“…A combination of social and economic factors led to a kind of collapse in Early Bronze Age societies in many European regions (Kneisel, 2012: 274-77;Müller, 2013: 533-36). In the northern Bavarian region considered here, the number of sites then increases again from the middle of the fifteenth century BC (Berger, 1984), and, around 1300 BC, a shift in the settlement pattern from valley locations to the Alb plateaus occurs, apparently due to a deterioration in climatic conditions (Seregély, 2013;Breitenbach et al, 2019;Kothieringer et al, 2023). Some irregularly shaped pits found at the site of Weiden-Winkel were probably used for clay extraction and quickly backfilled afterwards.…”