The project will address two major perspectives – with modern analytical technologies it will analyze the circulations of items, raw materials and humans and on an interpretational level, it will demonstrate changes and continuity in settlement patterns, social practices, technologies and material culture between the 15th and 5th century BCE on the territory between the Pannonian Plain and the Adriatic. It will include the revision of previous knowledge, formulation of theoretical backgrounds, analysis of existing archaeological finds, testing of the formulated theoretical backgrounds, and historical, as well as anthropological, interpretations of
the observed archaeological and anthropological finds.
It is designed to investigate current gaps in knowledge demonstrating the cultural and technological heterogeneity in the period that is currently erroneously described as the major period of changes in the social and technological development of prehistoric societies. In the project, we will focus on the continuity of practices and the different tempos of specific changes demonstrating that there was a much more complex process of transformation of societies between the Bronze and Early Iron Age.
Its originality lies in the use of a set of complementary and advanced research methods. They are involved to primarily target the provenance of artefacts, raw materials and people; to determine precisely the chronology of their circulations; to reconstruct the directions of their movements and finally to assess the interaction spheres between the late prehistoric communities. This project will use a single research framework to examine a combination of data derived from archaeological and anthropological analyses. The advantageous aspects of the project research strategy rest on the full access of original data from well-known and key sites from Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, Italy, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary.