 OK, so today, I'm going to talk about the function of 45 hilltop settlements and whether a function is not actually an intangible variable that we cannot measure directly. So just as a short thing, I will be using very classical, scientific methods, which I will explain shortly later. And there's lots of critique on that. And I talked about this yesterday. So do not expect a lot of critique on how you actually employ these methods. So the first thing is we need to think about why do we actually care what a hilltop settlement, and especially a 45 one, might be. And most people don't do that only because of geography, but also because social structure and power relations are presumed to be projected to space. So we believe that we can actually find information about this. And I worked in this very popular hypothesis from Germany on Bronze Age hill forts. And it basically says that this is like a central role. It has been turned a book or a castle, basically, in German. And it says that they can be considered an economic, power, and possibly cultic center of a region, as Leonard has shown before. What I will do now is I will try to explain to you how we could test this assumption with statistical methods. So this will require employing theories that actually support this idea as variables and markers. And I think what we all need to do is, borrowing a bit from management and economics, is we really need to say what do we actually mean by function? What do we mean by economy? So economic dominance, power, and also cult. Like, what do we mean, and why do we actually care about this? And this is like, you need a lot of fear for this in the Bronze Age, at least the European one, because we don't have written sources. So I try, well, to exemplify a bit on this. So if we mean economic power, we usually mean trades, so imports, we mean high status objects, which we generally consider to be weapon, gold, and not defined metals. And also the close proximity of rich burials with lots and lots of objects in it, and mostly gold. So it's like kind of a closed circle here. Also political power is, and cultic center is even worse, but political power is usually very vague. We say, well, presence of metallurgies generally considered to be controlled by elites of some sort. We say these, they are usually in a geopolitical important location. And there's also sometimes the presence of large building structures, and obviously elevated location and fortification. What we do, we borrow a lot from how these settlements are interpreted in the Iron Age, and also in later times. So what I will consider in my presentation, mostly as markers, are these. There's no large scale excavation in my research area, and not a lot of the fortifications are dated, so I won't go into that much. So if we think about why we use this, there's like the measures of centrality which have been developed for medieval cities, but there's also central place theory, ideas about how different burial attire and assasuals reflect different social status, saying that in the entire culture, we generally believe that this is not as defined as in the Iron Age. There's also like the idea that a complex technology should require a complex society. Sometimes there's this idea, there's also like the location indicates control of the landscape. Like the elite lives there, and there's also ideas of early urban development which I will mention shortly later. So for my presentation, I will mostly focus on these theories as they have been put forward by various authors. So after we have like this theoretical background, we might think about, well, how do we measure this? Because function is other than craftsmanship and these things not as easily defined. And we have this idea that all things that exist should exist in some amount and anything that exists can also be measured, even if we might not know how, but it is still there. So we should hold on to this and it's been like a major part in many sciences. So we can also apply this idea to archeology. But what I want to state first is a bit about my theoretical background in this. So I'm much on the side that measurement is always a state of uncertainty reduction. It does not mean having a actual function. It just means that we know more than before. Also, it is obvious that magical variables need observable consequences and that's what directly relates from these two quotes because if that something does not create an observable consequence, it's also probably not matterful for the past. What I will not talk about that you will see as a great influence is Bayesian statistics that uncertainty I treat as a feature of the observer. So I do not believe that this uncertainty was present in original data. It's just that I have too much noise in my data to see the things like directly. So what did I choose as matterful variables? So I basically divided it because cultic is really weird. We don't know a lot about the cult of the Urnfield culture. So I went to go for the centers of protection and power and the centers of economy. And in theory, like a optimal space use should lead to hexagonal territories as indicated by central place theory. And you can do that by the Lonnie triangulation and other kinds of triangulation. So this is related to a theory of the centrality of places. Hillfords are usually described as a center of some sort. Then the close proximities to sword bearing graze is a translation of the rich burials. And in Urnfield culture for that region, they have been described as a territory of people who bear swords. It is very not like all translation look kind of weird. So this is the German term for it has been described as fairground at approximately four to six kilometers. And they always are close to Hillfords or other things. And then there's the presence of horse managing, which is generally associated with the terriots and carts that appear in these rich graves. And also it's kind of seen as a sign of the elite to have them. And there is obviously fortification, which is generally described as a manifestation of power. I do not say which kind of power. Then bearing further from the original like hypothesis I used, Jochenhofer is very, very precise at the presence of advanced metallurgy. So smithing, not actually producing the metal is a indicator of a superior economic states. And he said that's because of control of a limited resources. Also, there's this idea of increased hospitality that directly connects to the sword bearing individuals. And the idea that warrior and warrior aristocracies might have been a social system in the Urnfield culture. In general, if you look at increased hospitality it is very typical for decentralized societies to manifest their power through feasting and other kinds of economic ways in order also to decrease violence. And we also have an increased rate of imports and prestigious objects, which are generally thought to be a marker of economic dominance. So I do not necessarily agree with all of these kinds of markers I presented here, but this is how usually this framework is employed in order to find something out about the function of hill forts. So moving on to my study region, this is somewhere near Suttgart, it's the center of Srebino. In green, you can see the higher elevations on this map. What we have there is to just look at it. So this is a density map. It has, if you use like a optimized bandwidth, you get the bandwidth of six kilometers for the hill forts, which is actually saying quite a thing because it fits perfectly into Srebren's idea. Like people have described this, like the triangle of the hill forts and people have described them as being a center of protection and power because they had the passages through the up. But if you really look at this data set, you could say, well, this is a gateway function, but on the other side, they are not that many ways you can actually cross this territory. So you basically have to go through the up and also with the slope in there, you can't just settle everywhere. What we also see if we translate this data to a, this is an unweighted Voronoi tessellation and a Delani triangulation, so the associated one. And if we plot all other objects, so this is all other sites, which are graves, hordes, and lowland settlements. In total, it's about 280 of them. We actually don't really see hexagonal space orientation. What we see there, especially also with the density map is people just used the area that was available to them. So this is not necessarily an indicator of how these things work. And if we move on and think, take a bit closer look at the burials and the ideas of fortification associated with people with swords, we can look at scenar diagrams which are basically nearest neighbor circles. So this is a kind of a neat way of looking at space distribution and sometimes a bit easier to see. They have been generally interpreted as kind of spheres of influence. They're not much used in archeology though. So the point is I don't have any large scale excavation of sites and I want to point out this large circle with the number four that is actually the Heineburg and the dataset I used was compiled by a single person in the 80s published in the early 2000s. And at that time, the Heineburg was not considered to be a central site in the field culture. Today, people have even argued that it's an early form of urban city, but back then people did not know that. So I just want to point out how much progress in science will change your results at any time. So what we can see here, the few fortifications that have been dated to the Heineburg culture don't actually have that much connection with salt-bearing individuals. And I hope you can see this because it's the tiny green diamonds which are the salt graves or necropolis with salt graves. What we see though is if we have them, they tend to be located at the borders of these circles, which is probably I think the only like better connection about power because as you can see in the upper area, that's the area around tubing in, you can also see that they directly interconnect with other circles. While it is hard to see get dating and proper data on it, you can see that there's some kind of idea if you want to employ this idea that a salt-bearing individual might be a protector of space. Well, if we move on, because these people used to protect something and generally that's usually associated either with elites or the idea that the center of economy is based on mythology and trade of metals. What we see here is the distribution of all kinds of things that have been associated with the Shen Naparra 12 bronze production and it actually derives mostly from hordes. There's a few sides, like not a lot, like almost everything on the out is actually hordes, whereas like the findings outside of it are much more from settlements. So what we can see here, this is what originally sparked also this idea about advanced mythology and hill forts, but what I find particularly interesting is if you look at the bandwidth of the density estimation, which is about 37 kilometers. So it is much larger than any of the other spheres of influence that we could potentially create. So what we see here actually, this is more like a super regional phenomenon and it might actually point more towards the presence of not economic dominance, but the capability of getting more goods and being able to acquire more things actually. So to basically quickly sum up, and I hope it has not been too fast, we have this hypothesis. Use very traditional spatial methods, they have been used a lot in archeology. There's a lot you could consider about them in like the theoretical stance. And the point is, I also did a bit of experimentary statistics which says there's generally a weak spatial interaction between them. I did not go into this because of time today, but the point is that means everything we interpret, there's no causality, we just interpret what we believe. So if you look at this idea that there's a connection of salt bearing individuals and nearest neighbor circles, this might be an idea of territorial differentiation. It might be. However, there's no correlation between dated fortification and agglomeration of lowland settlements, as you could see in many of the maps I've presented. There's also no direct correlation with salt bearing individuals either. So this has to be tested, and metallurgy is probably more a sign of general increased productivity and not so much of actually having the presence of a hillfort of any source. So as this is like a really central hypothesis and like in the research on hillforts, I just would say that there's no conclusive evidence if we use these spatial or artifact data, and that we should think about how we interpret a hillfort, and that we just need to look for other variables. So we cannot just go on like this and employ traditional factors and social status things, but we should rather go back, look at all the material evidence and think about how they could differentiate themselves because they're a bit different among each other, but they actually not that different in the sense of how they are situated in a territory. So thank you for your attention.