Content:
The socio-cultural image of Europe in the Iron Age is traditionally assumed to be a result of interaction between the indigenous substrates and external cultural inputs caused by ‘migrations of foreign cultural components’. In central Europe, the Danube served as the primary communication corridor through which the long-distance impulses connected the Mediterranean to the areas north of the Alps and West to the East. During the early and middle La Tène period (5th – 4th cent. BC), a rapid spread of material culture, influenced by the Middle Rhine, the Swiss plateau, and Bohemian lowland regions, reached the territories that became to be further known as the ‘La Tène Europe’. During the 3rd – 2nd cent. BC we see this direction somewhat reversed with major influences coming from the Mediterranean connecting the areas north of the Alps. Such ‘impulses’ have caused profound changes in La Tène society, affecting the organisation of settlements, local dietary patterns, specialised technologies, and finally also burial customs. Our project ‘ELEMENTS’ is aimed at investigating whether these transformations were induced externally, by the new incoming groups disrupting the traditional continuity of the local communities, or whether these notable changes were more coherent with the endogenous development of the local people, processing the inputs mediated by increasing long-distance contacts. We aim to test the theory of whether spreading and adopting new ways of life connected with economic innovations resulted also in the adoption of common cultural or ideological models that facilitated communication and created social links between individual groups that did not need permanent relocation of people to be put in practice. We employ an interdisciplinary approach based on a combination of the structural analyses of local cemeteries (demography, kinship, mobility, diets) with technological and provenance analyses of costumes and personal objects.
Keywords:
central Europe, La Tene period, cemeteries, isotopic analysis, provenance analysis, sociocultural changes