Project title: Community dynamics and identity constructs in the eastern Carpathian Basin during the Late Iron Age. The impact of human mobility;

Project acronym: CommunityID;

Project code: PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2016-0353;

Keywords: Late Iron Age, Eastern Carpathian Basin, Identity construct, Human mobility, Social dynamics;

Project leader: Aurel Rustoiu;

Project team: Mariana Egri, Sándor Berecki, Andreea Drăgan, Iosif Vasile Ferencz, Dan Lucian Vaida, Szilárd Gal, Georgeta El Susi, Beatrice Ciută, Andrei Georgescu, Adrian Cătălin Căsălean;

Project duration: 2017-2019;

The project proposes a novel, multi-disciplinary approach, aiming to investigate a wider range of contexts that shaped the dynamics of identity constructs in various communities from the eastern Carpathian Basin during the early and middle stages of the Late Iron Age. These include: settlement and household organization, relationships with local environment, degree of economic specialization, diet and culinary practices, regional and pan-regional connectivities.

The region witnessed significant demographic, social and cultural changes during this period, caused by the arrival of Celtic groups from Western and Central Europe, thus providing a relevant field of investigation. The project will focus on different types of sites (settlements, farmsteads, manufacturing centres, cemeteries, sacred places) from four micro-regions, each having distinct social, demographic, economic and environmental characteristics. The identified micro-regional patterns and trends will be compared at different chronological stages to assess the impact of human mobility as well as the degree of influence exerted by local and regional networks of interaction on the construction and expression of collective identity across the entire region in question.

The project will take into consideration a wide range of archaeological evidence (artefacts and structures, geophysical, pedological and biochemical traces of human activities, including agriculture, animal husbandry, manufacturing and extraction of raw materials, human, animal and botanical remains, habitat organization and relationship with the environment). Thus it will use a multi-disciplinary approach involving analytical methods from several sciences (archaeology, physical anthropology, geophysics, mineralogy, biochemistry, pedology, palynology, archaeozoology, archaeobotanics); demographic and statistical analysis and digital landscape and environmental modelling will also be used.