The European Bronze Age (c. 2700–600 BC) was a time of social and demographic transformation. Shifts in ideological, economic, and political systems led to the emergence of social hierarchies across multiple regions on the continent. During this period, metals were heavily exploited and widely traded, fueling the rise of inequality. However, despite the importance of metal for building elite exchange networks, little is known about the mining communities where metals originated.
To understand how access to metal shaped the lives of people in the Bronze Age, The MARBAL project focused on prehistoric communities in the Apuseni Mountains of southwest Transylvania, Romania, which are amongst the richest gold and copper procurement zones in the world. Through using analysis of human skeletal remains, excavation at upland cemeteries, and isotopic analyses of human diet and mobility, MARBAL aimed to answer 3 major questions concerning (1) who was eligible for burial; (2) how social and biological inequalities intersected in this region, and (3) how communities interacted during the Bronze Age.
The two seasons of fieldwork and data collection by the ER included excavations at the upland cemetery of Rameț–Gugului, which provided valuable insight into the organization of tomb construction and architecture at a cemetery located in close proximity to the significant metal deposits in the Apuseni Mountains. Thirteen deposits of human skeletal remains were recovered during the 2019 season, providing new details about mortuary practices, funerary treatment, and social representation in upland cemeteries. Over the course of the project, skeletal analyses were conducted for individuals from seven Bronze Age sites in Alba County, incorporating sites from both the highlands and the lowlands. The data collected include information on age, sex, skeletal representation, pathology, and mortuary treatment. This osteoarchaeological database is a major contribution to archaeological understandings of the Bronze Age in the region as no systematic osteoarchaeological analyses have previously been conducted.
Finally, MARBAL has also conducted the first major isotopic study of diet in the Apuseni Mountain region, an area where no isotopic work on diet has previously been undertaken for the Bronze Age. Over the course of the project, analyses of δ13C and δ15N from both human (N=40) and faunal (N=28) bone collagen, as well as δ13C and δ18O from human tooth enamel carbonate (N=22) were conducted at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. These samples encompass a number of contexts frequently used in archaeological comparisons, including the uplands and the lowlands, cemeteries and settlements, and the Early and Late Bronze Age, allowing for the examination of differentiation in diet and mobility synchronically and diachronically. Combining these isotopic analyses with the data on age, sex, skeletal completion, dental completion, pathology, and mortuary treatment from the newly developed regional osteoarchaeological databases allows MARBAL to situate the new project data within a broader biocultural landscape.
The project achieved all of its major research objectives: osteoarchaeological analysis of individuals buried in Bronze Age cemeteries, excavations at the site of Rameț–Gugului, and isotopic analysis of diet and mobility for Bronze Age communities in the Apuseni Mountain region.
