Sociocultural and Demographic Change in Villages on the Great Hungarian Plain, c. 4500-3600 BCE

Within European prehistory, two topics have garnered much scholarly and popular attention – the shift from hunting and gathering to farming and the appearance of early complex societies. Subsequently, less interest has been aimed at understanding the millennia-long trajectory of villages between these two phenomena. This dissertation does just that by examining the shifting patterns of ancient villages on the Great Hungarian Plain during the Early and Middle Copper Age, c.4500-3600 BCE. The research takes a multi-scalar and multi-faceted research approach to investigate the archaeologically rich Körös River Basin in eastern Hungary. At the regional scale, I analyzed the Neolithic and Copper Age settlement patterns to reveal how the social landscape transformed from one focused on large, nucleated centers to a dispersed series of small villages. At the local scale, I conducted archaeological fieldwork, including survey, surface collection, geophysical prospection, and excavation to demonstrate how village dynamics changed in the Copper Age. Specifically, I focused on settlements of the Bodrogkeresztúr culture period (c.4300-4000 BCE), for which very little is known, as most information has come solely from cemeteries. Additionally, I used AMS radiocarbon dates obtained from multiple sites to improve the absolute chronology of the Copper Age in the region. The research demonstrates that the social and cultural changes during the Early and Middle Copper Age in the Körös Basin were tied to a significant population decline throughout the Great Hungarian Plain that echoed across Southeastern Europe into the 4th millennium.