Körös Culture

[Goswin_van_Eyck]

The Körös Culture, named after its eponymious site,
inchoates the food-producing economy(stock-breeding
and agriculture) in Hungary, in the early Neolithic of
6000-4800BC and is related to the Rumanian Cris
Culture, Bulgarian Karanovo Culture and Serbian
Starcevo Culture, all introducing in Northern and
Eastern Europe painted ceramics over an area
encompassing from Macedonia and Thessalia to
Transsylvania up north, accessing the Balkans and
Danubian plains by rivers; while the influence of the
East Mediterranean Bassin is unquestioned, opinions
acceptthe possibility of acculturation by mesolithic
locals.

The settlements betray the original "tell
life"(tell=hill) or stretched house building(like
everwhere else in the Balkans and Mediterranean) on
narrow strips along rivers and brooks, commonly humid
and forestal enviroments, with square or rectangular
habitats(4 by 5m) which would have contained a nuclear
or small family.
The house made of timber, loam and gyps had sometimes
a verticale wall with a plastered tent roof and a
hearth in the middle of the floor, but they are found
too outside the dwellings.
To ward off evil, an animal skull was stacked on the
gable.
In the vicinity of the buildings plastered storage
pits or large-sized storage vessels were dug.

Their economy didn't fully bar out the mesolithic
subsistence direction into fishing and collecting
shells and snails which proves the hoarded and
impressive finds of net fishing weighs and
anglings),while the stocks of goats and sheeps as well
small growth points to a connection with the
Mediterranean Bassin and Hither Asia.

Their ceramics favoured thick-walled plain vessels
with patterns incised or embossed
, outnumbering smaller and thin-walled, a bit glossy
with a play of light(red) and shade(black) which
expressed a bluntly capricious refined display.
Polished spatular bone spoons were in use in
manufacturing the vessels.
So-called pinta deras or stamp seals bearing symbolic
patterns were probably practiced for body painting,
because they left no mark in the unsignificant
decoration of pottery.


Creativeness was however nicely endowed on their simplified and
naturalistic objects of representation, statuettes, reliefs and
anthropomorphic and theriomorphic pots with female figures with
emphasizing some body parts and neglecting others, stags and goats,
rigidity and passivity of posture juxtaposed to stressed movement,..

KörÖs is famous for its "Venuses", small-sized anthropomorphic pots of
about 10cm high, very stylized so that the feminity is dissolved,
solely the buttocks gain the attention, limbs are indicated by cuts,
clefts or husks.
A small knob refers to the nose, horizontal notches the eyes, but the
mouth is amiss.
There seems to exist an connection to bird-shaped vessels, the one
found in Felgyö is bird-shaped but hafted with a human head.



Motion came about in reliefs on vessels of female figures with raised
arms from the elbow in a kind of praying pose(orans)or giving
blessings, rejection expressed by the arms turned down,another gesture
is depicted by arms hauled in opposite directions.
Sometimes the female is shown with a goat.
Stylized animals are too integrated in four-legged, small table-shaped
"lamps" with a bowl at the centre; the feet end in animal heads,
otherwise shaped like the forelegs of animals.



"Though stylization and symbolism predominated from the beginning,
these went through various stages from life-like representation to
extreme simplification.
The form was determined primarly by the meaning, the message
expressed.
Religion and rite demanded the accentuation or expression of certain
feature of form, particularly the emphasis on the female character,
the indication of the eyes and the nose on the head, the neglecting of
the mouth, and the regular reccurence of certain position and arm
gestures.
Within the framework of all these "laws", the abbility of the
neolithic artist was then the determining factor in the artistic value
of the completed object and the differences in aethethic effect."

The figurative representation and related symbolism were derivative to
the Mediterranean cultures, but provincial executed, Central European,
i.e. of a deviating religious system, lacking the need of figuralmodes
of expression, decreasing in numbers in the periphery zones of a
secondary neolithic nature or borderline mesolithics:

"In their place non-figurative symbols of an extremely simplificated
type were of primary competence."

Quotes:

Nánder Kalicz, Clay Gods, the Neolithic Period and the Copper Age
in
Hungary(1980).