Environmental Archaeology in Transdanubia [antikvár]

ForewordIn some cultures, the newborn infant is set on the ground as an expression of whence new life comes from and to whom it belongs. This custom, reflecting the very first meeting with Mother Earth, may seem a little barbaric to us - however, in fortunate cases, it is followed by many other encounters of this type, some of which determine one's entire life since the landscape irrevocably engraves the features of the natural and man-made environment on the child's soul. Growing up in the heartland of Transdanubia, the landscape of "sweet Pannónia" moulded me into a Transdanubian, to whom beauty is synonymous with the magnificent basalt organs of the Tapolca Basin and the Tihany Peninsula. Neither have I forgotten the people among whom I grew up in this wonderful corner of the world. And no matter where I lived after leaving Transdanubia, I always carried the love for my personal homeland in my heart during my wanderings. This personal heritage drew me back and this is why I gladly accepted the task of investigating the environmental history of Transdanubia with my colleagues.What can be more intoxicating for a geologist from Transdanubia than to study the past of his own homeland? I became a witness to how the vegetation, the fauna, and the soil were transformed during the past twenty thousand years in the regions of Transdanubia. Following the sedimentological, isotope chemical, palaeobotanical and palaeozoological analysis and evaluation of the samples extracted from the Transdanubian sediment catchment basins, we could reconstruct how bygone communities transformed the landscape of my homeland, what scars and wounds they inflicted on the land during their daily battles for livelihood, and how they acted as if they were the eternal owners of the land, unaware that they were in fact possessed by the land.The findings presented in this volume speak for themselves. The wealth of new and precise data presented here have set the environmental and cultural history of Transdanubia in a new perspective and have shed fresh light on the intricate relationship between the environment and the peoples living here from the Mesolithic to the Ottoman period. Suffice it here to mention but one point: we now have a better understanding of how the communities of the Transdanubian Linear Pottery culture were able to prosper in this fertile region and how they could colonise all of Central Europe within a few generations, carrying with them a tangible piece of their cultural cradle: the Szentgál radiolarite of their homeland.Throughout this research project, I felt that this was more than the average archaeogeological and palaeoenvironmental investigation, and this feeling13