Origins and early development of the jar burial tradition

Southeast European later prehistory yielded a relatively scanty mortuary record but one that demonstrates the relevance of certain burial traditions to the general understanding of prehistoric development. Appearing in the early phases of southeast European neolithization, although certainly not the earliest ones, jar burial developed in three territorially and chronologically restricted waves : a Neolithic core 1 area in the Struma and Vardar river valleys and : the west Rhodope Mountains in the early sixth millennium BC, and later, late/final Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and/or early Bronze Age - depending on local terminology - developments scattered from Argolid in Greece to Transdanubia in Hungary and dating from the late sixth to the late third millennium BC, with huge chronological gaps within. Their Anatolian and Levantine parallels give a solid ground to the expanding of our understanding of this obviously transcultural phenomenon. This paper considers the appearance of jar burial tradition - which is especially suitable for this experiment since its origin is determined by certain event with known beginning and evolution, the discovery and rapid spread of pottery -on the background of southeast European neolithization, and traces it back to the primary distribution zones, following the directions of its early developments, in a chronological framework spanning the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and the Early Bronze Age, in terms of southeast Balkan chronology, i.e., the time from the early sixth to the late third millennium BC. A hypothetical model of jar burial distribution has been suggested, one that situates the early appearance of this practice in the Northern Levant, sometime in the pre-Hassuna period. For a relatively short time jar burial influenced culture developments as far as the central Balkans; the appearance of this mortuary practice in the southern Levant followed soon after. The absence of relevant remains in western and eastern Anatolia could also hint at southeast European autonomy; however, this can hardly be substantiated since the burials in the Struma and Vardar river valleys, and the west Rhodope Mountains share common features with their Central Anatolian and Levantine parallels. What is more plausible is that the idea of burial of fetus/infant/child in a ceramic pot, as an element of the social reproduction networks, was transferred along the neolithization routes and its expressions were triggered by certain stimuli, most probably natural events or similar natural or social situations, as is demonstrated by the burials' contemporaneity as well as by the sites' clustering both in southeast Europe and central Anatolia.