Perhaps nowhere in European prehistory does the idea of clearly-defined cultural boundaries remain more current than in the initial Neolithic, where the southeast–northwest trend of the spread of farming crosses what is perceived as a sharp divide between the Balkans and central Europe. This corresponds to a distinction between the Vinča culture package, named for a classic site in Serbia, with its characteristic pottery assemblage and absence of longhouses, and the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), with equally diagnostic but different pottery, and its apparently culturally-diagnostic longhouses, extending in a more northerly belt through central Europe westward to the Dutch coast. In this paper we question the concept of such a clear division through a presentation of new data from the site of Szederkény-Kukorica-dűlő. A large settlement in southeast Transdanubia, Hungary, excavated in advance of road construction, Szederkény is notable for its combination of pottery styles, variously including Vinča A, Ražište and LBK, and longhouses of a kind otherwise familiar from the LBK world. Formal modelling of its date establishes that the site probably began in the later 54th century cal BC, lasting until the first decades of the 52nd century cal BC. Occupation, featuring longhouses, pits and graves, probably began at the same time in the eastern and western parts of the settlement, starting a decade or two later in the central part; the western part was probably the last to be abandoned. Vinča pottery is predominantly associated with the eastern and central parts of the site, and Ražište pottery with the west. Formal modelling of the early history of longhouses in the LBK world suggests their emergence in the Formative LBK of Transdanubia c. 5500 cal BC followed by rapid dispersal in the middle of the 54th century cal BC, associated with the ‘earliest’ (älteste) LBK. The adoption of longhouses at Szederkény thus appears to come a few generations after the start of this ‘diaspora’. Rather than explaining the mixture of things, practices and perhaps people at Szederkény with reference to problematic notions such as hybridity, we propose instead a more fluid and varied vocabulary, encompassing combination and amalgamation, relationships and performance in the flow of social life, and networks; this makes greater allowance for diversity and interleaving in a context of rapid change.
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Obtaining chronological control for geomorphological sequences can be problematic due to the fragmentary and non-sequential nature of sediment and landform archives. The robust analysis of 14 C ages is often critical for the interpretation of these complicated sequences. This paper demonstrates a robust methodology for the 14 C dating of geomorphological sequences using a case study from the lower Ribble valley, northwest England. The approach adopted incorporates using greater numbers of ages, targeting plant macrofossils, obtaining replicate measurements from single horizons to assess the extent of reworking and the use of Bayesian approaches to test models of the relative order of events. The extent of reworking of organic materials and space-time dynamics of fluvial change means that it is critical that chronological control is sufficiently resourced with 14 C measurements. As a result Bayesian approaches are increasingly important for the evaluation of large data sets. Assessing the conformability of relative order models informed by interpretation of the geomorphology can identify contexts or materials that are out of sequence, and focuses attention on problem materials (reworking) and errors in interpretation (outlier ages). These relative order models provide a framework for the interrogation of sequences and a means for securing probability-based age estimates for events that occur between dated contexts. This approach has potential value in constraining the sequence of geomorphological development at scales that vary from individual sites to a catchment or region, furthering understanding of forcing and change in geomorphological systems. Figure 4. Landform and depositional contexts used for 14 C dating of geomorphological changes recorded in alluvial units (after Lewin et al., 2005; Chiverrell et al., 2008). RADIOCARBON DATING LANDFORM DEVELOPMENT IN FLUVIAL ENVIRONMENTS 325 Figure 6. Three different chronological models, (a), (c) and (d) for Lower House are used to estimate the age of the 'Geomorphological change', which equates to the switch from terrace T3 to T4 The large square brackets on the left along with the OxCal keywords define the model. A question mark (?) indicates that a result has been excluded from the model. (b) A schematic representation of the structure for Sequences models, with Sequences comprise dating information arranged in an expected order (oldest first) and that one event precedes another is incorporated into the resultant probability distributions. Phases are groups of ages for which no information is assumed about their relative ages but they share similar relationships with other items in the sequence model. Probability distributions have been estimated for features (Geomorphological change) that have not been specifically 14 C dated by placing Date queries within the sequence of 14 C ages. Details of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling and the algorithms employed in Oxcal for this are available from the on-line manual (http://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/oxcal.html) and in Bronk ...
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