Dr. Julia Katharina Koch: Singen revisited: gender-related mobility patterns in early Bronze Age Central Europe
Abstract:
The cemetery of Singen (Lkr. Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg, Germany) is commonly interpreted because of its rich variety of metal objects as one important site in the Early Bronze Age landscape of Central Europe and as a landmark within the development of bronze metallurgy. The material includes local and regional types as well as objects from far away like a faience bead in a girl´s grave or the so called Atlantic daggers in the burials of elder men. Also the gender-differentiated burial rites demonstrate influences from different directions. Those results were reasons enough to re-analyse the material of Singen as a case study (publication in preparation). The project included an integration analysis of the material first at the individual level with the question how much foreign, regional and local marks show each grave. In comparison to the known social-archaeological and physical anthropological data and especially to the archaeometric isotope results of the project it was possible to define social groups with different (inter)cultural expressions. The discussion was focused to particular possibilities of those social groups to influence the cultural identity of the Singen community. The paper will pick up the question how close individual life courses can be reconstructed including archaeological and anthropological data.