Deriving from the natural cultural variability (observed in space and time) of the Late Bronze Age, this is Urnfield culture, will the proposed project focus on the research of the rapidity of changes and relative importance of cultural continuity and discontinuity (settlement and burials on sites). The core of the project will be formed around the research of cemeteries and settlements from the Late Bronze Age on the territory of Eastern Slovenia and northern Croatia.

The project will address the topics why ways documented such variability in the material culture, organization of landscape use and structure of burials – simultaneously on a broader area and in a diachronic perspective in time on an individual site. The major scientific background will be based on modern anthropological methodologies of interpretation. Contrary to traditional cultural-historic methodologies of interpretations, which interpreted the variability as a large unity of separated local units (cultures/groups), the cultural variability will be explained as a symptom of constantly changing and interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age.

In this perspective will be the life and agency in the past observed as formed by a system or systems of relations – of social and ecological. At the same time will, based on archaeological analyses, the lives of individuals, dialectic individuals or societies (societies of the living and communities of the dead) are observed as metamorphic, causal and interactive. It is based on the fact that the learning of culture, this is the acquisition of ideas, images, stories, habits and structures of relations were used flexibly to accomplish the goals. This means that social manifestations, reflections of which are observed by the archaeologists, a repository of flexible, adaptable and plastic tools which enable skilful and suitable use in unpredictable circumstances.

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Project leader: Assoc. Prof. Martina Blečić Kavur & Daria Ložnjak Dizdar, PhD