Mace or Sceptre? An exceptional Early Bronze Age male burial from the area of Lake Fertő

Melis, Eszter and Mrenka, Attila and Savanyú, Bálint (2025) Mace or Sceptre? An exceptional Early Bronze Age male burial from the area of Lake Fertő. HUNGARIAN ARCHAEOLOGY, 14 (1). pp. 12-24. ISSN 2416-0296

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Abstract

A newly discovered Bronze Age cemetery, remarkable for the quantity and diversity of copper and bronze objects, was unearthed on the outskirts of Nagycenk during the excavations in the path of the then-future M85 motorway in 2017–2018. The inhumation graves and their finds can be attributed to the Gáta–Wieselburg culture, which extended into the areas of today’s Western Hungary, Eastern Austria, and Southwest Slovakia between 2200/2100 and 1600/1500 BC. Grave S153, the focus of this paper, contained a unique artefact, a copper- or bronze-covered stone mace head the grave was radiocarbon dated to 2022–1892 BC. In addition to presenting a reconstruction of the burial, the study includes a detailed evaluation of the artefact, which remains without parallel in the European Bronze Age.

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