Kőszegi Frigyes: A Dunántúl Története A Későbronzkorban (BTM műhely 1. kötet Budapest, 1988)

Időrendi és történeti áttekintés (The history of Transdanubia during the late bronze age.) Bilingual-bilingvis.

supplementary animal husbandry along the riverside plains. The groups of people north of the Balaton and in the larger settlement centers continued mainly with shepherding. The highly variegated nature of these economic systems of the groups of people living in a closely linked symbiosis created an adequate economic balance. The continuous maintenance of this balance could not have been possible without an adequate central power. This economic variety is not accompanied everywhere by sharp differences in the material cultures. In spite of the pottery showing some local differences, the bronze industry is rather uniformed within a Central European relation during this period. It produced such bronze objects which had barely shown any regional differences. The styles reveal only slightly the differences of the products of the different workshops. According to the present state of our knowledge it seems likely that the industry working with bronze as raw material has reached its peak, it has developed the most practical forms and shapes allowed by the material, the best tool types to perform the different work phases, the technique and last but not least the relatively most modem attacking and defense arms. It seems that only very few of the earlier widely used jewelry types have survived. The simple spectacle type fibula, some pins (egg - and vase headed), round belt joints, wire ringlets, bracelets bent of flat bars with pine ornamentation which pushed the earlier types out can be above all mentioned along the bronzes of apparel. It is quite certain that the of ringlets, bracelets even represented an exchange item to facilitate trade, provided the function of money, in fact. The burial, artistic, and religious manifestations of the period are accompanied by very similar or almost identical characteristics of the material culture. The monuments of the religious aspects are witness to a very complex spiritual context. The cult life of the Urnfield Culture people is determined by an astral and bird symbolism closely related to fertility and at the same time by the lack of human representations, mainly of facial features is an identical phenomenon within the culture from Brno to Donja Dolina and from Munich to Este. The religious ideology is very complex, its variegated nature is indicated by the heterogeneous elements composing the culture. The bird cult might be the tradition of totemistic ideas of the shepherding tribes, whereas fertility magic referring to astral symbolism is the accompanying feature of an agricultural way of life. The interpretation of these is not an easy task and the limited methods of archaeology in themselves are not sufficient to solve the question.

534 The burial rite of the Urnfield period shows a highly variegated picture, especially in its earlier phase. The basic method is cremation, not considering some very early skeletal graves of very uncertain dating. Some experts mention the scattered ashes rite which is general in the southwest Slovakian Őaka horizon and develops only gradually into urn burial in the Hetény cemeteries as one of the proofs of the Urnfield continuity. These experts believe their thesis to be valid for Transdanubia as well. In any case it is certain that during Vál II the urn rite is used solely. The graves are generally flat, although in some cemeteries (Szentendre) they coach vessel urn containing grave of the Kánya cemetery of the Vál I phase might have also been covered by a tumulus according to the report of the excavating archaeologist. Thus the variegated burial rite of the younger phase of the Urnfield period has become more uniform, the other phenomena experienced during this period support this also. Concluding from the archaeologically also determined uniformity of the material and spiritual culture it can be said that the different groups of people of the Middle Danubian Urnfield Culture during the fourth phase were Ünked very closely to each other which might indicate the existence of a more or less unified political power. The base for an economic-political power is no longer the agricultural production but a mass producing bronze industry at its peak and the closely connected trade, to a degree, based on monetary accounting. Only a few could leam the master level of bronze producing which in itself indicates a basic change in the social structure during the Late Bronze Age. The clan-tribe society based on birthright hierarchy passed and the formations named as military democracies were the social frames of the people of the Bronze Age. The first revolutionary change of the social development of the primitive communities happened during the early phase of the UK and consequently reorganized economic-producing conditions determined for a long time the direction of the development of a highly stratum conscious society. The most difficult aspect of the examination of Bronze Age society by archaeological methods is the ethnic determination of the different cultures. The mutual material and spritual characteristics experienced in the progress of the Urnfield Culture do not indicate yet the existence of a unified ethnic picture, nevertheless we are witness to a process which eventually lead to such a formation in the mid Danube Basin. Primarily, according to linguistics and the correlation of data used by classical sources, it seems likely that the population of the area in question was not Illyrian at the end of the Bronze Age as presumed earlier. The Illyrians can be related more closely to the much more southern Glasinnac and circle and not with the Middle European Urnfield cultural circle. After excluding the identification with the Illyrians, the only remaining possibility for us is to look for the descendants of the Urnfield people in the Pannonian natives, the people who lived in the area prior to the Roman conquest. The representatives of this hypothesis call the bearers of this culture ancient Pannonian. We believe that the Urnfield Culture provided only a framework for the formation of the Pannonian ethnogenesis and in the final formation several ethnic groups must have played a role, even later also.

535 Even if some doubt surrounds the hypothesis concerning the ancient Pannonian ethnogenesis we can be sure that the first historically known groups of people in the Danube area made the first step for a unified nation within the