Rogue utopians or bumpkins on the margin? Bronze Age mortuary customs in the marshlands of the Great Hungarian Plain

Summary

Many archaeologists argue that the emergence of a social elite in the Bronze Age of the Great Hungarian Plain is due to the parallel appearance of a specialized trade network they were able to control. This poster focuses on the burial customs at the Békés 103 site, a Bronze Age cemetery in Eastern Hungary. This area saw growth in population, the intensification of farming, and increases in metal production during the Bronze Age, but the settlements lack any evidence for social hierarchy. Do mortuary practices reveal a different ideology and trajectory in this area? By analyzing the mortuary customs at this site, we hope to determine whether the existence of exotic goods or other funerary displays indicate different patterns of participation in the trade networks. By comparing the site to neighboring cemeteries, we will also investigate whether these burial practices are similar to the larger region's patterns, or different and therefore indicate some kind of isolation from other settlements in the Carpathian Basin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Studying the Past with Fragments from the Fire: Student Research on an NSF-REU Field School

Keywords

Spatial Coverage