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Understanding Pit Sites: Storage, Surplus and Social Complexity in Prehistoric Western Europe

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Abstract

Pits are virtually omnipresent in the archaeological record. In Prehistoric Europe, pits occasionally form large concentrations known as ‘pit sites’, where they are the most visible, sometimes the sole, remnants of past human activity. How can we interpret the social roles played by places comprising hundreds or even thousands of pits? A critical point of contention in these debates is how certain we are that all or most pits on a site indeed acted as grain storage pits for most of their use-lives. However, it is not easy to distinguish between pits used for storage and pits destined for other purposes. This paper represents an attempt to circumvent, to an extent, this problem. We will do so by turning our attention away from the problem of accuracy and by focusing on external consistency instead. We gather up-to-date experimental, ethnographic and historical data about the challenges that the storage of grain poses and how pits can help people to overcome them. Then, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages relative to other methods: why would anybody use airtight pits instead of, for instance, weather-proofed raised granaries? Next, we examine the social and economic contexts in which storage pits are an effective solution as opposed to those in which their performance is suboptimal. The conclusions drawn serve as a background against which to evaluate the external consistency of current interpretations concerning three selected case studies in Prehistoric Western Europe.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Imma Ollich, Penny Cunningham, Alfonso Vigil-Escalera, Adam Gašpar and François Gentili for helping us find obscure bibliographic references or for answering our insistent questions. Thanks go also to Ildefonso Navarro for providing us with images from Loma de la Alberica. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers who, with their comments, helped us improve an earlier version of the manuscript. Of course, the views expressed here remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the PEOPLE Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement no. 2012-326129.

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    Víctor Jiménez-Jáimez & José Suárez-Padilla

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Jiménez-Jáimez, V., Suárez-Padilla, J. Understanding Pit Sites: Storage, Surplus and Social Complexity in Prehistoric Western Europe. J Archaeol Method Theory 27, 799–835 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-019-09429-7

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