The rise of idiôtês: Micro-politics of death and community reproduction in Bronze Age Hungary

Polányi, Tamás

doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101445

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…When farming using traction animals is firmly established, people disperse and we see wealth consumption and display present only in cemeteries. Re-settlement in the Bronze Age, accompanied by lavish burial rituals, then returns to near invisible housing and limited mortuary display in the Late Bronze Age (39). It is not that inequalities were never present in our sample, but rather that inequalities were never great, and did not continue to grow as they did in the Near East.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Five Thousand Years of Inequality in the Carpathian Basin

Duffy,

Wilkes,

Skorna

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The emergence of sedentary farming economies, especially in contexts intensified by plow agriculture, has been argued to underpin marked increases in economic inequality and its intergenerational transmission across Eurasia. To assess this presumed causal relationship, we examine relational (burials) and material (house sizes) inequalities in the Carpathian Basin, a large region in central Europe, from the time the first farmers arrived in southeastern Europe through the next five millennia to the Bronze Age. We find that although farming did increase the potentials for both relational and material inequalities that potential was rarely reached, and then only for short durations. A series of leveling mechanisms, which shifted over time, are identified including the removal of material wealth from circulation, community fission, and investments of surplus labor in infrastructural investments. In the Carpathian Basin, only after at least five thousand years were the intergenerational potentials of material wealth transmissions more broadly realized.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Five Thousand Years of Inequality in the Carpathian Basin

Duffy,

Wilkes,

Skorna

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

From the ashes of Bronze Age fires: A framework for comparison across body treatments

Parditka

Duffy

2023

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Common animals: sedentary pastoralism and the emergence of the commons as an institution

Kanne,

Haughton,

Lash

2024

Front. Hum. Dyn.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Animal husbandry was of fundamental consequence in the planning and development of larger and more permanent communities. Pastoralism is often assumed to be highly mobile when considering social institutions and political formations, despite the diversity of husbandry practices that are either wholly, or largely, tethered to relatively sedentary social aggregations. Key tenets of more settled animal husbandry are intensive social relations between people, and between people, animals, and landscapes. This entails reciprocal, multispecies cooperative efforts to decide how to utilize pastoral resources, choose where to settle, and how to organize settlements with an eye for the animals. Yet, scholars have rarely considered how the logistics and social dynamics of pastoralism shaped the transition to sedentism and, particularly, the development of collective forms of governance in prehistory. In this paper, we re-center pastoralism in narratives of settling down, in order to recognize the critical ways that relations with animals shaped how humans learned to move and dwell in emergent grazing landscapes. We take an institutional approach to the concept of “the commons,” demonstrating the dynamics through 19th-century Irish rundale, then draw on case studies from Southern Scandinavia and the Carpathian Basin to consider the commons as a multispecies institution which resulted in variable sociopolitical formations of the European Bronze Age.

show abstract

The rise of idiôtês: Micro-politics of death and community reproduction in Bronze Age Hungary

Cited by 3 publications

References 43 publications

Five Thousand Years of Inequality in the Carpathian Basin

Five Thousand Years of Inequality in the Carpathian Basin

From the ashes of Bronze Age fires: A framework for comparison across body treatments

Common animals: sedentary pastoralism and the emergence of the commons as an institution

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About