- Field Museum, Anthropology, Department MemberTrent University, Anthropology, Department MemberUniversity of Toronto, Anthropology, Department Memberadd
Archaeologists in the Carpathian Basin are increasingly focused on social variability across the Bronze Age landscape. However, when it comes to mortuary variability, the difference in body treatments (cremation and inhumation) between... more
Archaeologists in the Carpathian Basin are increasingly focused on social variability across the Bronze Age landscape. However, when it comes to mortuary variability, the difference in body treatments (cremation and inhumation) between populations impairs our ability to carry out regional comparisons and appreciate the range of community social organizations. In this paper, we compare mortuary assemblages from three Bronze Age culture areas on the Great Hungarian Plain. In our coarse quantitative framework, we characterize the intensity of funerary distinction as a proxy for complexity and identify structural variation across mortuary programs. We identify both horizontal and vertical differences in funerary assemblages and note horizontal differences that do not necessarily materialize vertically. The results also show that societies can represent varying values across the different measures, underlying the necessity of working with analytical frameworks which approach the question of complexity in a non-linear manner. We believe that the method offered here can be a useful addition to the toolkit of mortuary archaeologists who work in areas and/or time periods with various body treatment practices.
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The Mesolithic in Eastern Europe was the last time that hunter-gatherer economies thrived there before the spread of agriculture in the second half of the seventh millennium BC. But the period, and the interactions between foragers and... more
The Mesolithic in Eastern Europe was the last time that hunter-gatherer economies thrived there before the spread of agriculture in the second half of the seventh millennium BC. But the period, and the interactions between foragers and the first farmers, are poorly understood in the Carpathian Basin and surrounding areas because few sites are known, and even fewer have been excavated and published. How did site location differ between Mesolithic and Early Neolithic settlers? And where should we look for rare Mesolithic sites? Proximity analysis is seldom used for predictive modeling for hunter-gatherer sites at large scales, but in this paper, we argue that it can serve as an important starting point for prospection for rare and poorly understood sites. This study uses proximity analysis to provide quantitative landscape associations of known Mesolithic and Early Neolithic sites in the Carpathian Basin to show how Mesolithic people chose attributes of the landscape for camps, and how they differed from the farmers who later settled. We use elevation and slope, rivers, wetlands prior to the twentieth century, and the distribution of lithic raw materials foragers and farmers used for toolmaking to identify key proxies for preferred locations. We then build predictive models for the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic in the Pannonian region to highlight parts of the landscape that have relatively higher probabilities of having Mesolithic sites still undiscovered and contrast them with the settlement patterns of the first farmers in the area. We find that large parts of Pannonia conform to landforms preferred by Mesolithic foragers, but these areas have not been subject to investigation.
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Kutatásunk fókuszában azok a jelentős társadalmi és gazdasági átalakulási folyamatok állnak, melyekre a Kr.e. 2. évezred derekán került sor Európa szerte. Ez az az időszak, amelynek temetőiben első alkalommal figyelhetők meg társadalmi... more
Kutatásunk fókuszában azok a jelentős társadalmi és gazdasági átalakulási folyamatok állnak, melyekre a Kr.e. 2. évezred derekán került sor Európa szerte. Ez az az időszak, amelynek temetőiben első alkalommal figyelhetők meg társadalmi egyenlőtlenségre utaló nyomok. A temetkezési szokások is megváltoztak: a korábban túlnyomóan jellemző csontvázas rítust Skandináviától a Balkánig a hamvasztás váltja fel. Az Alföldön élő közösségek ezzel párhuzamosan aktívabban bekapcsolódtak a távolsági kereskedelembe, a bronz- és aranytárgyak cseréjével.1 Új díszítőelemek és tárgytípusok kötik össze a Balti-tengert a Mediterráneummal, és számos kutató véli úgy, hogy a társadalomból kiemelkedő katonai arisztokrácia vette át a kereskedelem és a fémművesség irányítását.2 Új kutatási programunk, amelyet egy kelet-magyarországi bronzkori temetőben indítottunk, a temetkezési szokásokat vizsgálja annak érdekében, hogy feltárjuk, milyen szerepet játszott az adott közösség a regionális kereskedelmi kapcsolatokban.
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A B S T R A C T Nucleated tell sites emerged on the Great Hungarian Plain nearly a millennium after the earliest agricultural communities established sedentary settlements at the beginning of the Neolithic period. Once established, these... more
A B S T R A C T Nucleated tell sites emerged on the Great Hungarian Plain nearly a millennium after the earliest agricultural communities established sedentary settlements at the beginning of the Neolithic period. Once established, these unprecedentedly large population centers had a dramatic impact on their local environment. In this article, we present the results of our recent research at two Neolithic tells in the Körös Region of the Great Hungarian Plain. These sites – Vésztő-Mágor and Szeghalom-Kovácshalom – were established at roughly the same time and were located on the same branch of the Sebes-Körös River. Focusing on two methods – geophysics and micro-stratigraphy – we compare how these two nearby sites were established, evolved, and were abandoned within their local landscapes. Whereas geophysical surveys provide a horizontal picture of how the sites expanded over space, microstratigraphic studies provide a vertical perspective of the social processes that built the tells over time. Although both settlements were established at the same time, the sites developed in very different ways. We attribute these differences in the micro-regional trajectories to specific traditions associated with different local communities.
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Compared to other parts of the Old World, nu-cleated, tell-based settlements emerged late in the evolution of Neolithic villages in the Car-pathian Basin. This article presents the results of recent research conducted by the Körös... more
Compared to other parts of the Old World, nu-cleated, tell-based settlements emerged late in the evolution of Neolithic villages in the Car-pathian Basin. This article presents the results of recent research conducted by the Körös Regional Archaeological Project and examines the long-term trajectories of two tell-based settlements in the Körös Region of the Great Hungar-ian Plain. In this article, we describe the various non-invasive investigative techniques that were employed to reconstruct the organization of Neo-lithic tell-based settlements at Szeghalom
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ABSTRACT Changes in settlement patterns in the later prehistory of Southeastern Europe historically have been attributed to shifts in climate, hydrology, and subsistence. This paper evaluates the importance of different human... more
ABSTRACT Changes in settlement patterns in the later prehistory of Southeastern Europe historically have been attributed to shifts in climate, hydrology, and subsistence. This paper evaluates the importance of different human environmental relationships on the Great Hungarian Plain from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age. To model these relationships in a way amenable to archaeological investigation, we frame the discussion according to different spatial and social scales. Based on systematically collected data at various geographic scales in and around the Körös Basin, we suggest that changes in settlement distribution and organization were determined by a dynamic interaction between environmental factors, social concerns, and cultural preferences. Our results imply that at the regional scale certain hydrological features strongly influenced the settlement distribution, but did not prompt changes in their locations over time. At the local scale, environmental differences in micro-zones seem largely responsible for subsistence variability between individual settlements. Yet in between these two resolutions, at the micro-regional scale, settlement location in the Körös Basin was strongly and consistently influenced by social concerns. Long-term stability of environmental patterns at one scale and variation at another contributed to a wide range of dynamic human-environmental relationships shaping the transition from small egalitarian Neolithic villages to larger, more economically complex polities on the Great Hungarian Plain during the Bronze Age.
... These features are not insignificant, as the use of a standard geode and projection ... Two fairly distinct groups of paleochannels also became evident during the digitization process. ... fairly coherent, traceable hydrological... more
... These features are not insignificant, as the use of a standard geode and projection ... Two fairly distinct groups of paleochannels also became evident during the digitization process. ... fairly coherent, traceable hydrological network, these larger channels were rarely integrated into it ...
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Research Interests: Archaeology, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Remote Sensing, Aerial Archaeology, and 10 moreMethodology, Archaeological Science, Ground Penetrating Radar, Remote Sensing (Archaeology), Archaeological Prospection, Archaeological Geophysics, Satellite Remote Sensing (Archaeology), Aerial Photography, Spectroradiometry, and Geophysical Surveys
Archaeologists use differences in metals from burial contexts to identify variation in social inequalities during the European Bronze Age. Many have argued that these social inequalities depended on access to, and control of, trade... more
Archaeologists use differences in metals from burial contexts to identify variation in social inequalities during the European Bronze Age. Many have argued that these social inequalities depended on access to, and control of, trade routes. In this paper, I model critical gateways in the Tisza river-a river system in the Carpathian Basin that might have enabled privileged access to metal in some areas but not others. I then evaluate the concentration of metal on different topological nodes of the river network in an attempt to understand what best explains the distribution of metals across this landscape. I do this by describing Bronze Age metal consumption and display in cemeteries from four micro-regions of the Tisza, and compare them with network 'betweenness centrality' values for locations along the river. I find support for the argument that favourably located river nodes had better access to metal in the earlier part of the Bronze Age.
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Site size hierarchy is an archaeological pattern commonly used to identify regional political hierarchy in state-level and stateless middle-range societies. Although a number of archaeologists have acknowledged that several processes can... more
Site size hierarchy is an archaeological pattern commonly used to identify regional political hierarchy in state-level and stateless middle-range societies. Although a number of archaeologists have acknowledged that several processes can produce site size hierarchy, many scholars in North America and Eurasia continue
to assume that this settlement pattern is solely generated by single process—hierarchical, politically centralized societies. This assumption, I believe, limits our ability to build an accurate database of societies with emergent inequality. In this paper, I review the processes potentially responsible for producing site
size hierarchy, and draw on ethnohistoric case studies from the Great Lakes region and Papua New Guinea to illustrate these processes. I then assess the possible mechanisms that created site size hierarchy for a prehistoric case in Middle Bronze Age Hungary (1750–1400 BC)—an area where the signature is almost universally assumed to index regional political hierarchy. However, I reveal that the Hungarian case study instead points to several other processes—including aggregation, dispersal and community fission—that lie behind this pattern. These examples suggest that site size hierarchies, when interpreted uncritically as social hierarchies, may overestimate the degree of political centralization in prehistoric societies.
to assume that this settlement pattern is solely generated by single process—hierarchical, politically centralized societies. This assumption, I believe, limits our ability to build an accurate database of societies with emergent inequality. In this paper, I review the processes potentially responsible for producing site
size hierarchy, and draw on ethnohistoric case studies from the Great Lakes region and Papua New Guinea to illustrate these processes. I then assess the possible mechanisms that created site size hierarchy for a prehistoric case in Middle Bronze Age Hungary (1750–1400 BC)—an area where the signature is almost universally assumed to index regional political hierarchy. However, I reveal that the Hungarian case study instead points to several other processes—including aggregation, dispersal and community fission—that lie behind this pattern. These examples suggest that site size hierarchies, when interpreted uncritically as social hierarchies, may overestimate the degree of political centralization in prehistoric societies.
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This work asks what kind of social differentiations emerged in European Bronze Age societies and what changes were associated with this transition. It is clear that during this period large fortified settlements became increasingly... more
This work asks what kind of social differentiations emerged in European Bronze Age societies and what changes were associated with this transition. It is clear that during this period large fortified settlements became increasingly common, great inequalities in access to metals and exotic goods appear, and warrior iconography permeates material culture. But the specific forms of political and economic complexity in these societies, such as tribute payments, difference in craft production and household consumption are often unknown. Focusing on Bronze Age settlement and household economies in the Körös Region of the Great Hungarian Plain, this book establishes a more complete picture of these societies.