Architectural techniques in the Bronze Age tell settlement of Bakonszeg-Kádárdomb

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices

Bronze Age stone tools in Nuragic Sardinia: The case of the ground-stone tools from Nuraghe Cuccurada-Mogoro (Sardinia, Italy)

During the past century, numerous archaeological surveys and handbooks have been published that include summaries of the Levantine Bronze Age (fourth–second millennia BCE: ca. 3800–1100 BCE). The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant by Raphael Greenberg is the most recent and in-depth of these treatments. The ways in which such archaeological overviews are approached have evolved over time. The first of these summaries, notably by W. F. Albright (1940 and later editions), presents the results of excavations in pre-WWII Palestine. This was followed by K. Kenyon's 1960 (and later editions) publication, which integrates the contributions of post-WWII archaeology in Israel and Jordan, especially her excavations at Jericho and Jerusalem. These two books, as their titles suggest, linked the archaeological evidence to the biblical and historical record, and they had a broad appeal for both the academic community and the general public. Three decades later and following a dramatic increase in archaeological activity in the region, A. Mazar (1990) and A. Ben-Tor (1992) published updated archaeological summaries of the southern Levant. Both volumes, which served as textbooks for a generation of undergraduate students and valuable reference works, prioritize the archaeological data, examined together with the primary textual sources.Other surveys dedicated to the archaeology of this region emphasize anthropological approaches to reconstruct the social archaeology of the southern Levant (see, e.g., Levy 1995 and Yasur-Landau et al. 2019). One publication, J. M. Golden's (2009) Ancient Canaan and Israel: An Introduction, organizes the archaeological data thematically. Margreet Steiner and A. E. Killebrew's 2014 multi-author handbook is the most comprehensive archaeological treatment of this region and includes both the northern and southern Levant and Cyprus. It serves as a general resource and reference work for the broader Levant and its interaction with neighboring regions.Greenberg's 2019 monograph differs from these earlier publications in his prioritization of processes over agency. Additionally, it centers solely on the Bronze Age and focuses primarily on the archaeological data interpreted through the lens of socio-anthropological theory while minimizing the use of textual sources. As a coherent, up-to-date narrative written by a single author, it also avoids the pitfalls of earlier edited handbooks and surveys comprised of chapters of uneven quality and differing approaches.The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant appears in the Cambridge World Archaeology series, whose targeted audience comprises students, professional archaeologists, and academics in related disciplines. The aim of this series is to publish up-to-date surveys of the archaeology of a particular region that integrate findings, contemporary theoretical approaches, and intellectual trends with broader cross-cultural interpretations. Greenberg's volume is solidly situated in the socio-anthropological approach to Levantine archaeology and lives up to the goals of this series. It is written as a narrative that traces social and cultural change in the Levantine Bronze Age and how communities there interacted with the broader developments in the Near East and Mediterranean, ranging from emulation to resistance. Major transregional themes addressed include the emergence of states, international trade and elite networks, and external imperial ambitions. The author also considers the impact of landscapes and places of commemoration as reflected in the archaeological record. The book consists of seven chapters, including an introduction (Ch. 1) and conclusions that summarize the legacy of the Bronze Age Levant (Ch. 7).Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the Levant and its environment. In this volume, the Levant refers to a section of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, the rift valley and the highlands bordering the valley on either side, today forming the modern entities of coastal Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, and Jordan. Greenberg outlines his rules of engagement and defines the Bronze Age as a period when key human institutions develop, subdividing these into cities, states, markets, military power, legal codes, and institutionalized religion. The fourth–second millennia BCE also witnessed the human impact on the physical landscape, including the appearance of the layered mound (tell), and the integration of the Levant into a Mediterranean world resulting in the establishment of contact networks and interaction (3). This chapter defines the geographical boundaries of the Levant and characterizes it as “a diverse patchwork of environmental affordances and potentialities” and an “ecological mosaic” with a range of microclimates that serve as a buffer to climatic change (6–7). Contrary to much recent scholarship on the importance of climatic change for settlement patterns, social organization, and economic development, Greenberg downplays its impact on the Bronze Age Levant.Chapter 1 also outlines the principal themes that form the framework for this book. They include the ebb and flow of centralization of power, which the author attributes to the tendency of people in the Levant to both emulate the political ideologies of neighboring regions and resist their practical application (13). In his approach, Greenberg begins with the material culture evidence, privileging excavation results over surveys. As contemporary texts are usually fragmentary and often not directly relevant to the material culture interpretation, he uses these texts sparingly, prioritizing the archaeological over the literary record. In each chapter, chronological parameters and the environmental setting are discussed. Main archaeological categories including settlement patterns, architectural features / built landscape, key artifact types, crafts/industries, and burials / mortuary practices are described in detail.Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to the Early Bronze (EB) I, II, and III, a period of time spanning over a millennium (ca. 3800/3600–2400 BCE) and the focus of much of Greenberg's decades-long excavation and research. Greenberg traces several trends, including the transition from the village-based world of the EB IA, the establishment of more complex mega-villages, and the beginnings of inequality, that appear in the EB IB during the final centuries of the fourth millennium. The latter period also coincides with the first significant interaction between Egypt and the Levant, which Greenberg terms the “first Egyptian intrusion” (13, 57).The following millennium represents the crystallization of fortified population centers and the appearance of “urban ideologies” (13) in the EB II and III. Chapter 3 explores the nature of EB II–III Levantine society. A key question addressed is: Can the EB II fortified cities be considered “urban”? The physical features of these settlements meet some of the criteria usually defined as “urban” (e.g., fortifications and evidence of town planning), as exemplified in contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, other commonly cited features of urbanization, such as large, clustered populations, writing, and administration, are lacking. These characteristics suggest that the EB II and III Levant represents “partial” urbanization (what some have termed “complex villages”) or, as Greenberg proposes, a uniquely local, “Levantine” urbanism.Chapter 4 investigates the Intermediate Bronze Age (IBA), a 500-year period of time that in the southern Levant is marked by changes in settlement patterns including the abandonment of mound settlements, a shift in mortuary practices, and regional ceramic assemblages based on village workshops. The retreat from urbanism during the IBA is often attributed to the well-documented climatic change that occurred between ca. 2200 and 1900 BCE. However, Greenberg challenges this interpretation, noting (140) it is difficult to evaluate the impact of climate change on microregions within the Levant and the nature of human response to it. As he points out, counterintuitively, the number of settlements in drier, more marginal regions increases in the southern Levant during the final centuries of the third millennium, coinciding with a period of a warming climate.In Greenberg's account, the picture that emerges during the IBA is one of regionally diverse cultural assemblages that are difficult to place chronologically due to the dearth of uninterrupted stratified sequences in the archaeological record and insufficient radiocarbon dates. Although the IBA is culturally distinct from the EB III, some material-culture features demonstrate elements of continuity with the EB III and overlap with the MB I. These findings suggest that, chronologically, the IBA may have partially co-existed with the EB III and MB I, a phenomenon that Greenberg (182) terms in Chapter 5 as “archaeologically coeval.”Chapter 5 examines the first half of the second millennium, conventionally termed the Middle Bronze Age (MBA). The MBA is also often understood as a cultural “regeneration” that represents the apex of Bronze Age urban culture in the Levant. Following his goal of disentangling the textual and archaeological evidence, Greenberg constructs what he terms a new “conceptual scaffolding” (184), which is grounded in the archaeological evidence and radiocarbon dates. This approach leads him to decouple the end of the MB II from the documented expulsion of the Hyksos and link it with the eruption of the Thera volcano that occurred ca. 1600 BCE and doubtlessly had a profound short-term effect on the environment in the eastern Mediterranean.The remainder of the chapter presents the archaeological evidence, mainly from the southern Levant, arranged chronologically and regionally. Greenberg (264–65) concludes, somewhat controversially, that the end of the MB II is marked by societal collapse, coinciding with the period of the Thera eruption but unrelated to disruptions that may have resulted from New Kingdom Eighteenth Dynasty accounts of a “Hyksos expulsion” from Egypt. In his view, this “collapse” is best exemplified by two phenomena: first, what he considers to be a marked discontinuity between MBA and Late Bronze Age (LBA) material culture (a statement that not all archaeologists would agree with); second, a contraction in population that led to a decrease of settlements, both in size and in number, during the LB I.The LBA is featured in Chapter 6. Greenberg outlines the two main themes that serve as the framework for his narrative interpretation of this period: the expansion of Egyptian imperialism in western Asia and the impact of interconnected regional economic networks. Several dozen pages are devoted to the concept that the Levant was “under Egypt's heel.” This view is puzzling since archaeological evidence for Egyptian interaction during the LB I and LB IIA is scant, as Greenberg himself (299–300, 309) points out. Rather, our knowledge of Egyptian engagement in Canaan during this period depends largely on textual evidence: Eighteenth Dynasty annals, which describe periodic Egyptian campaigns to Canaan, and the mid-fourteenth-century BCE Amarna letters. Except for Jaffa, there is little archaeological evidence for an Egyptian occupation during the LB I and IIA. This changes in the thirteenth century BCE, when Egyptian intervention is archaeologically visible but confined to a number of sites that served as Egyptian strongholds, as summarized by Greenberg (291–99, 302–10). Outside of these strongholds, Egyptian artifacts in Canaan are not abundant and, when they do appear, are usually imported prestige objects. Based on the archaeological evidence, there is little support for the view that New Kingdom Egypt “annexed” the southern Levant as Greenberg maintains (287). Rather, the archaeological evidence suggests Egypt appears to have exercised varying degrees of informal to administrative imperialism during the course of the LBA. Though Greenberg emphasizes the role of Egyptian imperialism in the region, when considered in its larger eastern Mediterranean political context, one may question how much Egyptian imperialistic ambitions affected daily life or controlled socioeconomic, political, and cultural developments in the LBA Levant.The second part of this chapter discusses the LB II prestige economy, exemplified by discoveries from Hazor, Megiddo, and other small towns and nodes of ritual power. In this section, Greenberg justifiably highlights the role of interconnected networks in shaping the LBA Levant. The archaeological evidence is unequivocal. The large number of imported Cypriot and Mycenaean objects at Levantine sites and elsewhere reach their apex during the LB IIA and testify to the Levant's integration in LBA global networks. This coincides with a period during which direct Egyptian imperialistic control seems to have been minimal. Not discussed is the central role of copper from Cyprus and long-distance trade in tin in this imperial and elite-controlled exchange system. Unlike many scholars of this period, Greenberg (341–42) does not consider the end of the LBA and transition to the Iron I period, or what he terms the Terminal Bronze Age (ca. 1200–1100 BCE), to represent a period of societal collapse or significant disruption.In his final, seventh chapter, Greenberg considers the legacy of the Bronze Age Levant, asking “what changed, what stayed the same, and what was passed on to the following eras” (354). The first signs of early state formation can be discerned in the EBA. EB II and III polities, which can be described as “just short” of being towns and states, are, in Greenberg's view, the foundations for MBA, LBA, and later Levantine political entities. Another development is the Levant's unique ability to adopt innovations from neighboring cultures and its willingness to absorb technologies, peoples, and ideas. One of Greenberg's more interesting observations is the linear rise in the “capacity for violence” (355) over time, best evidenced by the increase in weapons and human-induced destructions during the course of the Bronze Age. As Greenberg concludes, ultimately it is the geographic characteristics of this region that shaped the Levant and its cultures, creating a uniquely Levantine idiom. Its diverse landscapes, microregions and climates, and lack of unifying geographic features tended to suppress the ability to accumulate great amounts of surplus or wealth (which, in turn, would have required the development of large bureaucracies). These tendencies also encouraged exploitation of the region by imperial powers. The result is the resilience, creativity, and flexibility to adapt to new situations as narrated in Greenberg's masterly, nuanced, and engaging account of the Bronze Age Levant.

Many studies on subsistence strategies in prehistoric age have been presented, which explained neolithic age fishing and bronze age agricultures with accompanying pottery styles and tool industries. But they need more detailed analysis of artefacts and ecofacts, and theoretical approaches to subsistence skills. Based on the structure of Bronze Age house, the transition from multi-families to nuclear family housing have been asserted to be the results of intensive agriculture. This is also needed to figure out and connect the other life styles and practices with those housing in that period. Bronze age villages in Southern Korea has been identified to include public squares, communal storages, and ritual facilities according to many intensive excavations. Also several styles of dolmens, which were constructed by abundant labors, have been identified in many sites. Those settlments and tombs has been asserted to prove the formation of the early chiefdoms. A large amount of bronze tools and accessories made by a few professional craftsmen, which buried in the elite graves of the early iron age have been thought to explained the existence of late chiefdoms. But archaeological data and explanation methodology in Korea are still not enough to describe the nature of societies in relation with them. The bronze and iron age tombs of north eastern China and Korea have been studied for figuring out the historical Old Choseon and Jinguk Polities. This also require a variety of analysis and interpretation methods of archaeological data, as well as the in-depth justaposition of the early historical records and archaeological data.

VIRVELINĖS KERAMIKOS KULTŪRA LIETUVOJE 2800–2400 cal BC

Since 2006, the interdisciplinary project “Leventina – Prehistoric Settlement Landscape”, funded by the Swiss National Foundation, is being conducted under the coordination of the Department of Pre- and Protohistory of the University of Zurich with researchers from further disciplines. The project investigates prehistoric settlement and economy in various altitudinal zones of the Alpine Ticino valley. One of the aims is to reconstruct the agricultural, pastoral and forestal land use in the Bronze and Iron Ages, and to evaluate the influencing factors on the spatial distribution of subsistence economy areas. A wide range of spatial and archaeological data as well as literature and field data describing properties in particular of the ancient economic plants was available for the purpose. Based on these data, a factor analysis and a subsequent prediction were conducted in order to evaluate the variables with a likely impact on agricultural land use at prehistoric times, and to detect potential agricultural land. Additionally, using predictive modeling, we aimed at extracting factors with impact on the spatial distribution of Bronze age settlement sites and generating a potential map of areas used for settlement. Furthermore, a cost path analysis was conducted to investigate different traffic routes across the main ridge of the Alps in terms of travel time.

Three seasons of archaeological fieldwork were carried out in 1998–2000 by Cornwall Archaeological Un within the Imerys Stannon China Clay Works, Bodmin Moor. The first two seasons involved the excavation of an Early Bronze Age cairn group and Middle Bronze Age and Middle Iron Age settlement activity. The third season on the Northern Downs involved the evaluation a number of cairns, field systems, and palaeoenvironmental sites.The cairn group consisted of three earlier Bronze Age ring-cairns and two ‘tailed’ cairns. One ring-cairn continued to be used as a ceremonial monument in the Middle Bronze Age and was reused during the Iron Age as a dwelling. An artefact assemblage including Bronze and Iron Age pottery and stonework was recovered. Two prehistoric beads one of faience, the other of amber, were also found.Ten Bronze Age radiocarbon determinations spanning 2490–1120 cal BC and two Iron Age determinations (370–40 cal BC) were obtained from three of the cairns. Two pollen columns on the Northern Downs were also dated. Significantly, a series of eight determinations was obtained from a single column, which provided environmental information from the Mesolithic through to the early medieval period. The radiocarbon dating showed that impact on the vegetation of the Down commenced during the Neolithic, with larger-scale clearance during the Bronze Age. Widespread open grassland was established by the Middle Bronze Age.It is suggested here that use of space within the cairn group was structured and that the cairns formed a monument complex which was part of a wider landscape cosmology, involving groupings of particular monument types and the referencing of rocky outcrops and tors.The investigations on Stannon Down were important as an opportunity to study an Early Bronze Age ceremonial landscape and reconsider how later Middle Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples on Bodmin Moor might have engaged with and interpreted the materiality of earlier prehistoric monuments.

History Versus the Homeric Iliad:A View from the Ionian Islands Vassilis P. Petrakis I. Introducing the Problem: Homer, Odysseus, and the Catalogue of Ships [Homer] is every Mycenaean scholar's passion . . . but if one thing is more certain than another in dealing with Greece, it is that every generation, let alone century or millennium, saw changes more profound than the simple classicist likes to acknowledge. It seems more honest, even refreshing, not to invoke Homer as decoration or instruction.1 Four decades since Emily Vermeule made this cautious remark in the preface to her Greece in the Bronze Age (1964), we may acknowledge the fact that Homer is still an object of passion for most endeavors into the Mycenaean world. The debate over the historicity of Homer (whether the poems attributed to him reflect certain historical conditions and when these can be dated) has not ceased to absorb scholarly thought. It is a fact that an attempt to interpret and confirm Homer as a historical work was a major driving force in Aegean prehistoric research during the pre-World War II years. In tracing patterns of connection between the world of the poems and that documented by archaeological data, some scholars have attempted to examine differences and similarities between habitation patterns revealed by archaeological surveys or regional studies and relevant information stated or implied in various sections of the epic, most notably the so-called "Catalogue of Ships" (Κατάλογος, Il. 2.483-760).2 Following this line of thought, the present [End Page 371] study examines the nature of the connection between the Ionian Islands, homeland and kingdom of Odysseus, as pictured in Homer, and the Ionian Islands during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, as revealed in the archaeological record. A main point I will focus on is the contradictory information included in the Catalogue and in the rest of the epic. That the Catalogue differs significantly from the rest of the Iliad (and the Odyssey) and that the information it includes is often incompatible with it are recognized facts.3 The point is how to interpret this situation. It is overly simplistic to consider this as a "right or wrong" query, as Walter Leaf did.4 It is true that one can find throughout Homer a number of minor inconsistencies that have been interpreted as evidence for the "multiple authorship" of the poems,5 emphasized by the Analytical School of Homeric studies. Yet, the Catalogue is by far the largest and densest concentration of such inconsistencies on major issues, such as the status of leaders and the extent of their kingdoms. Certain morphological features of the Catalogue, most notably the fact that it is introduced by a προοίμιον of its own (Il. 2.484-493), have been long observed and add to the general impression that this passage must have originally been an independent work, added to the Iliad only after the latter had been basically formulated. Every attempt to examine the "historicity" of these poems must, at least, take into consideration this major inconsistency. Throughout this article, I will base arguments only on significant contradictions, such as omitting the status (or even the existence) of kings and kingdoms, and I will refrain from focusing on trivial details, which has been a source of just criticism of certain Analytic arguments. 6 The most significant effect of this Catalogue/Iliad [End Page 372] incompatibility on the methodology of "Homeric archaeology" should be, in my opinion, to warn us against making chronological statements which assume Homer is a single work; the case of the Catalogue, in other words, must make us very suspicious of the conceptual (and, therefore, chronological) unity of the Homeric text. It seems a safer method to consider certain passages and issues separately so that chronologies refer only to specific passages, not to the epic altogether. For instance, the famous passage of Myrione 's "boar-tusk helmet" in the Iliad (10.260-271), which is undoubtedly a Bronze Age artifact, is no guarantee that Homer as a whole, or even the Iliad, has a Bronze Age background; it can only provide clues for the specific passage in which the object is described. I thus argue that one...

Several lines of evidence permit us to characterize ancient Levantine settlements whose modern place names include variations of the Arabic term majdal. It has been suggested for some time that these sites preserve the locations of Bronze and Iron Age watchtowers, though this has not been unequivocally demonstrated. However, textual references to Bronze Age magdaluma, Iron Age migdālim, and Classical magdoloi, when compared against the locations of majādīl, indeed support the identification of these sites as Bronze and Iron Age military observation towers. This fact is further supported by archaeological data available from nearly half of these settlements. The distribution of Arabic majādīl reveals a logical selection of strategic positions within the Levantine landscape for the establishment of towers that served as part of an integrated defensive network related to the major political centers of the Levant, principally during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages.

The main recommendations of the panel report can be summarised under five key headings:  Building the Scottish Bronze Age: Narratives should be developed to account for the regional and chronological trends and diversity within Scotland at this time. A chronology Bronze Age Scotland: ScARF Panel Report iv based upon Scottish as well as external evidence, combining absolute dating (and the statistical modelling thereof) with re-examined typologies based on a variety of sources – material cultural, funerary, settlement, and environmental evidence – is required to construct a robust and up to date framework for advancing research.  Bronze Age people: How society was structured and demographic questions need to be imaginatively addressed including the degree of mobility (both short and long-distance communication), hierarchy, and the nature of the ‘family’ and the ‘individual’. A range of data and methodologies need to be employed in answering these questions, including harnessing experimental archaeology systematically to inform archaeologists of the practicalities of daily life, work and craft practices.  Environmental evidence and climate impact: The opportunity to study the effects of climatic and environmental change on past society is an important feature of this period, as both palaeoenvironmental and archaeological data can be of suitable chronological and spatial resolution to be compared. Palaeoenvironmental work should be more effectively integrated within Bronze Age research, and inter-disciplinary approaches promoted at all stages of research and project design. This should be a two-way process, with environmental science contributing to interpretation of prehistoric societies, and in turn, the value of archaeological data to broader palaeoenvironmental debates emphasised. Through effective collaboration questions such as the nature of settlement and land-use and how people coped with environmental and climate change can be addressed.  Artefacts in Context: The Scottish Chalcolithic and Bronze Age provide good evidence for resource exploitation and the use, manufacture and development of technology, with particularly rich evidence for manufacture. Research into these topics requires the application of innovative approaches in combination. This could include biographical approaches to artefacts or places, ethnographic perspectives, and scientific analysis of artefact composition. In order to achieve this there is a need for data collation, robust and sustainable databases and a review of the categories of data.  Wider Worlds: Research into the Scottish Bronze Age has a considerable amount to offer other European pasts, with a rich archaeological data set that includes intact settlement deposits, burials and metalwork of every stage of development that has been the subject of a long history of study. Research should operate over different scales of analysis, tracing connections and developments from the local and regional, to the international context. In this way, Scottish Bronze Age studies can contribute to broader questions relating both to the Bronze Age and to human society in general.

We present a spatial interaction entropy maximizing and structural dynamics model of settlements from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) and Iron Ages (IA) in the Khabur Triangle (KT) region within Syria. The model addresses factors that make locations attractive for trade and settlement, affecting settlement growth and change. We explore why some sites become relatively major settlements, while others diminish in the periods discussed. We assess how political and geographic constraints affect regional settlement transformations, while also accounting for uncertainty in the archaeological data. Model outputs indicate how the MBA settlement pattern contrasts from the IA for the same region when different factors affecting settlement size importance, facility of movement, and exogenous site interactions are studied. The results suggest the importance of political and historical factors in these periods and also demonstrate the value of a quantitative model in explaining emergent settlement size distributions across landscapes affected by different socio-environmental causal elements.

On aborde ici la question de la domestication des plantes et des animaux au moment du passage du Mesolithique au Neolithique ancien au Moyen Orient L'A pose la question de l'expansion ou pas de l'habitat naturel des cereales et par consequence, s'il y a expansion, la question se pose alors des traces economiques et sociales reperables archeologiquement. Est-ce le manque de nourriture, la famine, qui a favorise le developpement de la culture intensive ?

Preface Towards new models (Harry Fokkens and Stijn Arnoldussen) Bronze Age settlement sites in the Low Countires: An overview (Stijn Arnoldussen and Harry Fokkens) Bronze Age houses and barrows in the Low Countries (Quentin Bourgeois and David Fontijn) Bronze Age settlements in Drenthe (Piet Kooi) Bronze Age occupation on coversand ridges of the Looerenk near Zutphen (Jeroen Bouwmeester) The Middle Bronze Age farmstead from Rhede (North Rhine - Westphalia, Germany) (Stephan Deiters) Rhenen-Remmerden revisited: some comments regarding site structure and the visibility of Bronze Age house plans (Leon G L van Hoof and Lucas Meurkens) Living at Eigenblok. A Bronze Age settlement in the Dutch river area (Peter Jongste) The Bronze Age cultural landscape at Zijderveld (Sebastiaan Knippenberg) Bronze Age settlements in Tiel-Medel (Janneke B Hielkema and Tom Hamburg) The Bronze Age cultural landscape of De Bogen (Bernard Meijlink) Marking while taking land into use: some indications for long-term traditions within the Oer-IJ estuarine region (Linda L Therkon) The Early Bronze Age farmstead of Noordwijk (Henk M van der Velde) Bronze Age neighbours: occupation of three parallel coversand ridges near Breda (Ria Berkvens) The living and the dead: A Bronze Age barrow and farmyard from Weelde (Rica Annaert) List of contributors

Some scholars explain the absence of settlements in the Bohemian and Moravian Late Eneolithic (Corded Ware archaeological culture) as a consequence of pastoral subsistence with a high degree of mobility. However, recent archaeological studies argued that the archaeological record of the Late Eneolithic in Central Europe exhibits evidence for sedentary subsistence with mixed agriculture, similar to the subsequent Early Bronze Age. Because the archaeological data do not allow us to address unambiguously the mobility pattern in these periods, we used cross-sectional analysis of the femoral midshaft to test mobility directly on the human skeletal record. The results of femoral midshaft geometry do not support a high degree of mobility in the Late Eneolithic in Central Europe. This conclusion is supported mainly by no significant differences in male groups between the Late Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age in mechanical robusticity and shape of the femoral midshaft, although Corded Ware males still exhibit the highest absolute mean values of the diaphyseal shape (I(A-P)/I(M-L)) ratio and antero-posterior second moment of area. However, Late Eneolithic females have significantly higher torsional and overall bending rigidity because of a significantly higher medio-lateral second moment of area. This finding cannot be directly linked with a higher degree of long-distance mobility for these females. A significant difference was also found in overall decrease of size parameters of the femoral midshaft cross section for one of the Early Bronze Age samples, the Wieselburger females. Since the decrease of size and mechanical robusticity for Wieselburger females does not correspond with the parameters of Early Bronze Age females, we can expect a mosaic pattern of changes during the Late Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age period, instead of a simple unidirectional (diachronic) change of the mechanical environment.

During recent archaeological excavations in the alpine valley of Montafon, western Austria, a Bronze and early Iron Age settlement cluster located at about 1,000 m a.s.l. was excavated. The human impact on the woodland resulting from these prehistoric settlement activities has been evaluated by the analysis of charred plant macro remains from cultural layers from a hilltop settlement site and two other close-by settlements, all of them encompassing the Early and Middle Bronze Age (19th to 15th century cal. b.c.) and early Iron Age (6th/5th century cal. b.c.). Charred seeds and fruits have provided information on the supply of foodstuff while charcoal (anthracological) analyses of firewood have revealed the use of wood and consequently the changes in local woods. The latter analyses suggest that the spruce-fir woodland (Piceeto-Abietetum) was gradually cleared from the Early Bronze Age. During the Middle Bronze Age large amounts of Pinus sylvestris (pine), Betula (birch), Corylus avellana (hazel) and Sorbus (rowan) with some Picea abies (spruce) characterized the woods, and early succession stages indicate clearings. These anthracological studies are corroborated by pollen studies disclosing clearings in the woods since the Early Bronze Age, which gradually expanded during the Middle Bronze Age. Furthermore, several charcoals from a Middle Bronze Age hearth seem to be of the same age, and the pattern of their annual growth-rings suggests the pollarding of broadleaved trees.