OT student digs for answers As an occupational therapy major, sophomore Heleinna Cruz learns by observing how people move. Over the summer, Cruz had a chance to learn from bodies that hadn’t moved in nearly 5,000 years. Cruz was a member of an international team of specialists and students from around the world who excavated and analyzed material from burial sites in the Bronze Age cemetery of Békés 103 in Hungary. The work is part of the BAKOTA project, an international, multidisciplinary archaeological project. This fall, Cruz presented her research findings at a professional conference and will continue developing her work to present at a conference in Canada in…
Blog posted by Robert Barlow and Hajnal Szasz Touch through time and space – ceramics coding and spatial patterning as survey methods What if you had the opportunity to tell someone’s story? Through the BAKOTA project, we have the chance to do that for a Bronze Age society in eastern Hungary, by investigating material culture and spatial relationships of the Békés 103 cemetery (Fig. 1). The aim of the BAKOTA project is to answer questions regarding the emergence of technological advances, such as agriculture and metallurgy within a Bronze Age society. Traditionally, scholars viewed the Bronze Age as a period powerful, centralized chiefdoms controlled their surroundings and maintained political and…
Blog posted by Hamima Halim Structure by Motion-Sickness The future is now, and its name is computer vision. Computer vision is a branch of computer science involving image processing that addresses the question: if a computer had eyes, what would it do? Its applications include navigation, medical imaging (think CT scans), and manufacturing, among other things. It’s making a splash in archaeology as well, where applications like pattern and object recognition are allowing professionals to analyze and digitally preserve potentially brittle, far-away or endangered material from their own personal machines. At the BAKOTA project we’re using a technique called photogrammetry to generate 3D models of our graves and vessels…
BAKOTA 2016: Summer season application for European students The BAKOTA Research team is looking for one, possibly two European students to participate in this coming summer season. This season is primarily a lab season for the project, no excavation will be conducted. Please keep this in mind when consider application. General requirements: Advanced level of English. Members of the research team are from several different countries and the general communication and documentation language on the project is English. BA, MA or PhD student at a European university. Priority is given to Hungarian, Romanian and Polish students. Project dates: July 17th to August 14th, 2016 Location: Békéscsaba, Hungary Participants are required…
We’re happy to announce that we’ve chosen our applicants for the 2015 season BAKOTA season! We’re now in the process of finishing our analyses from last summer, planning our 2015 excavation strategy, and organizing student projects.
On June 20th, seven archaeological projects met during the first Hungarian Archaeological Research Circle (HARC) at the Hungarian American Fulbright Commission in Budapest.
Békés Jégvermi-kert is a Middle Bronze Age cemetery situated on the outskirts of the modern town of Békés, at the confluence of the old Fekete and Fehér Körös Rivers. The nearest well known settlements are the tell sites Békés-Várdomb, Túrkeve-Terehalom and Berettyóújfalu-Herpály, and the nearest well-known cemeteries are Felgyő, Csánytelek-Pálé and Mártély-Szegfű on the Middle Tisza and Battonya Vörös Oktober on the Száráz Ér in the south. The site is shown here with Hungarian systematic survey boundaries and modern national borders.
Our primary area of interest is to understand how travel and trade networks affected sociocultural change and the emergence of social inequality in later European prehistory. During the Neolithic and Copper Age, Europe was characterized by more egalitarian social relationships. But with the dawn of the Bronze Age (circa 2700 BC), social inequality began to be entrenched in many parts of Europe. This saw powerful chieftains buried with chariots, large fortified villages controlling the production of metals, and a dense network of trade connections between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Many archaeologists argue that it was control of this trade that allowed an elite class of warriors to emerge and…
Work at the Békés Jégvermi-kert is allowing us to assess variation in health, nutrition, regional background, rituals, and access to trade of communities in the Körös region, a crossroads for products and people from the Balkans, the Russian Steppe, and Central Europe. Bronze Age cemeteries often show strong inequalities in access to exotics such as bronze, gold, and fine ceramics. Differences in funerary ritual, such as the treatment of the body and the location of the grave, often correspond to religious tradition, rank, and clan. We have excavated 42 graves to far, most of which contain cremated bodies in ceramic funerary urns. Small vessels are commonly included with the deceased,…