Spreading the news The role of individuals, social networks and sociocultural variability in the sp

The existence of an independent Copper Age has been long debated. In the 20th century, Colin Renfrew’s large-scale narrative connected the beginnings of metallurgy and the emergence of social inequality to this period. Andrew Sherratt summarized Copper Age innovations in his model of the secondary products revolution, based on which later great civilizations rose.

Later, many postprocessualist archaeologists argued against large-scale narratives and pointed out that there is a need for local stories and studying individuals. After the development of new analytical methods, many tools appeared in the 21st century that allowed a detailed description of individual lifeways.

The Early and Middle Copper Age in Hungary is a good illustration of how the concept of archaeological culture, which is still used as an analytical unit, covers sociocultural diversity. This talk will demonstrate how we can write a narrative while maintaining individual and local diversity and build a multiscalar model from the individual level through communities up to the regional scale by combining multidisciplinary analytical methods. As we take into consideration the differences in material culture, mobility, access to resources at the individual and community levels and the different local traditions, we can reveal a colourful, mosaic and diverse cultural picture, which is in stark contrast to the previous, culturally homogeneous picture, and is an evidence of the success of a vivid network organized by small-scale communities. This contribution will summarize the results of our team’s research, which has been going on for more than ten years, and our next steps.

Zsuzsanna Siklósi