Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Pivotal Ponies: Horses in the Development of Emergent Political Institutions of Bronze Age Hungary

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Under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Earle, Katherine Kanne will analyze archaeological data collected from seven settlements and six cemeteries of the Bronze Age (2800-800 BC) in Hungary. Bronze Age societies in Hungary showed early sociopolitical complexity for Europe including the development of regional chiefdoms with marked social stratification, an extensive trading system, new metallurgical technologies, and the rise of a powerful warrior class. A major shift in horse use appears to have occurred as these sociopolitical transformations were underway. Based on some isolated cases, people stopped eating horses and they increased in both size and number. Based on Kanne's pilot studies, some people began to ride horses in this period and bury them in the floors of their houses. This research seeks to reconstruct how people may have changed their conceptions of horses and then reoriented their raising and use of horses in attempts to affect political, economic, and social change in Bronze Age Hungary. Horses use and production are valuable for studying the emergence of the political economy, complex societies, and social inequalities because horses can be used to accumulate, maintain, and demarcate wealth, power, and control. This research tests the hypothesis that during the Bronze Age in Hungary, aspiring leaders initiated intensive horse breeding to mount an expanding warrior class, to provide swift and protected transport for trade, and to create an additional commodity for exchange. As a result of this scenario, horse ownership and riding would have become limited to the elite. To test the hypotheses, Kanne will institute an integrative and comparative research study that combines zooarchaeological, stable isotope, osteological, and spatial analyses from settlements and cemeteries throughout Bronze Age Hungary. Examination of multiple lines of evidence will reveal if people of this period were riding horses, if riding became tied to elite warriors as they sought political power, what cultural and economic significance horses held to different segments of these communities, and if horses were standardized into a special type for exchange.This research contributes to the study of European prehistory, adds to general theories of political economy, and advances a more theoretical orientation of human/animal studies in archaeology. The innovative methods employed in this project have the potential to document the earliest definitive physical evidence for horseback riding and should be of interest to scholars investigating the domestication of the horse and the beginnings of mounted use. Moreover, in a country still rich with horses and equestrians, this work will be disseminated to Hungarians in their own language in a translation of the dissertation and a scholarly article. The results may also be incorporated into exhibits at the museums which house the materials studied. Lastly, in the U.S. this research will be published as a dissertation, released as scholarly and popular articles, and presented at professional meetings and public lectures to further distribute the findings to the academic community and the general public.