A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1962-1964 (Debrecen, 1965)

Tanulmányok - Kovács Tibor: Some Facts of the Emergence of a Late Bronze Group at Egyek

tural characteristics support our suggestion that the different traits of various groups of a culture complex that developed from the Middle Bronze ethnic units surviving east of the Tisza and in Northern Hungary in the first period of the Late Bronze Age, were determined only secondarily by the different Middle Bronze character of the factors. What was decisive was the change that took place in social structure

; new clans (formed through interbreeding), changed relations of blood, economy, and territory between the families mean entirely different factors in the burial rituals, the forms of ceramic and metal objects of groups that lived ik the first period of the Late Bronze. This process is difficult to reconstruct on the basis of sections of cemeteries opened up or the sporadic material of some sites (97). But there is no completely excavated settlement or cemetery that could help us in deciding when to classify a particular people as belonging to the Middle Bronze or (with a difference in quality) to the Late Bronze. Developmental transformation is a long process and it should be a task of high priority to determine the time and direction of the first attack of tumulus peoples that meant the beginning of this process. Tumulus groups advancing as far as the Sajó estuary (the most important site of early tumulus finds in Northern Hungary is the cemetery of Mezőcsát) wedged themselves into the territory of the Bodrogszerdahely group, gradually lost their pure tumulus character, and occupy western Nyir and the central part beyond the Tisza, the territory south and east from that of their original emergence (upper Tisza region) and survived as a group still showing tumulus characteristics, of the group of Egyek, that preserved Middle Bronze traditions indirectly. But even at the time of its largest extension, the Egyek group, was not able to incorporate the western part of the central Tisza region, Hajdúság and the southern part of the territory east of the Tisza, where the Rákóczifalva and Hajdubagos groups, i. e. the tumulus culture survived. Part of the population of the second tumulus cilture wave, advencing east at the turn of the 2nd and 3rd period of the Late Bronze, reached the territory of the Rákóczifalva and Egyek groups, and changed their fundamental cultural features considerably. The so-called late tumulus ethnic group, the third that intruded at the beginning of the third period of Late Bronze (Reinecke BD), occupied a sizeable part of Transdanubia (101) and the southern part of the Great Plain (102). No objects have been found among the material of the Egyek find to suggest that this group should have survived in the third period of the Late Bronze. It seems probable, as Kemenczei sugested (102), that the end of the independent development of the Egyek group was connected with the migration of this late tumulus group. 86