 As I'm sure you all know, there was a lot of change at the transition from brass to iron age. A lot of it shows up in the archaeological record. But in the area of my research, and most important for the subject that I'm talking about today, is that in the zone north of the Alps, at this time, there's a reemergence of rich burials. These burials obviously are an indicator of profound social political change. After the middle of the unfilled culture, where we had depositions rather in hordes than in burials, we now have again rich grave inventories. And those show several characteristics. For example, we see hints of new technologies, as is this iron needle, or in this horse gear, which is also connected to innovations in the area of horseback riding. We have foreign influences, as for example, also evident in this horse gear. We have several typological trajectories. We have on one side, we have progressive forms that already hint at forms that are more common in the iron age, for example, this bronze vessel. But we also have conservative form traditions that continue forms of the past. We also have the reemergence of traditional status markers in the burial, for example wagons, as you see here in the pieces in the middle. And all in all, you can say that these are highly individualized, varied compositions of grave inventories. So what we see here is sort of a search for new modes of status display, the rise of new types of elites, but also the reactivation of old modes of expression from the beginning of the unfilled culture. So the first question is if we can even manage to trace patterns of elite expression despite this variability of these funeral inventories. But if we manage that, these burials can answer a lot of questions connected to the cultural transition. For example, which impact this bronze age iron age transition had on elites or how they shaped it in turn. And if we can infer how processes of social change happened exactly and in what kind of order. Let me very quickly introduce my research area. I'm working on something that I call the zone north of the Alps or other people as well. But it's a little bit broader than that, which broadly reaches from the east of France to the entrance of the Capetian basin. In this area, we have a lot of local groups which show very distinctive characteristics but are also connected by shared material traits. So we can speak of something of loosely connected cultural space that is set apart from surrounding regions among others through this emergence of which burials at this time. Another short premise, what do we mean or what do I mean when I talk about elites and elite burials? The term elite is, as I'm sure all of you all know, very contested. I'm working on a very broad definition of elites that includes what I call second tier elites. So elites, for me, are just defined by any kind of influence they are believed to have had on communities through their role in one or several subsystems of this community. And this I'm influenced by some sociologists like Suzanne Keller and his strategic elites. Of course, I also have this list of elite criteria, but I'm not going to go into that at this point. To analyze these graves, I used two avenues of methodology. For one, I used a traditional typological analysis as a good German is one to do. But I'm not going to explain that here because everyone knows what it is, but I also used archaeological network analysis. And because I'm not sure everyone is familiar with this methodology, I'm going to say a couple of works about it. So network analysis is a set of statistical methods, but it's also a theoretical framework. And this framework focuses on relations between entities and the embeddedness of these entities in larger structures. And therefore, it's a very good tool to analyze what Guinness calls the duality of structure. So the impact that a singular entity can have on the structure that it's embedded in, but also the rules that are given by the structure for a singular entity. So if you construct a network of these burials that I've shown you in the beginning and the objects and features that are contained in them, you get something like this. The squares are the graves, the circuits are the objects. I'm not going to say anything about this. This network, this complete network through some calculations, we can reduce it a bit and make it clearer. For example, into something like this, this is a similarity network, which means it shows only the graves and the graves are connected if they are similar to more than 66% or two-thirds. So if they have the same objects and the same features and are two-thirds similar, there is a connection between them in this network. And through this reduction, we get something like fundamental building blocks of aspects of identity expression in this time. So we have, for example, we have here identities that are centered on weapons. Here those spearheads, those are gray swords. And we also, okay, you have to believe me, but they're sort of hierarchy. And we also have here axes which are very similar to the sword identities, actually, or to the weapon identities, which are more likely to be understood as a tool in this time. And then there on the top, we have graves with bronze vessels. But these are just some of all the graves with bronze vessels because these vessels also obviously appear in many rich graves. In those rich graves, you can see at least sort of junctions in the graph because obviously there are focus points where many aspects of identity are combined. We also have one disconnected component in this network. Those are graves that are characterized by large sets of ceramic vessels and elaborate grave architecture, which mostly appear in the western part of my research area. And here we have graves that are not connected at all, and those are mostly graves with horse gear, which are so varied in their composition that there's not enough similarity between them so that edges would appear in this network. So the interaction between these different types of identity or aspects of identity and the political realities that are encoded in these aspects show us how things happened and what drove these processes of elite competition and individualization that are embodied in these graves. And I'm going to give one example for that really fast. So one very interesting thing is the interplay between current types of horse gear and wagons that are observable in several regions of the east of my research area. And here I will talk a bit about the micro-region of the county of Degendorf in Lower Bavaria. So here we have the grave of Stein-Kirchen. And here we have an inventory that is heavily influenced by an eastern type of identity, the so-called in German it's Reiter Krieger in English maybe equestrian warrior or a horseman or something like that. So we have the so-called Thracos Sumerian horse gear or North Pontic Cis Caucasian horse gear that follows distinctively eastern form tradition. Those are these objects and some that might even be imports from this area. So very early expressions. And then we have objects such as this wetzel and this needle which also is very often found in connection with this identity. And we also have a local bronze vessel. So we have a combination of typical eastern aspects of this sort of identity with emerging local customs. The next step so to speak would be burial A from Künzing which I have already shown also in Lower Bavaria which is very nearby. And here we also have horse gear which also is still heavily influenced by this North Pontic Cis Caucasian traditions but also shows some signs of adaptation. We have the addition of wagon. So these are those parts. And we have the addition of a weapon which is here which is at this point a local spearhead. And then we basically have another step which is burial F also in the same symmetry which is also a part of a wagon which is this and this. But the horse gear now follows distinctively local customs as you can for example see in this falere. And the weapon is now a sword which also it's very likely that this was produced in Künzing itself. So all these three graves have expressed some sort of claim of high status and position but show sort of a trajectory where we see that the process of individualization in the form of which graves is more or less initiated or this is a theory that I have is initiated by the deceased of Stankirchen who adopts distinctively foreign customs and forms and is then followed by a reaction of traditional elites to the sort of or you can call it a challenge or something of their position namely the reactivation of the wagon burial and the integration of these foreign influences into local customs. So this shows a new form of identities appear and I use this alternative ways to express status but I quickly adapted and integrated into existing forms of status display. So there are many more examples like that in this data but beyond the specific expression of status and that entanglements there's also a bigger picture and that is that this sort of horse gear wagon interplay mostly happens in the east of my research area and many of these changes are very readily adopted there for example especially in Künzink which is there but in other regions such as the lake dwellings of the Renish-Swiss group no really rich burials can be found. This is very roughly because I couldn't turn the circle in PowerPoint but somewhere there is this area. So there you don't really have the sort of exceptionally rich burials despite the fact that undoubtedly these lake dwellings were centres of great economic and political power and also examples of similar objects as the ones that I've shown before are found in this region actually so the explanation can only be geographical. So the question seems to be less what is there but what is not and why and this is also a theory obviously so one possible explanation might lie in the concept of social cohesion which ties into the network analysis part. So there are several factors of social cohesion according to sociologists the behaviour of elites, the reaction of a group to disruptive forces and especially innovation and the adherence or the challenge of group norms and if we combine that with theories like the strength of weak ties by Mark Ranowwetter which is one of the most important theories in the area of network analysis then we would think that strongly connected regions of a graph hint at strong cohesion and the resistance to innovation and weakly connected areas show that there is less cohesion and may be a danger of collapse of the structure. And if we look at these theories in mind again at this network then we could theorise that strongly connected areas like the sword grave area for example and body identities that are governed by norms that are encoded in the burial rituals and this existence of norms hints at a degree of social cohesion while in the weakly connected areas for example the horse gear part there apparently are less norms and less social cohesion but a very ready adoption of new influences which are on the one hand possible through this weak cohesion of the structure but also are responsible for the disruption of a formerly probably cohesive community. So we basically arrive at two models of communities that can roughly be applied to the west and the east of my research area the west with the weapon identities and especially the sword identity and this cluster here and the east with rich graves, varied graves and horse gear a focus on horse gear. To summarise, broadly speaking this is all just a very broad summary and if you want to know more I will hopefully publish my PhD sometime in the next two years but we have in these graves we have a combination or through a combination of typocronological and a network analysis we get a rich picture of these differing interacting expressions of elite identity in this zone north of the Alps and these identities are very much in dialogue with each other there's overlap, there's adaptations, there's imitation of identities and there's also identities reacting to each other and if we would brought paint sort of a geographical picture we would have that influences predominantly from the east bring innovation but also disrupt these communities and enhance existing tendencies of change and elite competition while in the west we have more strongly consolidated identities that hint at functioning social norms that sort of inoculate these communities against social change as for example the emergence of rich burials but also prevent the appropriation of new status markers and maybe because at the end of the day I'm only looking at identity expression and graves and not what lies behind but this could maybe mean that innovation was taken up at a much more measured pace in these areas and with that thank you very much for your attention