The new settlement landscape of Kuyavia in the second half of the 5th millennium BCE: Longhouses as emblems of identity, drivers of agglomeration, and components of central settlements

Around 4350 BCE, the region of Kuyavia witnessed profound social and cultural transformations that led to the emergence of the Brześć Kujawski culture (hereafter BKC). The principal marker of this new identity, as well as a fundamental component of a complex settlement system, was the characteristic trapezoidal longhouse, alongside central settlements that simultaneously fulfilled three functions: habitation sites, burial grounds, and ceremonial centres. These were surrounded by satellite settlements in the form of hamlets and farmsteads. This paper offers a new perspective on the formation of the BKC as a process that fundamentally transformed the settlement and ethnographic landscape of the Polish Lowlands. In our interpretation, this process was shaped by three interrelated phenomena: (1) ethnogenetic changes that redefined and unified groups around new symbols, whose identity, rooted in the traditions of the Danubian Neolithic, had become increasingly diffuse following the decline of the LBK; (2) processes of settlement agglomeration and the emergence of new territorial divisions; and (3) practices of ancestor commemoration, employed to construct new historical narratives that legitimised shared origins, rights to occupied territories, and the meanings of communal symbols. The present paper focuses on the second of these phenomena, within which the introduction of longhouses and their associated symbolism is interpreted as the principal factor initiating ethnogenetic processes, settlement agglomeration, and the formation of central settlements.