Drilled dog canine ornaments from a special Late Copper Age grave

Abstract

Grave 367 of the Balatonlelle-Rádpuszta site 67/5 cemetery dating from the classical period of the Baden culture contained the burial of an adult woman interred according to an unusual rite involving the placement of a child’s skull under the head. The sole grave goods from this burial were three and ten fragmented drilled dog canines. Roughly one-half of the canines lay by the feet of the deceased. The worn surface of the canines and the damaged perforations indicate that they had been worn for a long time, while their position in the grave would suggest that some had once adorned the lower part or hemline of a longer garment. The Hungarian and Central European analogies dating from a few centuries later raise the possibility that woman laid to rest at Balatonlelle as well as the dogs providing the canines used for the adornment, a wholly unique practice in the Carpathian Basin during the fourth millennium BC, were not of local, but of eastern origin.

A cattle mandible thong‐smoother from a grave: Strap production and cattle traction in the Late Copper Age in Hungary

“…European sites (e.g., Kysely & Peške, 2022) including both settlements (e.g., Bökönyi, 1979;Vörös, 2014) and a cemetery (Gál, 2015) on the territory of present-day Hungary point to the unresolved status of these horses and suggests possible domestication processes in this region as well (Outram, 2023).…”

“…As long as the earliest domestication center in Botai gave rise to Botai‐ and Przewalski's horses (referred to as DOM1) around 3500 BC, the ancestors of modern breeds (DOM2) lived in the region of the Lower Volga and Lower Don rivers in Western Eurasian steppes and their spread is dated to about 2200 BC and during the second millennium BC (Librado et al, 2021). Therefore, the number of Eneolithic horse remains reported from several Eastern and Central European sites (e.g., Kysely & Peške, 2022) including both settlements (e.g., Bökönyi, 1979; Vörös, 2014) and a cemetery (Gál, 2015) on the territory of present‐day Hungary point to the unresolved status of these horses and suggests possible domestication processes in this region as well (Outram, 2023).…”

“…The large and deep, beehive-shaped pit (STR 870; Figure 2) was found in the northern part of the site Balatonlelle-Rádpuszta-Romtemplom mellett. It came to light at 345 m north-east from the already published two coeval inhumation burials, which comprised unusual grave goods such as an ornament made exclusively from drilled dog canines in Grave 367 of a woman (Gál & Bondár, 2022), as well as a copper bracelet, a copper and a jet bead, and additional skulls in Grave 415 of 8-9-year-old child (Bondár et al, 2021).…”