FUNERAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AT THE END OF THE BRONZE AGE. BURIAL NETWORKS OF THE LATE URNFIELD
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 06/03/2021

At the end of the Bronze Age, the material record of the late Urnfield period exhibits many of the characteristic traits that only fully emerge within the following Iron Age. Apart from technological change as evidenced by the shift from bronze to iron, this also includes hints at a profound socio-political and -cultural change that is most strongly exemplified by the re-emergence of rich burials in this period. Showcasing a variety of influences form East, West, North, and South, they contain many objects typical of the later Iron Age whose developments can be traced back to the Bronze Age; apart from that, they show patterns of matching funeral expression that appear over nearly all of Middle Europe from Eastern France to the Carpathian Basin as well as distinctively local influences. In this way, they enable us to analyse the way multiple intersecting social identities were materialized in specific selections of grave goods in local as well as overarching contexts. One the one hand, these representations of identity allow us to develop a deeper understanding of the different groups that made up Late Urnfield “elites”, their types and their hierarchies; on the other hand, they also let us draw inferences to the nature of the societies they were embedded in. Employing methods and theoretical concepts of network analysis, the study focuses especially on the way in which the composition of funeral inventories implies varying degrees of social cohesion, and how these findings relate to the development of the structure of Hallstatt society as evidenced in the “princely” graves of the late Hallstatt period, but also on the strategies materialized in grave goods that did not see implementation beyond the end of the Urnfield cultures.


Author(s): Deicke, Aline (Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz)