Archaeologists Discover Vast, Complex Prehistoric Society That Rewrites History

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of a highly complex prehistoric society in Central Europe that thrived in a region experts previously believed was abandoned in 1600 BC. This sophisticated society was one of the “major cultural centers of southern Europe” and exerted “regional scale influences across the continent and into the Mediterranean,” they report in a new study. 

The Pannonian Basin is a region that centers on modern-day Hungary and touches upon multiple nations in Central Europe. Thousands of years ago, Bronze Age humans settled there and built a complex and influential society that lasted for centuries before it was mysteriously abandoned in 1600 BC. Ancient sites examined by experts show signs of depopulation over several decades, leading to the theory of a “regional scale collapse” and a relatively “abrupt end” for this prehistoric social order. However, the authors of a paper published this month in PLOS One write, based on a remote survey and excavations “a fully opposite trajectory can be identified–increased scale, complexity and density in settlement systems and intensification of long-distance networks.” Rather than disappear, ancient people adapted. 

“In many ways it provides a missing link,” lead author Barry Molloy of University College Dublin told Motherboard in an email. “We know that societies in Europe in the later second millennium BC were interacting at a continental scale. We also knew that material and symbols from this area were influential within Europe, but we had not identified the kind of sophisticated society that would be a driver in those communication networks. This find changes this.” 

Using a combination of satellite images from Google Maps and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2, as well as pedestrian fieldwork and small-scale excavations, the researchers report the identification of 100 new prehistoric sites in the Pannonian Basin encompassing 8,000 square kilometers. Many of these settlements are smaller than the “megaforts” that have previously been identified. 

The authors report evidence that these small settlements spread out from former centers that were abandoned, and reflect a shift from “intensive to extensive” settlement patterns. It has been difficult to pick these sites out until now, they wrote, because they were flat settlements with ditches instead of ramparts that could be more easily identified today. While changes in the region’s climate could explain some of this, the authors argue that this is “a context, rather than a cause, for social transformations,” and that “what collapsed was the political / ideological regimes, and widespread participation in these.”

While “many aspects of cultural practice are not newly identified” by the study, Molloy said, “it is the way they fit together to reveal a complex and well-organized society that is new.”

What was this society like? Our insight is currently somewhat limited, but the excavations to date offer some possible answers. Molloy explained that one fascinating element is how this society “downplayed hierarchies.” Excavation revealed sites that were bigger than others, with signs of management by a smaller group and spaces the researchers believe not everybody in the community could enter. 

“However, in the burials we find, everybody was treated relatively equally and there were few prestigious things—like metals—placed in burials,” Molloy said. “So overall, we can tell they had a complex political order and that in practice not everyone was regarded as the same, but at an ideological level, they aimed to downplay the importance of such divisions.”

Moreover, that there was such a large number of settlements in one area strongly suggests that they were interconnected and “shared resources,” according to Molloy. “This tells us we are looking at political units, or polities, that included many different settlements which in turn indicates the presence of relatively big and well-ordered entities.”

The team’s work is not finished. Molloy said that they plan to return to the sites in the Pannonian Basin and conduct more excavations where they believe dwellings may have been, and they will publish more geophysical and survey data as well as analysis from excavations.

“We often focus on the importance of urbanism in the development of complexity in prehistoric and early historic Europe,” he said. “These people who built these sites were no doubt aware of contemporary urban societies in the south, but they chose a very different way of building their settlements and managing how these served as building blocks for larger political units.

“This reminds us that the human story is full of different types of complexity and while urban systems hold up a mirror to our world today that we can more readily identify with, the past is full of other ways that people dealt with sustaining populous societies.”