Every Year Is Getting Shorter, Never Seem to Find the Time: Evidence for a Fourth-Millennium Gap in Southeastern Europe

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Prior to the surge in radiocarbon dating over the last 15 years, the culture chronologies of Southeastern Europe were organized neatly in sequential centuries-long blocks for the fifth and fourth millennia. Recent research, however, has completely upended the traditional chronologies. With increased research and scholarship on the Copper Age / Chalcolithic / Eneolithic (ca. 4500–2700 BCE), the standard and generally accepted prehistoric narratives have had to be retooled entirely. This includes the relationships between cultural groups, the pacing of technological developments (e.g., metallurgy), and the patterns of demographic change. One of the most striking developments is the scarcity of archaeological data from the first half of the fourth millennium. This period is generally positioned between the disappearance of the tells and large regional centers and the appearance of the Late Copper Age and Early Bronze Age cultures (e.g., Baden, Yamnaya, Sitagroi IV, Ezero). There appears to be a demographic decline throughout much of Southeastern Europe that may be tied to climate change, social upheaval, and large-scale migration. In this paper, I examine the corpus of radiocarbon data along with regional settlement patterns to try and answer a straightforward question: Was there a fourth-millennium gap?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37534.0