BURIAL · Forming Idendities in a Transitional Area

Forming Idendities in a Transitional Area

The project Burial was dealing with the interpretations of the archeological finds from the Late Bronze Age (12th – 8th century BC) in a specific region of Southeast Europe that included territories of continental Croatia and northern Bosnia. For the most parts of Southeast Europe, the awareness of the group identification is to the present day strongly connected with the dominant collective identity of ethnic group as a persistent and impenetrable community with cultural and biological continuity within certain territory. This, for obvious reasons, hazardous concept was consequently adopted also for the non-written societies in the past by using their material culture, foremost burials and specific grave belongings (jewelry, weapons), as a prime source of the distinction. In contrast to this unilateral and static model of ancient societies, the archaeological remains from region udner study provide a different and innovative approach to the questions of identity. Large diversity of the burial customs and funeral objects are indicating that group identification needs rather to be understood as overlapping, multifaceted and dynamic construct. The main objectives of the project were to provide tangible evidences regarding the prehistoric societies in the region under study in terms of absolute chronology, metal and pottery production, burial customs, settlement structure, subsistence strategies and relationships with neighbouring areas. This goal was accomplished with a number of applied scientific analyses that provided a much better comprehension of the different technological and social aspects of ancient communities. The results achieved within the project vastly helped to create new paradigm in the way how to explain and understand people of the past. Especially in the region of Southeast Europe with repeated and harmful instrumentalization and misusage of the history it is essentially important to establish evidence based narrative that will regard ancient communities not as static entities but rather as real, once existing people with manifold social structures and organisation levels, economic challenges (resource management) and beliefs (burial customs).

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз