Bell Beakers – Chronology, Innovation And Memory: A Multivariate Approach
Creators: name: Müller, Johannes
name: Hinz, Martin
name: Ullrich, Markus
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018
Subjects: Bell Beaker
Ceramic styles
Typology
Multidimensional Scaling

description: As Bell Beaker (BB) research in southern Germany already has documented archives that might be used for intense typochronological studies, we are able to present a statistical estimation and a societal interpretation of the Rhine-Main-Neckar Bell Beaker group. The quantification of stylistic changes resulted in a pattern of different intensities of change with at least 3 phases of increase, decrease and cessation of style development (ca. 2600–2380 cal. BC; 2330–2230 cal. BC; ca. 2220–2000 cal BC). A rhythm within the development of BB styles seems to be indicated. Intervals, in which new decoration patterns are created, are followed by intervals, in which the development of new patterns decreases. The discontinuation of the development of the existing designs after a certain number of generations displays, in our opinion, the lacking stable chain of ideological patterns over the course of generations: a recreation of the society became necessary. If our interpretation is valid, BB societies in Central Europe must still be considered to have been organised in dramatically unstable conditions: Probably the limitation of ideological transmission over time limited the development of stable political institutions. The BB network functioned as a spatial link between different societies and not so much as a new quality of stratification within regional societies.

Social practices of non-literate societies depend heavily on institutions that secure the transformation of knowledge and ideologies from one generation to the next. In these societies, knowledge transformation is also bound to an active role of material culture within the communication process. In this respect, we use Bell Beaker (BB) shapes and decoration patterns to observe a structural patterning, which, in turn, might indicate ways in which these transfomations took place.

In archaeological research, typologies and chronologies are implemented to reconstruct the social developments of the societies we intend to investigate. In our case, we are interested in a high-resolution chronology for the Rhine-Main-Neckar Bell Beaker development, which was established by a PhD thesis (Ullrich 2008). Whereas this new chronological model already informs about the development and contemporaneousness of different Corded Ware (CW) and BB styles, one main effort of the present analysis is placed on the reconstruction of the speed of stylistic change in the case of BBs. In a combination of the linear timescale, which is derived by the scientific dating of inventories within a sequence of a correspondence analysis, and the multidimensional ordination of ceramic shapes and decorations, the rate of change will be specified with the help of multidimensional scaling procedures. In an interpretation, we would like to apply the quantified changes in ceramic design as a proxy for the innovation rate within BB societies. A surprising result is the detection of memory patterns in stylistic development.