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Warriors and Traders of the Hallstatt World of Central Europe and the Iron Age Balkans

This chapter covers the area of southern Pannonia and northern to central Balkans. In the Early Iron Age it was contact zone between the Hallstatt Cultural Complex and the Balkan Iron Age cultures. Communities in this area although they belonged to different cultural spheres developed unique regional network thus creating link that made possible long distance contacts between Central European Iron Age communities and highly developed cultures of Mediterranean – primarily Greece and Italy. Since this network was established, maintained and operated by local elites – the best reflection of this phenomenon are their graves. This is why we will present different communities in this area through their elite graves. Lavish inventories of prestigious goods discovered in these graves illustrate profoundly intertwined communication network that must have included people, and goods, as well as technologies and ideas. Distribution of these objects outlines routes along which such communication passed. It also points to special nodes of power in this network such as the Požega Valley or the Glasinac area which where centres of cultural transfer in this area. Beside already mentioned contacts between North and South, this regional network also functioned as sort of cultural hub including influences from Alpine world in the West, as well as Danubian region in the East. Our contribution presents elites that ruled over these cultural crossroads.

Hallstatt, Iron Age, Balkans, warriors, trade, Kaptol, Donja Dolina, Glasinac, Trebenište

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