No abstract

Ancient brass (aurichalcum) was a valued commodity in the Antiquity, notably because of its gold-like appearance. After mastering brass fabrication using the cementation procedure in the first century BC in the Mediterranean, this material became widely used by the Romans for coins, jewellery and other artefacts. Because of its visual qualities, it is believed that since this period, brass played an important role in diplomatic and economic contacts with indigenous communities, notably Celtic and Germanic tribes north of Danube and west of Rhine. To test this hypothesis, we performed for the first time the advanced statistical multivariate analysis based on chemical composition and lead isotope systematics, coupled with informed typo-chronological categorisation, of a suite of late Iron Age and Early Roman period (first century BC – first century AD) brass and other copper-alloy artefacts from the territory of Bohemia. In order to to discuss their provenance, the results were compared to known contemporary sources of material. The new results for brass artefacts from this early phase of the massive occurrence of Roman aurichalcum in the Barbarian territories point to the ore deposits in the western Mediterranean or the Massif Central area in Gaul, consistent with historical events. These new findings underscore the great economic and political importance of the new and rich mineral resources in the Transalpine Gaul acquired due to Caesar's military campaigns.

This dataset comprises the core spatial and temporal structure of the 'Lifestyle as an Unintentional Identity in the Neolithic' project. The data consist of spatial and chronological information on 2,154 Neolithic settlement sites from c. 4900 to 3300 BCE in two separate regions, the eastern part of Bohemia (Czech Republic) and the Morava River basin (Czech Republic, parts of Austria and Slovakia). To gather as much data as possible, all available sources including published works, find and excavation reports in archives, museum collections and unpublished records and both existing and legacy databases were examined. The dataset is deposited at the Zenodo data repository with an open access license. There is a reuse potential in aggregating the data with data from different regions and/or time periods for various spatial and temporal analyses.

The study examines the degree of similarity of Neolithic settlement structures in two geographically separated regions (eastern half of Bohemia, Morava River Basin) based on the analysis of 11 variables related to the environment and the settlement structures. The period studied corresponds to c. 4900–3400 BC. Although the results of most of the variables analysed using principal component analysis (PCA) do not show significant differences in the preference of settlement locations, the analysis of the individual variables points very clearly to major differences in settlement patterns. These are manifested in different settlement dynamics, accessibility to stone raw materials, and the spatial extent of occupation. The general conclusion is that although early agricultural societies are similar in general terms regarding the location of settlements, their individual aspects are quite different, which must have been reflected in lifestyles during the Neolithic.