Theory into practice: basic connections and stylistic affiliations of the Late Neolithic settlement at Pusztataskony-Ledence 1

Abstract

Despite being positioned in the western fringes of the Tisza culture’s occupation area, the Late Neolithic settlement at Pusztataskony-Ledence 1 is seemingly well separated from the communities of the Lengyel complex. The character of its archaeological record however, together with recent results in the research of connections between the two cultural complexes raises the possibility of an amalgamation of these traditions at some point. In 2016, a grant of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office allowed us to start a threeyear-long project, aimed to process the data gained at Pusztataskony over three seasons in order to reveal foreign cognitive elements in the archaeological record of the site other than the ones observed in the burials. To match possible population movement with the appearance of Lengyel type cultural traits and understand the situation observed here classical archaeological and bioarchaeological analyses had been carried out. The current study surveys the first results of the investigations focusing on the archaeological record from one of the house clusters in the settlement. The examinations include a basic typological and resource analysis of the lithics and a stylistic analysis of the ceramic material. The interpretation focuses on the site’s contact system as outlined by the archaeological record, on the ceramic inventory as a medium of everyday symbolic communication here, as well as on our recent understanding of the character of contacts between the Tisza and Lengyel populations in the Middle and Upper Tisza Region.