I Would Walk 500 Miles: Survey of Copper Age Settlements in Eastern Hungary

Summary

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

The Copper Age (c. 4500-2800) of the Great Hungarian Plain was a period in which the widespread adoption of metallurgy and a series of large-scale population shifts substantially transformed the social landscape. However, research has primarily focused on the large cemeteries (e.g. Tiszapolgár-Basatanya), while the settlements and social structure of the period remain poorly understood. My research focusing on the Bodrogkeresztúr culture group (Middle Copper Age) takes a regional approach to understand the settlement system during a period regarded as, "the real floruit of the Copper Age with its golden symbols of power and the heavy copper axes" (Horváth and Virág 2003). In this presentation, I report on the findings of preliminary fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2018. Guided by the extensive survey work of the Magyarország Régészeti Topográfiája (Archaeological Topography of Hungary), I visited 70 previously identified Bodrogkeresztúr find spots throughout Békés County, Hungary. The primary goals of this survey were to identify clear Bodrogkeresztúr components at sites – as they are usually obscured by more prominent and dense assemblages from other periods (i.e. Middle Neolithic; Bronze Age) – and to set up the next, more intensive phases of fieldwork, including magnetometry and excavation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25850