind and ideology. Some Neolithic enclosures themselves represent „ditch religion“, that is a result of first farmers ideologies [4,5]."

and then that changed...

"But then, probably in 29th Century BC something changed in the ditch religion continuity and people abandoned enclosures and hill-top sites for more than thousand years."

"The Eneolithic society went through a number of deep changes in that period, leading to considerable individualization of social principles and thus also to a deeper differentiation of the society of the emerging Bronze Age.  The Neolithic collective idea of burials and monuments probably became definitely obsolete. The cause of such a collapse could have been the rapid deepening of social differentiation and the emergence of new elite...What also happened, however, was a paradigm shift in the use of land, building of settlements and handling waste."

"A new cult following the already existing sun worship appears to have prevailed. In their ritual communication with the spirits of the ancestors, now in the underworld, people focused especially on individualized burial ceremonies and their symbols - mainly to demonstrate and confirm the hierarchical social order and consolidate the genealogical system of inheritance of the social status of individuals and families"

Then he ends on a political note which doesn't seem to follow.  But I'm curious why he chose two graphics of the Michelsberg Culture (Maju?)  Does he know something not released yet?


J Turek. Enclosures in Human Mind. Glob J Arch & Anthropol. 2017; 1(2): 555559.  [Link]

Abstract
Dividing the cultural space is an essential need of humans. The enclosed space if giving people feeling of security from the otherness and dividing the world into concepts of peaceful domus safe inside and wild agrios, dangerous outside. Enclosures were created to protect human communities, their properties and livestock but also to perform their cult. Walls and ditches were often acting as symbolic manifestations of unity and creating shared identity, such as when Rome was founded by Romulus ploughing the furrow outlining the future Eternal City. Walls and ditches were also created as fortifications and symbols of domination and/or segregation, such as the case of Limes Romanus or the Great Wall of China. Enclosures were, however, also defining the holy places, dividing the sacred from the profane and creating arenas of spiritual and social communication, such as ditch monuments in Neolithic Europe. Walls and ditches are dividing people even now. The Korean wall or the wall at the West Bank present the reflection of the current human behavior.