History
In the absence of written sources, the burials, settlements and artefacts uncovered during excavations provide the available records of the prehistoric period. Since the early 19th and 20th centuries, the study of migrations has been an important aspect of archaeological research, including the Bronze Age. Indeed, the spread of bronze metallurgy has long been linked to population movements from the East and West. Initially, the formal characteristics of the artefacts suggested the existence of links between communities in remote areas of Europe. This was evidenced by the trade in bronze raw materials made from copper and tin alloys, as well as the exchange of finished bronze objects, but also of other finished products, and different raw materials, such as gold and amber. The social theories that gained ground in international research in the second half of the 20th century also brought about a paradigm shift in the interpretation of the transformations that led to the emergence of new technologies, settlement forms and burial customs. This shift challenged the assumptions that artefacts directly represent populations and archaeological evidence can be read as straightforward event history. However, geochemical and archaeogenetic studies initiated at the beginning of the 21st century have demonstrated that the movements of individuals and communities are indeed responsible for the significant changes of the period that have shaped human history. Our research on this topic was initially supported by an NRDI grant (2014-2018) (Changing populations or changing identities in the Bronze Age Carpathian Basin; K108597, principal investigator: Viktória Kiss). In 2015, the Lendület “Momentum” Mobility Research Group (principal investigator: Viktória Kiss) was established with the support of the Lendület “Momentum” Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and conducted research on the first thousand years of the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin (2600/2500–800 BC). The research, entitled From bones, bronzes and sites to society. Multidisciplinary analysis of human mobility and social changes in Bronze Age Hungary (2500–1500 BC) encompassed a range of disciplines, as well as an investigation into the social context of the period.
In order to address the question of whether migrations could be behind the social changes observed in our region during the first thousand years of the Bronze Age, the Lendület “Momentum” Mobility Research Group employed a range of bio-archaeological studies, including archaeological, anthropological, isotope geochemical and archaeogenetic approaches. The members of our research group participated in the process of initiating the genetic analysis of the Carpathian Basin communities following the Neolithic period on Bronze Age human remains. This was achieved through Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) studies, which were adapted at the Laboratory of Archaeogenetics, in the Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (now HUN-REN Institute of Archaeogenomics). Our research has demonstrated that there was considerable mobility among the people living in modern-day Hungary contemporaneously with the builders of the great pyramids and the Greek heroes buried in the Mycenaean shaft graves. Strontium isotope analyses have indicated that 40 percent of the analysed individuals were immigrants, and archaic DNA analyses have demonstrated the presence of the genetic heritage of communities living east and west of the Carpathian Basin in our region. Furthermore, archaeometallurgical analyses indicate extensive trade in raw materials among Central European Bronze Age communities, as previously presumed.