The celtic cemetery of Mannersdorf in its cultural context

The complex problem of intercultural connections between differnet regions in the Early Latène Period can hardly be solved in a single, short scholarly project. Thus, a combination of several projects and the use of various methods is being suggested to accieve the maximum advance in this research topic. This project having following main goals in mind: - The one main goal is to get new and important material from the cemetery of Mannersdorf/Leithagebirge to investigate the structure of the society. It is very important to study as many objects as possible with natural science methodes. So it is possible to get enormous knowledge about the used techniques and the economic basics like ressources and deposits. - The implementation of a new tool (Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma reaction cell mass spectrometry) for almost destruction free analysis of (pre)historic findings to gain significantly enhanced information. So in this part, the results of the archeological anlysis will be compared with the statistical analysis of the Strontium-Isotope measurements. Main Aim of this project is to set new priority in the research of the "celtic" inhabitants of the area Austria- Hungaria-Slovacia and the question of migration of this people. The important innovation in this project is to take this further and enhance the anthropological data by classifying the skeletal remains by stable isotope data in order to identify groups of different origins. If this is succesful, and the result then show clear correlations with different aspects, we have a powerful new tool with which to investigate the structure of the society or societies using the cemetery. The results would allow to start new research relating to the ethnogenetic process of the different "Celtic" tribes and their "multiethnicity" (relating of the membership of single persons to different tribes), which was as yet only speculation based on the archaeological material and informations from roman or greek authors.

This project is combined of two parts: 1) The archaeological analysis of the "celtic" cemetery of Mannersdorf/Lgb. 2) Naturalscience based analysis Ad 1) The work of this part was sucessfull finished with the complete presentation of this cemetery. Beneath the description of all sources (catalog, plates,..) the typological-chronological analysis was finished, which leads to the dating of the graves. The types of the artefacts have been split into certain variations to compare some distinctive marks of them. So it was possible to observe the development of the artefacts. All the details were put into a data set. The following statistical analysis (to get an idea of the rank of the single graves and the cemetery) shows e.g. the index of the raw material, the distribution of age and sex in the cemetery. It was also possible to propound groups for the costumes of the buried people. We could show several art historical aspects in comparisation to the surrounding cultures of this age. One of the main results was to establish the group of the " "Latène B1 Elitegräber" (La Tène B1 élite burials). These so equipped burials can be called the "Upper class" of the late Iron age. They are found from Champagne to Switzerland to Hungaria. For this area the term "Central European Corridor" should be established. So we are able to get the approach of a presentation of the groups of people buried in this cemetery in the European context. Ad 2) Serveral natural science based analyses (anthropology, metallurgy, material analysis, Petrochemical analysis, ) complete the view at the archaeological sources. Analyses of iron- and goldsmith technology reflect the knowledge technical standard of that time. Also material based analyses of bronze and ceramics show the distribution and origin of resources. European wide analyses of fibulas (material) and bones (Sr-Iostopes), which could be done with LA-ICP MS (BOKU Vienna), have been carried out. It was possible to measure 97 Bronze fibulas from Austria, Swiss, France and Czech. This also includes 123 samples of bones and dental enamel from this countries. So we could watch the distribution of bronze alloys in central Europe and a certain mobility of people.