Methods and Opportunities in the Research of Bronze Age Communities : The Outcomes of the Bioarchaeological Research Programme of the Momentum Mobility Research Group (2015-2020)

Abstract

Although there is no textual evidence known from the Bronze Age, written sources describing migrations of later (i.e. Early Medieval) periods effecting the Carpathian Basin were interpreted as instances of cultural and population change which could be comparable with processes that took place during the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin. In the past two decades, Eurasian archaeological research received a new impetus to investigate the traces of migrations during prehistory, in collaboration with other disciplines such as isotope geochemistry or archaeogenetics. The current project which commenced in 2015, funded by the ‛Momentum Programme’ of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was set out to investigate the societal changes that had taken place within the boundaries of modern-day Hungary – contemporaneous with the builders of the great pyramids of Egypt and the Greek heroes of the Mycenaean shaft graves – by analysing the settlements, cemeteries and the artefacts recovered from these archaeological sites. The project, for the first time in Hungarian Bronze Age research, employs a range of multidisciplinary methodologies in order to examine the social changes of the period. The present paper is to provide an overview of a particular aspect of this research: the outcomes of the bioarchaeological enquiries with special regards to the general health, mobility and the lifestyle of studied populations.