 Well first of all I thank you to the organisers for giving us the opportunity to speak to you and I have to confess at first that I am a total imposter, a machinist and a historian who has recently migrated a bit up north and I've been looking at later Bronze Age societies in the southern Carpathian basin and Balkans. The material that we are going to be looking at is from this region here so we're pretty much defined by the River Moores, the Tisa, the Danube and then the Carpathians to the east, speaking broadly speaking about the period 1500 to 1100 BC. Now many of you will know some of the sites in this area though we have recently been discovering quite a large number of settlements which previously been undocumented so we're getting a very densely settled landscape here with a lot of enclosed settlements and again this due to some of the wonders of Google Earth that for the later Bronze Age sites in this area they're actually visible quite clearly from Earth imagery with you can see ditches, you can see these patches here which are very characteristic of these sites so we've been able to define quite a large number of these in this landscape all kind of lining up along the Tisa and ground choosing of these are showing them to be late Bronze Age in chronology. This is part of the landscape where we have some really astoundingly large settlements probably the best known of these is going to be Cornesti Arcuri which is over 1700 hectares. We don't quite have sites of that scale but the sites we have are very large back in Paris and what you might expect so the likes of Grades de Ijosh which you're excavating is in the region of about 200 hectares and then other sites in the south of the network the uproader ones are around 100 plus hectares and these are all defined by ditches that are clearly bounded spaces and even the relatively small sites in this network would be somewhere around the 25-30 hectare range so these are very extensive large settlements. This work is part of a broader project than I'm conducting to say I'm a site imposter but from the Aegean because the project I'm doing is looking at changes in later Bronze Age society mobility and conflict really from the Carpathians right down to the Aegean world. I'm not going to be speaking about that now but we're covering quite a range of different research methods. Some of these are very much in process at the moment so we have even not even pilot data to give you. But just speaking a little bit about the chronology of these settlements we all know in a very very general sense these kind of boundaries so I mean I know the sessions at Ernfield doesn't really work in this area and the kind of chronologies we're looking at conventionally Belish one, Belish two, so all the GAVA and Gucci variants and it seems with our C14 dating we're pushing the beginning of that a bit earlier the end of us is still a little bit fuzzy but really this looks like it's going to have to be broken in two. But how this fits in I mean in our region you're looking at again these settlements are occurring right around the time of the collapse of if you want to call it a collapse of when tell settlements we're at the core of settlement dynamics so very messy picture and that really is what the slide is quite messy it's a lack of C14 dates really to anchor the local relative chronologies so that's something we're very much working on at the moment. The site that we have is located here you can see that it is in proximity well about a safe proximity as you can get to the River Tisa that big mess of areas there is this Tisa flood plain so it's located over here and we have rivers small rivers lining up here leaving you out to Tisa but along those rivers we have all of these tumuli which I am happy to identify it and again none of these haven't as yet excavated so we are looking at that they could be of any date probably preceding or contemporary with the settlement but even if you take those preceding if you're moving through this landscape you're going to that settlement you are going through this very visible mortuary landscape and again especially if you imagine people traveling along these water courses which it's not coming out very clearly on this but you can still also see the paleo channels quite clearly in these satellite imagery. The site itself we have conducted geophysics about 18 hectares which is giving us I suppose a good view of what was we believe to be the core of the settlement but this whole area we're looking at here is actually just this time that the green is patched down here so give you a sense of the scale of it and I suppose with the challenges investigating the site of this size but again even the geophysics showing does obviously have a lot more happening in terms of enclosures and boundaries and spaces that we're seeing from the aerial imagery. The cemetery is just off the serial shot just down here I apologize for the quality of the of the slide here but the cemetery was excavated in the 60s in three different rescue campaigns due to the construction of a new river channel or new channel from the teaser river so we have both incubation and cremation graves within this cemetery just putting it in its context there again it's along one of these channels so we have got these tumuli lining up so it's pretty much running along the same sort of orientation and the same landscape as the tumuli here which again is a remain undated at present from the cemetery we've got quite a range of of chronologies we are looking really at covering the whole spread of this Balagish one Balagish two kind of ceramic range and very broad kind of bands in these upper ones are the earlier chronology we've got these lower types down here in terms of dating this is a currently under study by Linda Fibiger this is adult and child in humation grave and again the c14 dating on this putting it in here around the later 15th century into the 14th century we have a slightly earlier in humation grave from the same cemetery just an individual and in this case we're looking at a 15th century date but where it becomes I suppose the challenge is when we are doing looking to the settlement and again the ceramics that we have there are very much similar to those that we have in the cemetery so again that's kind of what's in the settlement we're finding in the cemetery although perhaps we're getting slightly more elaborate ceramics even on the settlement than we are finding in the cemetery the dates for this again this these are the if we're looking at those very typical urnfield and I suppose format of burial that we're having in the cemetery looking at the chronology of the very similar pots from the site you don't yet see 14 dates from the cemetery there in the process at the moment but the same sort of ceramics from the site we're getting late 15th dates really I suppose more looking at beginning around 1400 BC would appear for these dates so 14th century sort of chronology for the ceramics that we're finding again we find that that's in the pit we have a ditch excavated as well near to the entrance of the site and again similar these urn objects which you're going to find in the cemetery we're getting those with very clear dates of the 14th century creeping into possibly into the 13th century but most of the nature lining up that slightly bit earlier we also have here similar kind of wares and an outer ditch here so again looking at 14th possibly getting into 13th century for those so again these are the kind of set ceramics we're getting on the settlement which are going to be contemporary in terms of style to what we are finding in the cemetery and again we look at the chronology of the enumations that we have this is again lining up with the later enumation we're getting these urnfield type ceramics so we do need obviously to get our dates from those urns which will be helpful for the formations but we are getting this kind of crossover in the very beginning stages so by ritual cemetery evolving into a purely cremation cemetery the cremation remains again not a lot collected these are 1960s excavations so we're not quite sure at the moment is this not a lot actually retained by the excavators or is it that they're only very very small represented of amount actually in some of these cremations but the fragments are relatively large so we have been again as of this summer conducting research so I'm afraid of zero results to give you at this point on those analyses and other than we have got several graves with two or three individuals generally speaking adults and children from the settlement we have other strange things happening we are getting human remains in the ditches surrounding the settlements surrounding the settlement and again these are from that same sort of period as one of the burials in the cemetery possibly going that little bit later but we seem to have evidence of manipulation of the deceased and welcome opinions on this but this is one of the crania from the parsecrania from the ditch and the hole you see there is actually punctured from the inside of the skull out so this is not an injury it's a post mortem not even peri mortem very soon after death but not too soon but we're not sure on this is this an element of this skull being displayed at the entrance to the site because right up on these entrance ditches of the cause we threw it so if it is it's perhaps with a face looking up the sky alternatives might be an injury is this from an arrow being shot with a charred wooden headed arrow rod having an actual arrow head on it puncturing at high velocity from from the back so some possibilities there we do have bronze arrowheads from the ditches so we know that they were not necessarily only using those kind of I suppose more improvised types of arrows but again it's not just these two separate ditches that we have and again the chronology of these we're sitting around that 1430 to 12 to early 13th century probably and then we look at other sites going a little bit further north Czech Republic Velen we are also getting that kind of same sort of chronology where we have human remains being manipulated and re and used in the ditches there's material that will be published to know by colleagues working in Romania from two of the sites there where it is also the same sort of chronology we're having these human remains manipulated in the ditches we also have from other settlements and we have from just south of the site that we're actually heading gradually to Ijosh about 20 kilometers south we have Maliakac or again we have a juvenile buried in the settlement context at Shagu site one we also have here a neonate buried in the settlement context or at least the cranium buried in the settlement context when we're moving a bit later into the early iron age we get actually accentuation of this reuse and manipulation of human remains in the ditches around the settlement so another site we're studying Clisa probably around the 9th century 10th 9th century writing against C14 dates on this it's just been studied this summer but again we have Crania lined up so you've got reusable elements in the ditches surrounding settlements so I think this is something that we're quite eager to do um ancient DNA analysis on so we've some of these have been examined at the moment and isotope stable isotope analysis to see are we getting some sort of social differentiation within those we're included in cemeteries and those who are not um not being heard in such a fashion so in this very little brief discussion of what we've been looking at in this region we can say that this transition from tumulus to unfilled a chronological events brackets is bracket by the building of these major and large settlements in this region and again we seem to get to border of where you get this extensive use of tumulus burial practice to areas where flat cemeteries are more dominant the urnfield mortuary rights were initially within a biracial context but before um really by the fully bit of 14th century possibly but a 16th century we're starting to get them being used as the dominant form and again that's the cemetery that extends from around that period right through again at least on relative chronologies going down into the 12th century and not all the individuals that we are seeing at this settlement and again we've only excavated I guess maybe 10 meters worth of ditch we're finding these individuals there's an older excavation where there was a radius found in one of the ditches so it seems that we're getting human remains spread quite widely throughout these ditches and they're again colossal so we only excavated small portions but uh so not all individuals are making the grades in this area we are finding potentially the manipulation and the use even the deflation of these bodies whatever fashion it had been but they're disarticulated when they're making it into the ditches so where they were previously we don't really know obviously and again this is on the peripheries and the entrance into sites the ones we've found so far are actually in the entrances so we are getting them deposited right at the entrance into the into the settled area we have that around in the dead in the ditches in the region around Greddish to Ijosh but also it does seem to be at least increasing we have other sites in Romania where we have the manipulation of of larger numbers of individuals in the early iron age and again we have at the moment stabilized open agent DNA analysis being conducted on these by Hannah Schroeder and Sharon McCarlavitz and we're going to use these to better characterize really the biographies of these individuals and try to explore really what is happening in terms of the difference paths to take before being and entered so thank you