Frontier, Contact Zone or No Man´s Land?

The rivers Thaya and Morava today define large parts of the border between Austria and the Czech Republic. In the past this border-region underwent serious transformations that culminated in the fall of the Iron Curtain. Fortunately the frontier has again become permeable for interaction, exchange and communication. Also for the Early Middle Ages serious transformation processes can be observed and depending on the context the Morava-Thaya-region is seen as frontier, as contact zone or as no man`s land, where in different periods different systems meet: For the 6th and 7th c. no real border can be seen. This changes in the 8thc., when a separation of different systems subsumed under the terms Slavic and Avar takes place. In the 9thc. there is the Carolingian Empire on the south-western and Great-Moravia on the north-eastern part. Due to the Hungarian wars and also because of ecological changes the region lives through regression in the 10th c. However only a few decades later new settlements flourish aside from the old centres. Finally in the 11th c. the region evolves to a border triangle between the Premyslid Moravia, the rpd Hungary and the Babenberg march. The proposed project aims to research these manifold transformations with an international team of specialists from both Austria and the Czech Republic regarding certain key questions: Where are settlements of the particular periods, how can they be characterized and how do they develop? How do the local humans interact and what kind of social systems can we observe? What can we learn about craft, trade, economy and communication by analysing material culture and technological attributes? Overall and within these questions we want to discuss where borders and where contact zones manifest and how they develop. Where are similarities or differences between several systems? Next to a quantitative collection of hitherto known archaeological sources, selected sites (e.g. Hohenau an der March, Pellendorf, Oberleiserberg, Bernhardtsthal, Lny, Mikulov, Kostice) will be investigated in detail to gain new insights on the region`s development in the Early Middle Ages. A combination of classical archaeological methods with modern and interdisciplinary GIS-analyses, anthropology, archaeometallurgy, geophysical prospection, surveys, archaeobotanical, archaeozoological and other scientific analyses etc. will lift the state of research that in particular on the Austrian side is rather poor onto a new and international level. Especially recent finds show the enormous potential that this region holds for archaeological research. The current call for proposals now offers the ideal opportunity to initiate bilateral archaeological research that in the past has not been possible in such an amount.

The project's aim was to study the archaeological development of the border-region between Moravia (CZ) and the "Weinviertel" region (AT) from the 7th/8th c. to the 11th/12th c. and to trace its transformation from a broad and ambiguous frontier-zone into a clearly defined borderline with differing realms on both sides. To achieve this, several case studies were carried out by an international team employing a broad spectrum of various scientific data and methods. The project has shown that from the 7th c. onwards the region was strongly influenced by various external and internal components. In the beginning, we can trace an early Slavic settlement as well as Slavic cremation burials, as uncovered in Bernhardsthal, from the 8th c. onwards. This burial ground holds the oldest burial mounds known so far from the medieval middle Danube region. Contemporaneous, inhumation cemeteries of a more Avarian influenced population can also be traced in the region. Furthermore, production sites of Avarian belt accessories, located at the very periphery of the kaghanate or even outside of it, could be discovered and investigated (Lany). In the 9th c. the region is situated at the periphery of the Carolingian Empire, whose easternmost outposts are marked by royal manors along the Danube. At the same time, it was on the periphery of the Moravian dominion. Sites and finds have shown that the region had much more in common with the northeastern territories regarding material culture and settlement patterns. This can be seen clearly by the material evidence from the settlement of Pellendorf which is also the largest early medieval settlement in the Weinviertel region to be archaeologically investigated. However, a clear boundary cannot be observed. Instead, the rivers Morava and Thaya seem to have been more connecting than dividing and the density of similar settlements on both sides is very high. In the 10th and first half of the 11th c. - after the fall of the Moravian principality - a strong Hungarian influence can be observed in the area around Oberleiserberg as shown by the material culture discovered there. However, the spectrum of finds and its interdisciplinary analyses show that the region was not isolated nor No Man's Land, but an area of exchange. Influences reaching from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea can be observed. Of course, the peripheral location caused that the rulers' power could not reach entirely all over the region which left space for individual developments and the aforementioned exchange. During the 11th c., the situation changes and castles like Mikulov were built along the Thaya and Morava river. They marked a boundary that now divided the realms of the Hungarian Kingdom and the Přemyslid Moravia from the Babenberg March.