The Research Continues...
In 2018, Dr. Danielle Riebe received an NSF Senior Grant in Archaeology (BCS-1827362) to fund the next phase of PIPP research. With funding for three years, PIPP officially began work in the summer of 2019 with Riebe as Principal Investigator.
Riebe leads an international, collaborative team of American and Hungarian scholars and students in an effort to investigate how everyday interactions impacted the formation, maintenance, and evolution of socio-cultural boundaries. PIPP focuses on the Late Neolithic period (roughly 7,000-6,500 years ago) on the Great Hungarian Plain, but its findings have direct relevance to contemporary issues of social interaction, boundaries, and the definition and demarcation of borders. Previous studies on these issues have focused on how regional cultural variation is shaped by environmental and economic changes, but these studies underestimate the active role that people play in the creation of their own social identities. By focusing on household-scale interactions, PIPP is examining how daily interactions between people influence larger regional socio-cultural boundaries. The project is contributing to a better understanding of how connectivity impacts and structures concepts of self and identity – issues that are especially relevant in the extremely globalized world that we live in today.
From a research perspective, PIPP advances the well-established consortium of collaborative Hungarian-American archaeological research projects that has been active in the region for the past 40 years (see Related Projects). In addition to promoting women in the sciences, the project is furthering the STEM fields by combining diverse approaches to studying the past, including anthropology, geology, geochemistry, botany, zoology, osteology, and sociology, and it offers new research and training opportunities for students and scholars.
In the first phase of PIPP (2013-2016), researchers successfully reconstructed the prehistoric regional interactions between two archaeologically defined cultures, the Tisza and Herpály. They also modelled the presence of a strictly enforced socio-cultural boundary during the Late Neolithic (see PIPP Phase I). However, due to limited research on Herpály settlements, it has remained unclear how local-scale interactions fed into these regional networks.
In the current phase of PIPP, Hungarian and American researchers are working together to investigate a Herpály tell site, Csökmő-Káposztás-domb, that is located near the modeled Herpály and Tisza cultural boundary. Preliminary magnetometric survey at the site identified subsurface features, including houses, fortification ditches, wells, and storage pits. Guided by the magnetometric and surface survey data, the PIPP team will excavate selected households and collect materials that will grant insight into past interactive behaviors, including the ceramics that people made, the tools that they used, and the food that they ate. From these materials, the team will be able to reconstruct past interactions at multiple scales and determine the degree of connectivity between households within the settlement of Csökmő-Káposztás-domb. Innovative techniques, including laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), portable X-ray fluorescence (p-XRF), and social network analysis (SNA) will be used to model these multi-scalar interactions. The results from the survey and excavation will be compared with information from neighboring, previously excavated Tisza sites in order to assess how inter-site interactions and access to exchange networks at the household level influenced the formation and maintenance of regional cultural boundaries during the Late Neolithic.
Read the PIPP Squeak for the latest results from the 2019 field season.
Riebe leads an international, collaborative team of American and Hungarian scholars and students in an effort to investigate how everyday interactions impacted the formation, maintenance, and evolution of socio-cultural boundaries. PIPP focuses on the Late Neolithic period (roughly 7,000-6,500 years ago) on the Great Hungarian Plain, but its findings have direct relevance to contemporary issues of social interaction, boundaries, and the definition and demarcation of borders. Previous studies on these issues have focused on how regional cultural variation is shaped by environmental and economic changes, but these studies underestimate the active role that people play in the creation of their own social identities. By focusing on household-scale interactions, PIPP is examining how daily interactions between people influence larger regional socio-cultural boundaries. The project is contributing to a better understanding of how connectivity impacts and structures concepts of self and identity – issues that are especially relevant in the extremely globalized world that we live in today.
From a research perspective, PIPP advances the well-established consortium of collaborative Hungarian-American archaeological research projects that has been active in the region for the past 40 years (see Related Projects). In addition to promoting women in the sciences, the project is furthering the STEM fields by combining diverse approaches to studying the past, including anthropology, geology, geochemistry, botany, zoology, osteology, and sociology, and it offers new research and training opportunities for students and scholars.
In the first phase of PIPP (2013-2016), researchers successfully reconstructed the prehistoric regional interactions between two archaeologically defined cultures, the Tisza and Herpály. They also modelled the presence of a strictly enforced socio-cultural boundary during the Late Neolithic (see PIPP Phase I). However, due to limited research on Herpály settlements, it has remained unclear how local-scale interactions fed into these regional networks.
In the current phase of PIPP, Hungarian and American researchers are working together to investigate a Herpály tell site, Csökmő-Káposztás-domb, that is located near the modeled Herpály and Tisza cultural boundary. Preliminary magnetometric survey at the site identified subsurface features, including houses, fortification ditches, wells, and storage pits. Guided by the magnetometric and surface survey data, the PIPP team will excavate selected households and collect materials that will grant insight into past interactive behaviors, including the ceramics that people made, the tools that they used, and the food that they ate. From these materials, the team will be able to reconstruct past interactions at multiple scales and determine the degree of connectivity between households within the settlement of Csökmő-Káposztás-domb. Innovative techniques, including laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), portable X-ray fluorescence (p-XRF), and social network analysis (SNA) will be used to model these multi-scalar interactions. The results from the survey and excavation will be compared with information from neighboring, previously excavated Tisza sites in order to assess how inter-site interactions and access to exchange networks at the household level influenced the formation and maintenance of regional cultural boundaries during the Late Neolithic.
Read the PIPP Squeak for the latest results from the 2019 field season.