New Identities and Changing Funerary Practices in the Mid–Late 2nd Millennium BC in the Carpathian Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The transition from Middle to Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 – 1300 BC) in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement, and societal organization. While the narratives have somewhat shifted from the traditional model that primarily associated these changes with the arrival of the Tumulus culture population, and described them as rather abrupt events, several aspects of the underlying processes and the transition itself are still unclear. This paper addresses questions about the trajectory of changes in social practices and social identities at the dawn of a new era in a specific cultural context. As a case study, it focuses on the changes that happened in the Tisza-Maros confluence area from about 1700 to 1300 BC. More specifically, it is evaluating some of the changes that the Early-Middle Bronze Age Maros polity’s mortuary traditions went through and the changes that appeared shortly after the Maros era, using a Late Bronze Age cemetery, Tápé, as a point of reference. This study evaluates whether the observed patterns indicate a gradual or abrupt change at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, and the kind of social transformations that the observed changes may imply.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25527