Non- and Minimally-Invasive Methods to Investigate Megalithic Landscapes in the Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site (Ireland) and Rousay, Orkney Islands in North-Western Europe

The paper summarizes results of an on-going project in the Boyne Valley in Ireland and in Orkney in the north of Scotland. The research of the Romano-Germanic Commission and our partners aimed to investigate the interaction of social, economic, cultural and environmental phenomena in different types of landscapes in a diachronic perspective. Our exploration of the landscapes was based on geophysical prospection, remote sensing and sedimentological analysis, and we adopted a systematic approach that integrated the various approaches in a GIS. In the Boyne Valley large areas were investigated on the periphery of the monuments of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth. The field work on the Orkney Islands is focussing on tracing settlement patterns connected to chambered tombs, on the Island of Rousay. The use of a similar research design in both regions produces compound databases, something that is crucial for comparing trajectories of change in Neolithic land use, and in understanding those changes

Stolniceni, Petreni, Brînzeni, Republik Moldau. Luftbildaufnahmen mit Drohnen (UAV) von kupferzeitlichen Siedlungen in Moldawien im Kontext magnetischer Prospektionen und Ausgrabungen. Die Arbeiten der Jahre 2009 bis 2017

There are numerous Eneolithic settlements of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in North and Central Moldova. Its distribution ranges from the East of Romania via Moldova up to the Dnieper River. In Romania and Moldova settlements measure 10 to 30 ha, in Ukraine many are bigger than 100 ha. Indeed, these represent the largest settlements of Stone Age and Eneolothic Europe! During the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet Archaeologists started research on these by means of aerial photographs and magnetic prospections which has been continued by the Romano-Germanic Commission with their Moldovan and Ukrainian partners for a research project that started in 2009. Ahead of excavations, large-scale prospections have been conducted, first in Moldova and from 2011 onwards also in Ukraine. In 2017, the first aerial photographs of three of the most important sites in Moldova have been produced using drones. These pictures are being used foremost in order to create topographical maps and height models. Via the GIS based analysis of data it is possible to draw a more comprehensive picture of the phenomenon

MegaForm – Ein Formalisierungssystem für die Analyse monumentaler Baustrukturen des Neolithikums im nördlichen Mitteleuropa

MegaForm is a recording system for Neolithic megaliths in northern Central Europe and southern Scandinavia. It was created in the context of the Priority Program 1400 “Early Monumentality and Social Differentiation”. It aims at formalising the recording of architectural traits of megaliths, non-megalithic monuments and simple graves, focussing on single characteristics, not on complex types. Specific national traditions have resulted in different terminologies. MegaForm unites these into one overall recording system, a new standard for the recording and description of megaliths. In this article, the recording system is proposed and commented, and it is possible to download a suitable database system

Öcsöd-Kováshalom, Ungarn. Forschungen zu Tell-Siedlungen und ihrer Umgebung in Ostungarn. Die Arbeiten der Jahre 2018 bis 2021

The research of tell settlements coming from the first half of the 5th millennium BC go back to almost a century. Yet, earlier research was concentrated on the sites and barely on their perimeter. The new project of the RGK, in cooperation with the Eötvös Loránd (ELTE) University in Budapest and with the Hungarian National Museum, sets mainly these outskirts in focus. New data of non- or minimalinvasive surveay as well as small-sclae, targeted excavations will be compared with the results of earlier excavations, opening new avenues for so that a better understanding of social structure and networks within the late Neolithic Carpathian basin

Test excavation of the “pseudo-ditch” system of the Late Neolithic settlement complex at Öcsöd-Kováshalom on the Great Hungarian Plain

In 2018, the RGK’s research team led by Knut Rassmann undertook the magnetometer survey of the Late Neolithic site of Öcsöd-Kováshalom over a roughly 65 ha large area. An enclosure system of three concentric semi-circular ditches was detected around the tell-like mound that formed the core of the settlement. In order to resolve these issues, we organised a small field school excavation with the support of the RGK and with the participation of the archaeology students of the ELTE Institute of Archaeological Sciences between July 13 and 25, 2020. We opened an 8×2 m trial trench across the north-eastern part of the innermost ditch appearing on the magnetogram. We uncovered a ditch segment with a V-shaped cross-section, a width of 315 cm and a depth of 295 cm. We recovered a total of 17,430 finds with a weight of 194.4 kg (pottery sherds, daub, animal bones, bone tools, chipped and polished stone implements, quern stones, mussels, and ochre). In our preliminary report, we made a reconstruction of infilling process based on the quantitative distribution of the finds (frequency and weight data) and the different characteristics of the fill layers

Deciphering archeological contexts from the magnetic map: Determination of daub distribution and mass of Chalcolithic house remains

The unique size and development of prehistoric megasites of the north Pontic Cucuteni-Tripolye Chalcolithic groups (4100–3600 BCE) challenge modern archeology and paleoecology. The extremely large number of houses (approximately 3000, mostly burned) necessitates the development of multidisciplinary technologies to gain a holistic understanding of such sites. In this contribution, we introduce a novel geophysical methodology and a detailed analysis of magnetic data – including evolved modeling techniques – to provide critical information about the setup of findings, enabling a thorough understanding of the settlement dynamics, apart from invasive excavation techniques. The case study is based on data from magnetic field maps and distribution maps of the daub and pottery find categories. This information is used to infer magnetic models for each find category to numerically calculate their magnetic fields for comparison with the archeological data. The comparison quantifies the sensitivity of the magnetic measurements with respect to the distribution of the different find categories. Next, via inversion computation, the characteristic depth functions of soil magnetization are used to generate maps of magnetization from the measured magnetic field maps. To validate the inverted soil magnetization maps, the magnetic excavation models are used, providing an interpretational frame for the application to magnetic anomalies outside excavated areas. This joint magnetic and archeological methodology allows estimating the find density and testing hypotheses about the burning processes of the houses. In this paper, we show internal patterns of burned houses, comparable to archeological house models, and their calculated masses as examples of the methodology. An application of the new approach to complete megasites has the potential to enable a better understanding of the settlement structure and its evolution, improve the quality of population estimations, and thus calculate the human impact on the forest steppe environment and address questions of resilience and carrying capacity

Трипілля – стратегія та результати поточного українсько-європейського проекту

The aim of the article is to identify the main tasks, strategies and some results of an ongoing UkrainianEuropean Project that is dealing with the Tripolye culture phenomenon. In order to investigate emergence and decline of giant-settlements with thousands of houses and very specific spatial layouts, the challenge need to be mastered to perform representative archaeological and scientific sampling with reasonable efforts. This is only possible through the combination of non-destructive survey techniques, targeted archaeological excavations and the application of modern scientific methods. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the social, ecological, demographic and economic dimensions of such settlements and underlying transformations of human societies also in their regional variability, the consideration of different spatial investigation levels is required. In the first phases of the project, high-resolution magnetic surveys were applied to different large Tripolye settlements and exemplary investigations were carried out at the local scale of the Maidanetske settlement. At the current stage of the project, the studies focus more on the meso-and macro-regional level

Die Toten der spätneolithischen Tellsiedlung von Okolište / Bosnien-Herzegowina: Massaker, Seuche oder Bestattungsbrauch?

The following paper deals with the human skeletal remains of at least 14 individuals that were found during excavations in 2004 and 2006 in one of the surrounding ditches of the late Neolithic tell settlement of Okolište / Bosnia-Herzegovina. Based on the archaeological findings and the anthropological analysis it is proposed that these human remains are rather not the outcome of specific burial practices but have to been seen in connection with a short-termed, though not punctuated event. However, it is not very likely that the dead are casualties of warlike operations; instead, we think it more probable that they fell victim to some kind of epidemic or famine. However, because of the poor preservation of bone in other parts of the ditch, it cannot be ruled out completely that the skeletal remains were the result of some kind of yet unknown burial practice