John M. O’Shea

Mortuary Custom in the Bronze Age of Southeastern Hungary

There can be little question that the publication of SAA Memoir number 25, Approaches to the Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practices (Brown 1971), represented a major turning point in the way archaeologists view funerary remains. Prior to this time, the analysis of cemeteries tended to be the domain of the “sensitive” (those who sought a transcendental “nearness” to past societies through their dead) and the taxonomist, who sought to build chronologies through the seriation of grave lots. The promise of that (now far off) symposium was not just the potential to “dig up a kinship system” (Binford 1972:8), but the possibility that the unique kinds of evidence present in funerary contexts could provide the basis for a truly anthropological archaeology.

The Seasonality of Prehistoric Caribou Hunting in Northeastern North America

ABSTRACT It is widely accepted that caribou were an important resource for Paleoindian economies and lifeways in northeastern North America. The existence of large aggregation sites, such as Bull Brook, further suggests that hunters employed mass capture communal hunting methods for caribou exploitation during their seasonal migrations. As zooarchaeological remains are scarce in this region of acidic soils, site interpretations must often rely on historic or ethnographic analogs to determine the seasonality of these hunts, and on this basis, often predict that communal hunting of caribou took place in the fall. In contrast, new data from underwater sites in Lake Huron provide empirical archaeological evidence for communal hunting and social aggregation in the spring. It is suggested that this divergent pattern of seasonal exploitation is due to distinct paleoenvironment and larger populations of caribou at the end of the Pleistocene – resulting in unique hunting and social strategies seen only in the past.

The Cemeteries of the Maros Group

Unlike the settlements of the Maros Group, the cemeteries have been extensively investigated and documented. The earliest among these, the sites of Obeba, investigated in 1903, and Oszentivan, with excavations beginning in 1926, figured prominently in Childe’s synthesis of the character of the Perjamos culture (Childe 1929). In the decades immediately following, a number of Maros cemeteries were excavated in Hungary under the direction of Mora Ferenc, including Deszk A, Deszk F, Pitvaros, and Szoreg. In the 1960s, the large Mokrin cemetery was excavated in north central Yugoslavia. This major excavation, under the direction of Milorad Giric, produced the largest and best documented of the Maros cemeteries known to date.

Mortuary Symbolism and Social Differentiation at Mokrin

To this point, the discussion has focused on the Maros funerary program across the seven Maros cemeteries and has considered the association of each aspect of mortuary treatment relative to the referent dimensions of age, sex, pervasiveness, and effort. The spatial character of the occurrence of each trait has also been considered, in terms of the location within graves (in the case of artifacts), location within individual cemeteries, and, more broadly, the occurrence of traits or attributes across the Maros cemeteries. What has not been described systematically, however, is the covariation of these various attributes or the potential social categories that the patterns of occurrence may suggest. Since these categories, and the patterns of social differentiation that underlie them, are the principal focus of the research, these aspects of the Maros funerary program are the subject of this chapter.

Coding and Classification of Grave Inclusions

This research is not intended as a study of archaeological taxonomy and relies heavily on the traditional classification of Bronze Age artifacts. Nevertheless, the preparation of the raw archaeological data for an anthropological study of the funerary program inevitably raises a series of issues relating to typology and classification.

The Maros Group and the Early Bronze Age in the Eastern Carpathian Basin

The preceding chapters have described the organization and operation of the Maros funerary program and have built up a picture of both the individual communities and the larger society of the Maros group. In these discussions, the social and environmental background has frequently been alluded to. In this chapter, the character of interactions between the Maros villages and their neighbors is brought to the foreground. The consideration of the cultural landscape of the south Hungarian Plain necessarily touches on elements of the physical landscape as well as on the contemporary groups in the region, both of which were introduced in Chapter 3.

The Archaeological Study of Funerary Practices

The funerary remains of past cultures have long exerted a strong attraction on students of prehistory. Funerary sites typically are not only a rich source of intact and often exotic artifacts, but they also represent one of the few archaeological contexts in which we have direct access to specific individuals from the past. The individual may be a very specific one, in the case of literate societies in which the individual’s name may adorn the tomb, or it may be a more anonymous individual of deep prehistory. While the typical archaeological site could easily be mistaken for a complex geological deposit, in funerary studies the archaeologist confronts individual people and often the intentionally configured arrangement of those individuals’ final resting places. The intentional organization of a tomb or burial enables us to imagine the feelings and emotions of people in the past, in much the same way that we are enabled to do so by another variety of intentionally configured archaeological context, that of cave painting and rock art. The challenge for the anthropological archaeologist is how to use the patterned traces represented in the archaeaological record of funerary activities to gain a fuller understanding of the past culture, without falling prey to the fanciful speculation about the past that has characterized both earlier and postmodern archaeologies. In this chapter, I will briefly summarize the theoretical background and basis for the current social approach to the study of funerary remains and then describe the procedures and methods employed in this study.

Maros Funerary Differentiation

The configuration of remains found archaeologically within a mortuary context is but the final step in a process of unknown duration that began at, or immediately prior to, the time of an individual’s death. This process involved the preparation of the body for funerary disposal, but also may have included ritual and feasting, construction of a funerary monument or facility, and a range of other acts designed to reaffirm social relations and positions within the community and beyond. This range of potential activities is subsumed here under the heading of treatment variables, or formal treatments, as distinct from grave accompaniments or offerings that are placed with the dead.

An Archaeological Overview of the Maros Group

The Maros Group is a deceptively easy archaeological culture to know, with a record of excavations going back more than 100 years and a rich archaeological literature. Under its various appellations, it has been the subject of major archaeological syntheses in all three of the countries where it is known: Hungary (Banner 1931; Bona 1965, 1975), Yugoslavia S.R. (Garasanin 1983; Giric 1984, 1987), and Romania (Sandor-Chicideanu and Chicideanu 1989; Soroceanu 1984). These syntheses compile a wealth of data concerning what is known archaeologically of the Maros group and present varying models to account for its distinctive character and origins. The intent of this chapter is not to duplicate these syntheses, but rather to present sufficient summary data on the Maros villages to allow the detailed analysis of the cemetery remains to be placed into a context, both as elements in the larger culture of the Maros peoples and as one of several ethnic cultures occupying the eastern Carpathian Basin during the Early Bronze Age.

Symbolism and Differentiation across the Maros Villages

Chapter 8 considered Mokrin, the largest and best documented of the Maros cemeteries, and subjected the patterns of funerary differentiation observed there to a series of examinations designed to reveal the underlying character of the social categories and statuses that structured the funerary program. The goal of this chapter is to assess the extent to which these patterns of differentiation and social symbolism are shared among the Maros cemeteries. While it is reasonable to expect a degree of similarity in the ideology, practices, and organization among associated communities, there is no reason to believe that the treatments and practices among a series of autonomous villages should be identical. Indeed, it is to be expected that at least some aspects of the practices followed in each village should be distinct and that the overall patterns of treatment and organization will exhibit a balancing of distinctive local practice with more broadly shared custom. Such balancing in the funerary program fits with the more general and pervasive tension in village confederacies between local autonomy and tribal cohesiveness, and contrasts with the more centralized control of hierarchically organized societies. Thus, the intent of this chapter, rather than to attempt to fit all the Maros cemeteries into Mokrin’s mold, is to look at the sometimes fragmentary evidence from the other Maros cemeteries and attempt to determine which aspects of the funerary symbolism are broadly shared across Maros society and which elements might more properly be treated as purely local phenomena. The composite picture of the Maros villages that emerges not only can provide insight into the actual organization of Maros society as a tribal social system (or village confederacy), but also may provide hints at the processes that led to the crystallization of Maros society.