Publication details
“Nagyrév Jugs” and Their Archaeological Context
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The main goals of our study were to compute a contextual seriation of grave goods from the Late Eneolithic in the Middle Danube (mostly in Moravia and the Carpathian Basin) on various hierarchical levels (from individual burial sites, through aggregates of several sites, to the entire region), compare the sequence of objects in seriation sets with absolute dates, and infer the possible role of Nagyrév jugs in the relative chronology of that period. In literature we recorded incidences of 95 variables (types of grave goods) on 832 cases (mainly graves) from 11 archaeological cultures. In sum, the matrix contained 2163 incidences. These data were subjected to contextual seriation on various hierarchical levels. Subsequently, we compared available calibrated 14C dates (CalPal 2007 HULU) for 86 cases with their relative orders. The relative sequences from various hierarchical levels of the same culture/ cultural sphere (e.g. BBC) correlate with each other to varying degrees. The relative sequences of identical variables from separate seriations for the individual cultures have very little relationship to each other. Therefore, the similarities between cultures are much less pronounced than those within each of them. Within individual cultures or cultural spheres, correlations between absolute dates and the sequences from individual seriations for a hierarchical level are often strong but often not statistically significant due to the small number of cases. This suggests that relative chronologies created within individual cultures are valid to a certain degree and we should seek an optimum compromise in the composition of the seriation aggregates, where a sufficient number of absolute dates exists but the “non-chronological” sources of variability are restricted. Some types of Nagyrév jugs occur in more than one culture in a particular time period, other types are confined to a specific region or time period. For these reasons we suggest that the concept of “Nagyrév jugs” needs to be re-evaluated. |
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