De facto refuse or structured deposition? House inventories of the late neolithic Vinča culture

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to determine whether there are reasons to believe that inventories from the Late Neolithic Vinča culture houses do not represent systemic assemblages and to offer an interpretation of household assemblage variation. Pottery inventories from Vinča culture houses were compared to the ethnographically recorded range of variation in household inventory size. The discard equation was used to make projections of the accumulated assemblages from house assemblages for comparison with empirically observed accumulated assemblages. It is concluded that in general there is no reason to reject the assumption that Vinča household inventories reflect systemic assemblages. Moreover, the patterns of inventory variability can be meaningfully interpreted in social term