Abstract
The prehistoric landscape is always primarily a social landscape. It is not just a scene, a stage for interpersonal interactions, but as such an entry into people's thought patterns and actions.
The paper considers the possible use of the landscape in terms of deposition of hoards on an example of the Late and Final Bronze Age (BD - Ha B2/3, Bronze Final I-IIIb). This is a period of significant social stratification; the Late and Final Bronze Ages belongs to the rank of chiefdom.
The wealth of the privileged chief comes from the redistributive economy, when the chief is considered as its coordinator, who controls production, trade and communications. Elites not only decide on the movement of commodities and thus the population, but also initiates the creation of higher social and landscape structures such as hillforts.
Hillforts are often controlling entrances to the transit landscape. In the monitored region, several corridors of long-distance routes pass through it - from the North of the Baltic Sea in a direction to the South to the Adriatic Sea (and vice versa) the Amber Road; from the North-West (and vice versa) then the Pannonian-Elbe Road.
Commodities, goods and people flowed along these paths, which are not just lines connecting important points in the landscape, but also meditators of cultural impulses. Transport corridors that were discovered on the basis of data of the projects of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic NAKI-I and NAKI-II (with the help of airborne laser scanning, old maps and archaeological excavations), are also presented.
A key element is the territorialization of space, which according to R. D.
Sack, is not inherent to people, but a comprehensive strategy of individuals or social groups, which has the task of influencing or controlling various resources (people, relationships or phenomena) by defining a geographical area and enforcing control over it. Territoriality is one form of human communication.
However, the territory is structured with respect both to the natural and to the ancestral landscape, social memory plays a role. Long-distance roads are then controlled with the help of significant points in the landscape.
The landscape is marked by another important phenomenon, and that is the deposition of hoards. Their thesauration points to the respect of significant landscape structures such as the foothills of the mountains and the immediate vicinity of watercourses, but at the same time it is linked to prehistoric roads within the social landscape.
On the example of Moravia (ie. the eastern part of the Czech Republic), the deposition of hoards outside the traditional settlement oikumene of both cultures of the Late and Final Bronze Age and in the subsequent Iron Age is discussed. The deposits are not outside the populated area or directly in their centers, but on the border of populated and uninhabited territory.
For these landscapes, terms such as liminal landscape, marginal landscape, offsite landscape, uncultivated areas, or outfields, which collectively describe areas without intensive cultivation (mountains, forests, swamps, etc.), are used. Such landscapes have long been perceived as unused and socially uninteresting, but today they are relatively widely discussed.
Deposits at border sites, often just near the hillforts, are observed especially in the Final Bronze Age, most often related to mountain passes. In general, the landscape is a place of supply and demand, the intensity of human acts increases with the places that are inhabited, however, people always know the landscape and use it (at least partially) as a whole.
Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, places with sparsely populated areas and specific acts of human action are worth noting. Natural, remote places can also act as a kind of interface of worlds, sanctuaries.
The non-agrarian landscape is then timelessly sacral and mystical, it has a specific genius loci. Places in such a landscape have a long tradition and remain in the consciousness of prehistoric people for many generations.
In these places, the hoards are stored not only as a one-time act, but repeatedly (hoards concentrations from one period are created - the so-called hoard fields). Natural landscape boundaries, between individual zones of inhabited and uninhabited landscapes, can then be called as ecotones - places, richer in relationships, contrasts, paradoxes and rites of passages, but they are difficult to grasp because they belong to more worlds.
The paper summarizes theoretical knowledge about marginal landscapes and confronts them with the model of landscape use in the Late and Final Bronze Age in Moravia. Moreover, it brings a new methodology for the study of deposition through the concept of the so-called plurality of values.