Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Interactions, Innovation and Communication in the Late Neolithic and Copper Age
Content:
The period from the 5th to the mid-4th millennium BC in Central and South-Eastern Europe is a time of fundamental change. Larger-scale cultural entities fragment into small regional groupings, yet trends and innovations are shared widely and across such cultural boundaries. Due to this duality, our understanding of the period in question can be very diverse depending on whether we focus on the diversity of cultural entities or on the large networks outlined by for example copper or jade objects, stone knapping technologies, circular enclosures or formal cemeteries.
At this time, very different social formations were in intensive and sustained contact with one another, implying considerable personal and group mobility and intense social interactions. An ever increasing portfolio of methods and approaches means that we can now integrate a much wider range of information for understanding these than ever before, integrating site-based narratives and supra-regional connections. Our session aims to discuss the recent research directions in Late Neolithic and Copper Age studies along the following main axes:
1. Innovation, craftsmanship and specialized knowledge – the development of new technological systems, the networks behind them and societies’ reaction to them;
2. Burials, cemeteries, ritual activities – the social importance of ritual spaces and landscapes and the purposeful deposition of human remains, animals and selected material culture;
3. Settlements and economy – organization of everyday life, the spread of economic innovations which enable life in new landscapes;
4. Cooperation and collective action – on a site-based, microregional, regional or supra-regional level;
5. Connections and boundaries – what form did long-distance connections take, what were the routes and actors involved, and at what times/points were boundaries created?
All contributions dealing with any of the above mentioned topics from Central Europe, the Carpathian Basin and the Balkan peninsula and adjacent areas are welcome.
Keywords:
interactions, communication, innovation, mobility, Neolithic, Copper Age
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Zsuzsanna Siklósi (Hungary) 1
Co-organisers:
Daniela Hofmann (Norway) 2
Márton Szilágyi (Hungary) 1
Affiliations:
1. Eötvös Loránd University
2. University of Bergen
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