A Dynamic Past: The Prehistoric Interactions on the Plain Project

Summary

The collaborative, American-Hungarian Prehistoric Interactions on the Plain Project explores the past through the reconstruction of interactions. Investigations on interactions as an active mode of social investment and social construction challenges normative concepts of "culture" by modeling socio-cultural boundaries as a dynamic and negotiated process, as opposed to a static categorically assigned social unit. Moreover, our research contextualizes regional developments as the result of multi-scalar social processes. Initially, PIPP focused on the regional scale and reconstructed Late Neolithic (5,000 – 4,500 BC) long- and short-distance interactions between Herpály and Tisza sites through the stylistic, technological, and compositional analyses of lithics and ceramics. The results suggested a strongly enforced socio-cultural boundary between Tisza and Herpály sites in the Körös region. However, by focusing on the regional scale, the local dynamic interactions have been completely obscured. The current phase of PIPP focuses on the local scale at the Herpály site of Csökmő-Káposztás Domb to investigate how variation in household access to long- and short-distance interaction networks resulted in the previously modeled strongly enforced socio-cultural boundaries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20825