From the shambles of the old? Social and demographic change in Copper Age Hungary an afternoon with Billy Ridge
Brown Bag Series
February 13, 2019
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
The Copper Age (5th and 4th millennia BCE) in Eastern Europe was a time in which the widespread adoption of metallurgy and a series of large-scale population shifts substantially transformed the social landscape. However, there has not been a whole lot of dedicated scholarship on the period and it is often cast as the murky transition between the better understood Neolithic villages and complex societies of the Bronze Age.
In this talk, Billy will discuss his research in Eastern Hungary on the Middle Copper Age (4000-3500 BCE), Bodrogkeresztúr culture group. He argues that a major shift in settlement patterns, along with a few other changes, challenges the current narrative of uninterrupted social and cultural continuity from the preceding Tiszapolgár culture group of the Early Copper Age. Billy will discuss this along with the survey work he conducted in the Körös region last summer and the upcoming fieldwork he plans on doing this summer.
The Graduate Anthropology and Geography Association (GAGA) sponsors a year-long series of talks, workshops, and roundtables among our faculty and graduate students. Talks may be a student 'testing out' a presentation, a student or faculty member working through a challenge in their research, or an informal sharing of each other's research. We offer a series of hands-on workshops geared to improve our teaching, applying for jobs, or becoming better presenters. Roundtables are opportunities for graduate students to get together and discuss challenges and solutions for difficult issues from managing the classroom to balancing work and our social lives.
If you or someone you know would like a platform to share their research, please get in touch with Kim Garza (kgarza4@uic.edu), Kendall Hills (khills2@uic.edu), or Billy Ridge (wridge2@uic.edu) to discuss other speaking opportunities.
Date posted
Jan 16, 2019
Date updated
Feb 5, 2019