Provider: Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic

TY  - JOUR
JO  - Anthropologie (Brno)
TI  - Prehistoric human-environmental interactions on the Great Hungarian Plain
AU  - Gyucha A
AU  - Duffy PR
AU  - Parkinson WA
Y1  - 2013
VL  - 51
IS  - 2
PB  - Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic
SN  - 0323-1119
SP  - 157
EP  - 168
KW  - Körös Basin
KW  - Great Hungarian Plain
KW  - Prehistory
KW  - Environment
KW  - Settlement organization
N2  - 
N2  - Changes in settlement patterns in the later prehistory of Southeastern Europe historically have been attributed to shifts in climate, hydrology, and subsistence. This paper evaluates the importance of different humanenvironmental relationships on the Great Hungarian Plain from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age. To model these relationships in a way amenable to archaeological investigation, we frame the discussion according to different spatial and social scales. Based on systematically collected data at various geographic scales in and around the Körös Basin, we suggest that changes in settlement distribution and organization were determined by a dynamic interaction between environmental factors, social concerns, and cultural preferences. Our results imply that at the regional scale certain hydrological features strongly influenced the settlement distribution, but did not prompt changes in their locations over time. At the local scale, environmental differences in micro-zones seem largely responsible for subsistence variability between individual settlements. Yet in between these two resolutions, at the micro-regional scale, settlement location in the Körös Basin was strongly and consistently influenced by social concerns. Long-term stability of environmental patterns at one scale and variation at another contributed to a wide range of dynamic human-environmental relationships shaping the transition from small egalitarian Neolithic villages to larger, more economically complex polities on the Great Hungarian Plain during the Bronze Age.
ER  -