 OK. Should I use the microphone, or can you all hear me when I'm standing? Hillfords are a very diverse phenomenon. We heard about the Heunischen book before in the short introduction with the Stonewall fortification with Mediterranean influences to it, which is only a very short-lived thing. On the other side, I put a picture of the Yphe and Bobfinn, which is also like Bronze Age Hillfords that even transitions to a princely seat of the early Iron Age, and then later to a Celtic opidum. And you see it has many walls and many different phases of fortification, and it's been used for a long time and renewed for a long time. I'll just show you these two pictures to remind you that fortifications are a diverse phenomenon. So what I will try to do is I will look at the Bronze Age fortifications and try to isolate some factors that might be unifying to them. I have one more slide to show how different the actually setup and connections of Hillfords are. We have three Hillfords that exist in the same time frame, and we have a rough mapping of possibly Bronze Age settlements next to it. And you see some of these Hillfords are connected closely to settlement chambers. And if you look at the Heunischen book, that's a very isolated dot there. We have Hillfords that are not connected but does not seem to connect it directly to a settlement chambers or settlement landscapes. So Hillfords appear in various landscapes, shapes, and sizes. There are two things I want to mark out. Hillfords are part of the infrastructure of conflict. We should turn away from a pacified view of the past, and we should turn away from seeing Hillfords as being really representative or something like that, because there could be other means of representation to build these large-scale ditches, earthworks to even these fortified hinterlands or forelands, like we've seen in the example just shown to us, makes it clear that conflict was the main goal. The other one is that Hillfords emerge from socioeconomic networks. They do not exist on their own. For the Bronze Age, we have a very, very interdependent economic sphere, economic networks, and people and villages, they need to act in these networks. They need to get bronze. They need to get copper and tin. And so they're entangled in these. To understand the social dimension of Hillfords, we should not try to look for the elites. We should not try to look for traces of the elites on the Hillfords itself all the time. We should make sense of how the increased interactions and dependencies might have reflected back on society and what might have driven the Bronze Age societies, or what might have been the conflicts within Bronze Age societies. If we talk about Hillfords, we often talk about territories and borders. And normally, in archaeology, our understanding of a territory is very limited to the physical space. We look to the next mountain ridge and we say, OK, the Hillford could have ruled the space to this part. But what we see is that we have an overlapping. We have layers of different territories and influence spheres that be connected to Hillfords. There's an economical territory. There's an agricultural area that supports the Hillford. There's a military territory where you can act with your military power, however big or small this is. And in the end, there's the physical territory that might also limit your. And the interesting part is these spheres are not always overlapping. I put a Hillford there as an anchor point and you see the different spheres can be oriented in different regions. They can be oriented in different parts of physical space, just being anchored at the Hillfords. And we can even imagine that there are spheres of influence that have just been linked to other spheres. And another thing, if we think about these spheres, we have to think about them as networks. We have networks on these various layer, like the economic network, the Hillfords works in our military network. And then, if you see these dotted lines, these networks are three-dimensional. We have interconnections between all of these networks that are actually very important that we need to think of. And every interconnection, especially between these networks, may serve as a bottleneck. Keep the term in mind. We'll come back to that later. So another concept I want to talk of is flows of goods. And flows of goods are important because goods tend to traverse through space. And to be connected to flows of goods is very important as we think of socioeconomic networks. I will skip this slide. And we're coming to the urban flow theory right away. So flows of goods are often connected to urbanization and urban flow theory. And this is a process that starts in space. I will not argue that Bronze Age Hillfords are urban at all, but I want that we view them as part of urbanization as a long-term process that, in the end, leads to Iron Age, Ophiida, and other phenomenon. So flows of goods drift towards an area. And goods can be raw materials, finished product, but even people's ideas or innovation or some authors just describe them as energy that flows through space. And these streams can accumulate in certain areas and causing changes to the economic and social space and dimensions that they flow through, that they hit through. So these flows can change spaces double. These change in spaces can lead to the formation of new institutions. And I will try to show to you what I mean with an institution how I think these come together. Because we need institutions to regulate conflicts of interests and stabilize these various spaces and spheres that I showed you before. Because only if they're stable, they can be long-term connected to urban flows. And the concentration of institutions will eventually, further down the road, lead to a more dense urbanized area like we later get in a medieval city or the Iron Age Ophiida. So when we think about the social space, we always think about hierarchies. We always see these as a pyramid. And we also see these as very static. So you cannot make it from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy. Never can you leave your level of social status. I don't think it is like this. We should more think of it as dotted line. There is a possibility to crawl up social ladder to a certain extent. And if we really think about it in terms of complexity science, society might look more like this. It might not even be stratigraphically layered. Things might be interconnected. These social spaces might not be flat, might not be even. We can follow this with a very simple thought experiment. Imagine these are we, all the people in the room here right now. And all of us will self-identify as archaeologists. That's why you're here. That's why you're at EAA. Now, as we all have studied archaeology, some of us will listen to metal music. So this is a smaller group of us self-identifying as probably heavy metal fans. Within these heavy metal fans, we might find a smaller group of Bronze Age researchers, self-identifying as archaeologists, as heavy metal fans, and then as Bronze Age researchers. And two or three of us might also be Hillford enthusiasts. But you see, with him, a broader social space, there are various subgroups. There are various identities and entities. And being connected to such an identity might also influence the outcome of your acting, of your social acting. So there's a very simple example I took from Taylor, who's a social geographer. And he said, there's always two diverging powers in the population. There are the more bound to place people. Let's see, these are the agricultureists, the production people that actually do the agriculture, that try to support with their surplus all these economic networks. And then we have the metal traders. We have the metal workers. And they being like the more mobile people. While a farmer is bound to place, he has to live on his farmstead. He has to guard his farmstead. The trader might be able to go to another territory to trade somewhere else. So they are more distributors. They are more flexible. They're more global-sinking. While the agriculturalists are more mostly producers, and they think local and probably being a little bit more conservative and trying to guard their homesteads and their farmsteads. So this will create tension within a society. And this tension needs new superior institutions to regulate this conflict, to try to get society to work together to get into what you say, a unified idea of stuff. So I would argue, Hillfords could be such institutions because they can stabilize regions and might therefore play a key role within stabilizing spaces, make it possible to flows of goods to traverse through the territory and stay in the territory longer. Because if I have a peaceful region, if I have a region where I'm sure I can go out and reach out to an institution to regulate conflicts, I would be more inclined to trade with such a region. Stable regions therefore have a higher gain from the flows of goods that traverse to their territories. So it makes sense for me as a community to invest in a Hillford, to show that I'm ready to defend my territories, to be ready to probably even act radical on my own ideas, go out and wage war if I really want to have something, if I want to have a gain. Because the flows will come to my territory and will stay longer there. I can siphon off like a surplus. I can get something from interacting in these bottlenecks, maybe even create my own bottleneck where it was not given before because of the way the trade routes were before I tried to pacify my territory. These emergent institutions might restructure social space to those within and without the Hillfords, those living in there, those being on the outside. But they have a tremendous outcome. And it's not about the Hillford itself. The building of Hillford will not give me the institution. But the institutions will monumentalize themselves in these Hillfords. They will show off their power by building a Hillford, by having these focal point of coming conflicts. Because if I want to come and rate your area, I have to get past your Hillford. So building these primary military places in the first place will also give me a long-term gain from a better trade routes, from better placement in the socioeconomic networks that drive the Bronze Age. Thank you for your attention.