Innovation in Bronze Age archeology – without the past, there is no future 2.
In our series of articles on the renewal of archaeological research, further technologies are worth mentioning that we also use in multidisciplinary research. In addition to traditional aerial photography and the use of drones, a great outline of non-destructive field survey techniques, such as the LIDAR method or geomagnetic prospections, is covered by an interview with our research team member, Zoltán Czajlik, who is a lecturer at Institute of Archaeological Sciences, University of Eötvös Loránd.
An exemplary application of the above mentioned methods is illustrated by the modern processing of the Middle Bronze Age tell settlement of Füzesabony-Öregdomb. One of the most important objectives of our research group is the publication of the results of the excavations campaigns of the 1930s and 1970s (Szathmári–Guba–Kulcsár 2019). The digitization and georeferencing of old excavation documentation made it possible to relocate the findspots of seven casting molds, clay blowpipe and more than twenty bronze artefacts (namely workspace of the metalworkers of the settlement) found between 1931–1937 by Ferenc Tompa (Szathmári 2017, Fig. 2-9) .
1. Füzesabony-Öregdomb. Bronze artefacts (x) and molds (o) found at the excavations of Ferenc Tompa, between 1931–1937; 2. casting molds of pins and needles (Szathmári 2017, Fig. 2; Fig. 8)
Non-destructive imaging methods and elemental analyses (prompt-gamma activation and XRF) analyses carried out in the Budapest Research Reactor have also revealed that metalworkers of the settlement made high-quality (6-11% tin content), sometimes carefully decorated tin bronze artefacts (Maróti–Kasztovszky 2017, Szentmiklósi et al. 2018).
Irodalom
Maróti, B., Harsányi, I., Kasztovszky, Zs. Non-destructive Analysis of Bronze objekcts from Füzesabony-Öregdomb (Appendix). Communicationes Archaeologicae Hungariae 2017, 81–84.
Szathmári, I., Guba, Sz., Kulcsár, G.: New results on the settlement structure of the Füzesabony-Öregdomb Bronze Age tell. Gesta 17/2 (2018) 85–103.
Szathmári, I.: On the metallurgy of the Füzesabony Culture Bronze finds and casting moulds from the Füzesabony Bronze Age tell settlement. Communicationes Archaeologicae Hungariae 2017, 51–84.
Szentmiklósi, L., Maróti, B., Kis, Z., Kasztovszky, Zs: Integration of neutron-based elemental analysis and imaging methods and applications to cultural heritage research. Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 20 (2018) 476–482.
