Decoupling Decoration and Dates: A New Absolute Chronology for the Transylvanian Middle Bronze Age

Summary

Metal from southwest Transylvania fueled the development of inequality and regional polities across Eastern Europe during the Bronze Age. However, little is known about the communities in the resource-rich region. Through regional survey, test excavation, and digitization of existing collections, the Bronze Age Transylvania Survey (BATS) Project seeks to understand the long-term dynamics of social organization throughout the Middle Bronze Age in southwest Transylvania (2000-1400 BC). A robust chronology is critical to monitoring contemporaneous variability across the region and change through time in social, political, and economic organization. However, current models for the structure and dynamics of Bronze Age communities in Transylvania are based on a previously untested relative dating system based on ceramic seriation. In this poster, I present a new radiocarbon-based chronology for the Middle Bronze Age. These new dates challenge our understanding of the social significance of ceramic decoration as well as the long-term dynamics of social complexity in Bronze Age societies.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• New Perspectives on the Romanian Bronze Age

Keywords

Spatial Coverage