| Popis: |
At the beginning of the Bronze Age and in contrast to the Final Neolithic the landscapes of major entries to the Alps and the big alpine valleys became hot spots of human settlement activities. The reasons for that profound change in the settlement landscape are yet rather speculative but seem to be connected with the maintenance and establishment of intensified trade and the access to alpine resources such as metals, pasture or wood. However, the alpine foreland was not abandoned as the scarce record of Bronze Age pile dwellings might suggest. Interesting spatio-temporal dynamics can be witnessed in the overall settlement system in the Northwestern alpine region. Over the course of the Bronze Age there are reoccurring shifts for several kilometers of core areas of settlement activities. Those shifts seem to emerge especially during times when changes also took place in the social, economic or ideological realm of the Bronze Age communities, but sociaoecological reasons are also quite likely. Methods of archaeological population reconstruction such as 14-C SPD (summed probability densities), site counts/densities and the use of palaeoenvironmental proxies show ongoing human activities during the Bronze Age and do not indicate any severe popu- lation decline in the course of the witnessed spatial shifts of settlement activities. The social transformations that can be inferred from changing material culture and burial rites or the relocation of settlement core areas seemingly only had minor effects on the demographic development of the northwestern alpine region. Based on those findings we like to discuss possible social, economic or environmental drivers for the documented dynamics and present an interpretation of those developments in the local and over-regional context of the European Bronze Age. |
