Aunjetitz Culture (Early Bronze Age)

[Frans_Jozef]

Named after a Bohemian location, this cultural province situated in the Early Bronze Age spans the period 2300-1500BC and from it Czechian kernel it expended over Slowakia, Poland, Eastern Germany till the eastern flanks of Niedersachsen.

Carl Schuchardt in Vorgeschichte von Deutschland points to the fact that its wares underwent a potpourri of influences with clear indications of wandering elements from north and central Germany, while Danubians and Pile Dwellers might have left some marks too.
The strongest ties though are made with the Corded Ware in Schlesien and on the Oder: the obsequies of delivering the body in a loam-pit with perpedicular shafts, a stone heap layed out in a sharp-edged rectangular "window" surrounding the body,the body itself in a protacted position on some distance of the window, perhaps it rested in a coffin covered up under the stone mass. Also the schlauchartige Henkelkrügen and Blumentopfbechern hint on Corded Ware connection, although the decoration is intensified.

[Frans_Jozef]

Aunjetitz soarded higly the metal foundries of tin and copper and made it foremost for it great hoards of bronze objects to an important conception in protohistoric archaeology as a metallurgical province.
While the Beaker folk innovated the copper workings to bronze and produced wooden hilts attached by rivets, the people of Aunjetiz added on blades solid metal hilts(casting-on method).
Aesthetic concerns and quite manipulative playing up the urges of chieftains and warrior classes to adorn themselves with status-imposing goods, they produced silver-shining blades by enriching them with tin.
More limited as a speciality in the Eastern Alpine region was the ösenring or neck-ring, transport by canoes this ornamental iten winded up along the Danube to the northern halve of today's Czech Republic and Central Germany.
Still, weird as it sounds commodities were rarely traded and usually for exchange of status kits.
In stead bronze was accumulated locally in what K.A.Wardle called a potlach economy for the purpose of some ritualistic deposition.

[Frans_Jozef]

Their potteries were initially poor and wretched, sometimes touched by stilistic animal representations,
later cups and jars with concave necks on which a ornamentated grips are attached on become commonplace artefacts.
Greyish-black and well-polished and softly rounded as they are, the design betrays Rössen and Linear Pottery heritage and Schuchardt names Thüringen, Oberschlesien, Bohemia and Moravia as old vestiges of the Danubian culture and orientation areas of the Aunjetitz columns of settlers.

[Frans_Jozef]

The Aunjetitz people were medium to high-skulled, the outline a broad ellipsoid form(Schildform) with a broad planely arching/steepish and high forehead, flattened parientals and narrowing occiput.
The chin is narrow and pointy;the upper jaw is narrow, the mandible high placed and showing slight prognathy.
The nose is long and prominent, the nasion depression deep.
In general their skulls were not as long and narrow(though with jutting occiput) as Corded Ware people and somewhat higher-vaulted than the Megalithic types of NW Germany.
The high vault and somewhat broadening of the skull is probably adopted by intermingling with Danubians and the Taurid element in Bell Beaker folks and Pile Dwellers, parallel to the Corded Ware who in the beginning tended more to orthocephaly.
Cautioned, it opens the possibility to acknowledge the bulk of Agrippa's North Mediterranids as descendants of these Bronze Age partly mediterreneanized(Pile Dwellers contained also a definte Med. strain!) Nordic subforms.

[Agrippa]

I thought about many possibilities regarding the variants between Nordid and Mediterranid and it seems to be very likely that at different times and in different regions mixture took place if there was ever a clear border.

But I think that just genetic research will lead to hard results. What I hope for is that this research will be possible soon and financed of course...

Although even I, a very interested person in such topics, admitt that there are more important researches to finance at the moment.

So we will have a long time to guess around in the meantime.

[Dr. Solar Wolff]

Am I wrong or did Coon say the Aunjetitz people cremated their dead? If so, how do we know what they looked like?

[Agrippa]

After the Polish anthropologist B. Miszkiewicz, the typological composition of a Aunjetitz population of Tomice:

Keep in mind how difficult it partly is to distinguish Nordid from (especially North) Mediterranid if working with (especially poor) skeletal remains, the terminology is that of the Polish schools, for which Lapponoid = Alpinoid and Armenoid = Taurid in general:


Whats obvious is the practical absense, very low percentage for other elements - Nordomediterranid dominated this Corded influenced group obviously, Tomice deviated insofar from other Aunjetitzers since the Nordid element was stronger. The first value comes from an analysis of the average values, the 2nd from individual analysis. In other series of the Aunjetitz group is according to Miszkiewicz et al. the Nordid element weaker, the Cromagnid/Palaeeuropid higher (25-35 percent over time), the Mediterranid (or better Mediterranoid) is still dominant (50-55 percent). Dinaroid-Armenoid varies (Polish used Armenoid often for Dinarid too) at a high level with 10-20 percent over time.

The Nordid element seems to come rather from Corded groups and the Dinaroid from Bell Beakers.