Garam Éva szerk.: Between East and West - History of the peoples living in hungarian lands (Guide to the Archaeological Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum; Budapest, 2005)

HALL 3-4 - The Bronze Age (2800-800 B.C.) (Ildikó Szathmári)

33. Reconstruction of Bronze Age houses. Mid-2nd millennium B.C. technique was fairly common in the earlier Bronze Age and was used mainly for the manufacture of jewellery. Although bronze casting became more widespread from the mid-2nd millennium B.C., many objects continued to be made from sheet metal: as a matter of fact, the lovely bronze vessels decorated with punched and embossed patterns from the end of the millennium were created using this technique. 5. JÁSZDÓZSA-KÁPOLNAHALOM: A BRONZE AGE SETTLEMENT The lifeways and the settlement patterns of the various Bronze Age population groups with different cultural backgrounds settling in the Carpathian Basin were shaped by several circumstances, among which the natural environment and its resources, as well as the climate played an important role. The dry, warm climate in the early centuries of the 2nd millennium B.C. favoured agrarian lifeways based predominantly on crop cultivation with animal husbandry playing a secondary role; when the climate turned cooler and moister around the mid-millennium, there was a shift towards stockbreeding. The densely forested, hilly regions of Transdanubia provided an ideal environment for stockbreeding and pastoralism involving seasonal migration, while the communities in the Great Hungarian Plain had an economy based on agriculture and crop rotation. The settlements of the period ranged from smaller villages occupied for briefer or longer periods of time to large villages (and tell settlements), depending on whether a particular community was engaged in crop cultivation or stockbreeding. Of the many Bronze Age settlements excavated in Hungary, the one presented as part of the exhibition is one of the most thoroughly