Italian-Austrian-Hungarian workshop on the Bronze Age cremation burials
The workshop aimed to strengthen the cooperation between different institutions working on the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age urnfields in Hungary, Northern Balkans, Northern Italy and Austria. This partnership has the goal to enlarge the scientific network of the participant scholars, trying to develop a new international perspective on one of the most significant historical phenomena of the European proto-history.
Besides the members of the Momentum Mobility Research Group (Kristóf Fülöp, Szilvia Guba, Tamás Hajdu, Katalin Jankovits, Ágnes Király, Viktória Kiss, Kitti Köhler, Gabriella Kulcsár, Eszter Melis, Vajk Szeverényi and László Gucsi), colleagues from the Austrian Academy of Science (OREA), Durham University and Università di Roma “La Sapienza” (Michaela Lochner, Mario Gavranović, Michaela Fritzl, Ludwig Streinz, Elisa Perego and Claudio Cavazzuti) were present.
The first part of the workshop focused on the presentation of three extremely interesting works:
Kristóf Fülöp: Jobbágyi-Hosszú-dűlő. A cemetery of the Late Bronze Age Tumulus culture and its complex funerary ritual
Szilvia Guba: Funeral and burial rituals in the LBA cemetery of Salgótarján-Zagyvapálfalva
Ágnes Király: Invisible dead – LBA mortuary practices in the eastern part of the Carpathian Basin
Different contexts and approaches were shown and discussed, especially for what concerns the results of experimental archaeology on cremation process, burials in settlements, and chronological development of the rituals in the cemeteries.
The second part was addressed to discuss future improvements of this urnfield network. Mario Gavranovic (OREA) showed the potential of the open-source database on urnfield “CBAB” (Cremation Bronze Age Burials), as a tool to collect, standardize, compare and analyse data sets from different regions and to create a starting point for regional and supra-regional studies of cremation phenomena.
Claudio Cavazzuti illustrated the progress of a joint paper between all the partners, entitled “The first urnfields between the Po and the Danube”, which was initially presented as a talk at the IIPP conference in Forlì (October 2016) and will be soon published in the “Studi e Documenti di Archeologia” series.
Summary by Claudio Cavazzuti
Photo: Ludwig Streinz
