Human behaviour is influenced by many things, most of which remain unconscious to us. One of these is a phenomenon known among perception psychologists as "pseudo-neglect." This refers to the observation that healthy people prefer their left visual field to their right, and therefore divide a line regularly left of centre.
A study published on Friday, January 10 in PLOS ONE now shows for the first time what effect this inconspicuous deviation had in the prehistoric past. A Slovak-German research team has investigated the alignment of early Neolithic houses in Central and Eastern Europe. Scientists from Kiel University (CAU) and the Slovakian Academy of Sciences were able to prove that the orientation of newly built houses deviated by a small amount from that of existing buildings, and that this deviation was regularly counterclockwise.
Archaeologist Dr. Nils Müller-Scheeßel, who coordinated the study, says, "Researchers have long assumed that early Neolithic houses stood for about a generation, i.e., 30 to 40 years, and that new houses had to be built next to existing ones at regular intervals. By means of age determination using the radiocarbon method, we can now show that the new construction was associated with a barely perceptible rotation of the house axis counterclockwise. We see pseudoneglect as the most likely cause of this."
Müller-Scheeßel N, Müller J, Cheben I, Mainusch W, Rassmann K, Rabbel W, et al. (2020) A new approach to the temporal significance of house orientations in European Early Neolithic settlements. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0226082.
DOI: doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226082
This paper shows that local differences in house orientation in settlements from the Early Neolithic in Central Europe reflect a regular chronological trajectory based on Bayesian calibration of 14C-series. This can be used to extrapolate the dating of large-scale settlement plans derived from, among other methods, geophysical surveys. In the southwest Slovakian settlement of Vráble, we observed a progressive counter-clockwise rotation in house orientation from roughly 32° to 4° over a 300 year period. A survey of published and dated village plans from other LBK regions confirms that this counter-clockwise rotation per settlement is a wider Central European trend. We explain this observation as an unintentional, unconscious but systematic leftward deviation in the house builders’ cardinal orientation, which has been termed “pseudoneglect” in studies of human perception. This means that whenever houses were intended to be oriented towards a specific direction and be parallel to each other, there was an error in perception causing slight counter-clockwise rotation. This observation is used as a basis to reconstruct dynamics of Early Neolithic settlement in the Slovakian Žitava valley, showing a rapid colonization, followed by increased agglomeration into large villages consisting of strongly autonomous farmsteads.
