Julia Giblin: Isotope Analysis on the Great Hungarian Plain. An Exploration of Mobility and Subsistence Strategies from the Neolithic to the Copper Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 146 (1) ◽  
pp. 279-281
Keyword(s):  
Isotope Analysis ◽  
Copper Age ◽  
Subsistence Strategies ◽  
Great Hungarian Plain ◽  
Hungarian Plain

Immigration and transhumance in the Early Bronze Age Carpathian Basin: the occupants of akurgan

Antiquity ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (334) ◽  
pp. 1097-1111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Gerling ◽  
Eszter Bánffy ◽  
János Dani ◽  
Kitti Köhler ◽  
Gabriella Kulcsár ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Stable Isotope ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Isotope Analysis ◽  
Young Person ◽  
Immigrant Group ◽  
Early Bronze Age ◽  
Copper Age ◽  
Burial Mound ◽  
Human Teeth ◽  
Hungarian Plain

You never know until you look. The authors deconstruct a kurgan burial mound in the Great Hungarian Plain designated to the Yamnaya culture, to find it was actually shared by a number of different peoples. The Yamnaya were an influential immigrant group of the Late Copper Age/Early Bronze Age transition. The burials, already characterised by their grave goods, were radiocarbon dated and further examined using stable isotope analysis on the human teeth. The revealing sequence began with a young person of likely local origin buried around or even before the late fourth millennium BC—a few centuries before the arrival of the Yamnaya. It ended around 500 years later with a group of different immigrants, apparently from the eastern mountains. These are explained as contacts built up between the mountains and the plain through the practice of transhumance.

Reconsideration of the Copper Age chronology of the eastern Carpathian Basin: a Bayesian approach

Antiquity ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (336) ◽  
pp. 555-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pál Raczky ◽  
Zsuzsanna Siklósi
Keyword(s):  
Bayesian Approach ◽  
Carpathian Basin ◽  
Copper Age ◽  
Great Hungarian Plain ◽  
Hungarian Plain ◽  
The Way

Understanding the prehistoric narrative of a region requires good dating, and in recent years good dating has moved increasingly from models drawn from types of artefacts to a framework provided by radiocarbon sequences. This in turn is bringing a change in the way events are described: from broad cultural histories to a network of local sequences. In this case study, the authors apply this rethinking to the Copper Age in a key region of Europe, the Great Hungarian Plain in the Carpathian Basin. They replace the traditional Early and Middle Copper Age, defined by pottery types, with an 800-year sequence in which six cemetery and settlement sites experience different trajectories of use, and the pottery types make intermittent and often contemporary appearances. In this new chronology based on radiocarbon, the variations in pottery use must have some other explanation.

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