Project
From bones, bronzes and sites to society: Multidisciplinary analysis of human mobility and social changes in Bronze Age Hungary (2500–1500 BC)
The Lendület/Momentum grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences gives a possibility to us to examine the thousand years of the first half of the Bronze Age in several micro-regions of the Carpathian Basin that had played an outstanding role in prehistoric Europe for millennia due to its geographical location and to climatic factors. Based on the exchange of the eponymous material, bronze, distant regions linked up with each other, and for the first time in the history of humanity, social inequalities became institutionalized. Our multidisciplinary research will be carried out in three thematic groups concentrating on the burials, settlements and finds, especially bronze weapons and jewellery with new, high-precision AMS radiocarbon dates from selected samples, stable isotope and DNA analysis, the compositional and the lead isotope analysis of metal objects, and the petrographic and neutron activation analysis of stone and clay objects. Our research group’s goal will be to gain new insights into the health and subsistence strategy, as well as the mobility patterns of Bronze Age populations in Hungary.