Late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age

This article, already published in 1998 in German, focusses on the Prescythian Füzesabony-Mezőcsát group in the eastern Carpathian Basin in modern Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia. It analyses its chronology, burial practices, the strikingly heterogeneous pottery record and its connections to adjacent groups east of the Carpathian mountain range, in particular with the cemetery of Stoicani in the southern Romanian Judeţ of Galaţi and burials of north pontic communities of the Chernogorivka (Černogorovka) and Novočerkassk groups of the late Bronze and early Iron Age. Due to various characteristics, such as the absence of settlements, small cemeteries or often only single inhumation burials and pottery types showing close contacts to sedentary as well as mobile groups between the eastern Alps and the north pontic steppes, the bearers of the Mezőcsát group are identified as mobile pastoralists. The Mezőcsát rite of inhumation burials marks a break with previous local traditions and shows close contacts with communities east of the Carpathian mountain range and their comparable but still different burial practices. Against this background, the problem of a postulated Cimmerian migration to the west into the Carpathian basin is discussed. Among other aspects it is argued that the overexploitation of the environment in the late Bronze Age as well as possible climatic changes created open landscapes with ideal conditions in the Great Hungarian Plain supporting new subsistence strategies by mobile pastoralists.

Wachsmann, S., 2020. Hahotrim, Israel: A Late Second-Millennium BC Group of Metal Scrap Artefacts. In Shared Heritage: Proceedings from the Sixth International Congress for Underwater Archaeology (IKUWA 6), 28 November–2 December 2016, Western Australian Museum, Fremantle J. Rodriguez and A. Traviglia, eds. Oxford, Archaeopress: 218-227.

The book with an ambitious title of ‘Absolute dating of the Bronze and Iron Ages in Slovenia’ is a collection of contributions by various authors and presents a vast body of radiocarbon-dated archaeological finds. It aims to provide better starting points for the research, understanding and interpretation of the cultural phenomena and entities in this area, their beginnings, duration and transformation, in the space of almost three millennia, i.e. from the mid-3rd to the end of the 1st millennium BC. The currently valid chronological framework for this time span in Slovenia is based on the relative chronology that Stane Gabrovec developed in accordance with the conventional chronological system and published in the fourth and fifth volumes of Praistorija jugoslavenskih zemalja (in trans: Prehistory of Yugoslav lands) (1983, 1987). This was supplemented in the jubilee 50th volume of Arheološki vestnik (1999). The basis for his chronology is, more precisely, the central European chronological system for the Bronze and Iron Ages as it was established in the beginning of the 20th century by Paul Reinecke. This system was later subjected to numerous additions and subdivisions by other prominent scholars. In the last two or three decades, however, the advances in methodology and the newly developed investigation procedures, particularly radiocarbon and dendrochronological analyses of archaeological remains, brought about significant changes in the absolute dating of individual chronological phases of both the Bronze and the Iron Ages. It was this development in science that prompted us to conceive a project aimed at keeping in step with the advancements of the archaeological science in Europe and elsewhere, primarily in the field of absolute dating, but also at compensating for the paucity of such analyses of the Bronze and Iron Age material in Slovenia.

Within the framework of this project we strove to obtain the greatest possible set of samples of organic matter (wood charcoal, wood, bones, seeds, grain and so forth) to be subjected to radiocarbon analysis. These were taken from reliable archaeological contexts, such as graves or single settlement units (postholes, storage and refuse pits and others), that could be using the comparative archaeological method reliably determined both chronologically and culturally. From the beginning of the project in 2008 and until 2013, we were able to obtain 249  radiocarbon-dated samples from 55 archaeological sites in Slovenia. With these, we hope to have created a solid database for establishing a relevant chronological network based on absolute radiocarbon dates, primarily for the Bronze, but also for the Iron Age. Besides that, we hope it will provide a new starting point for the better understanding of various diachronic and synchronic phenomena, and their historic significance during the last three millennia BC in Slovenia, Europe and wider, across the Eurasian continent.

Pages 339–346 in DAIS—The Aegean Feast: Proceedings of the 12th International Aegean Conference, University of Melbourne, Centre for Classics and Archaeology, 25–29 March 2008, ed. L. A. Hitchcock, R. Laffineur, and J. Crowley. Aegaeum 29. Liège: Université de Liège, Histoire de l’art et archéologie de la Grèce antique; Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory.

Pages 54–71 in Israel in Transition: From Late Bronze II to Iron IIA (c. 1250–850 B.C.E.). Vol. 1:  The Archaeology, ed. L. L. Grabbe. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 491; European Seminar in Historical Methodology 7; T & T Clark Library of Biblical Studies. New York: T & T Clark.

Pages 555–572 in “I Will Speak the Riddles of Ancient Times”: Archaeological and Historical Studies in Honor of Amihai Mazar on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, Vol. 2, ed. A. M. Maeir and P. de Miroschedji. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.