A research team headed by the author has systematically visited the known Bronze Age sites of Hungary and conducted metal detecting surveys in order to locate and salvage as many as possible of the Bronze Age treasures still hidden in the ground. This book offers a fascinating glimpse into this long bygone age through discovered hoards, bringing us

Deeply stratified settlements are a distinctive site type featuring prominently in diverse later prehistoric landscapes of the Old World. Their massive materiality has attracted the curiosity of lay people and archaeologists alike. Nowadays a wide variety of archaeological projects are tracking the lifestyles and social practices that led to the building-up of such superimposed artificial hills. However, prehistoric tell-dwelling communities are too often approached from narrow local perspectives or discussed within strict time- and culture-specific debates. There is a great potential to learn from such ubiquitous archaeological manifestations as the physical outcome of cross-cutting dynamics and comparable underlying forces irrespective of time and space. This volume tackles tells and tell-like sites as a transversal phenomenon whose commonalities and divergences are poorly understood yet may benefit from cross-cultural comparison. Thus, the book intends to assemble a representative range of ongoing theory – and science –based fieldwork projects targeting this kind of sites. With the aim of encompassing a variety of social and material dynamics, the volume’s scope is diachronic – from the Earliest Neolithic up to the Iron Age–, and covers a very large region, from Iberia in Western Europe to Syria in the Middle East. The core of the volume comprises a selection of the most remarkable contributions to the session with a similar title celebrated in the European Association of Archaeologists Annual Meeting held at Barcelona in 2018. In addition, the book includes invited chapters to round out underrepresented areas and periods in the EAA session with relevant research programmes in the Old World. To accomplish such a cross-cultural course, the book takes a case-based approach, with contributions disparate both in their theoretical foundations – from household archaeology, social agency and formation theory – and their research strategies – including geophysical survey, microarchaeology and high-resolution excavation and dating.

Since the fall of communism, archaeological research in Central and Eastern European countries has seen a large influx of new projects and ideas, fueled by bilateral contacts, Europe-wide circulation of scholars and access to research literature. This volume is the first study which relates these issues specifically to Bronze Age Archaeology.

An outstandingly important golden treasure of the Late Bronze Age was discovered in the final days of August 1929 at Szent Vid in Velem, located on the eastern spur of the Alps. The jewellery pieces made with rare and unusual metalworking techniques had been hidden under a stone near present-day Szentkút Spring. The diadem and the pectoral ornaments were probably part of the costume ornaments of a lady from a high-ranking family who lived during the Urnfield period in the Late Bronze Age. As a result of exciting archaeological detective work, the author was able to establish the exact location of the findspot and the find circumstances, mainly through the meticulous examination of the previously unpublished correspondence between Baron Kálmán Miske who had excavated the site and his colleagues, Ferenc Tompa and Amália Mozsolics. The book also describes in detail the results of the conservation and restoration work performed between 2004 and 2006, when the finds were rigorously examined, in part using non-invasive techniques.

"This book is a copublication of The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and The Field Museum"--Copyright page.

The treasures described and analyzed here come from a wide range of different contexts; in terms of geography and culture as well as historic--or prehistoric--period. The treasures range from Ice-Age figurines of central and eastern Europe to African gold, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the sensational discoveries of Egyptologist in the tomb of Tutakhamen. Many of the most well-known treasure troves were originally put together as burial furnishings, and for this reason they tell us much of what our forebears believed about death and the afterlife, and how provision was mde for the wellbeing of the dead in their journey onwards.