EAA2021: Abstract

Character of production is a key indicator of the overall development level of any studied past society. Importance of our understanding of economic activities is even more accentuated in periods with unbalanced archaeological source base like in case of the La Tène period in Central Europe (5th – 1st century BC) when we literally miss graves from the 2nd century onwards. Common hypotheses are typically built on interpretation of specialisation of crafts, their spatial distribution, intensity, and the network of resources, producers and consumers. From this viewpoint, we are establishing the hierarchy of settlements, their involvement in long-distance trade etc. Quantitative aspect has so far been used in terms of representation of various production activities, in the bioarchaeological research or as an alternative approach to artefactual studies and material analyses.
We would like to introduce a new perspective which emerged during our work focused on geochemical analyses of artifacts made predominantly of copper alloys. With a large amount of data covering a timespan of more than four centuries, we can distinguish a long-term trend of narrowing the geochemical pool of possible resources. Simultaneously we detect a wider spectrum of produced alloys. These results correlate well with hypotheses on the development of specialized crafts and tendency towards centralized supply in the younger part of the given period. Based mainly on the evidence of influx of exogenous material, we discuss the market-oriented production versus its control by the elites, which has been postulated by earlier works but still lacks more exact verification. The dialogue between archaeometric data and hypotheses on the La Tène organisation of the production will be illustrated on a broader spectrum of evidence, including glass, gold, salt and iron.

Iron Age, Central Europe, Archeometry, Organisation of production

 Abstract (PDF)

Daniel Bursak¹

Alžběta Danielisová¹