Early neolithic lifeways in Moravia and Western Slovakia: Comparing archaeological, osteological and isotopic data from cemetery and settlement burials of the linearbandkeramik (LBK)

In the Anthropologie journal in 2008 (46, 2-3), Marek Zvelebil and an international team of experts presented the results from the Vedrovice bioarchaeology project, which detailed the life-histories of individuals buried at the early LBK cemetery. In combining a range of different bioarchaeological methodologies, this project was able to show that the community buried at Vedrovice was formed of a diverse and heterogenous population, leading lives influenced to different degrees by the transition to farming. Drawing on a similar approach - that of using bioarchaeological evidence fully integrated in its archaeological context - a project called The first farmers of central Europe: diversity in LBK lifeways was begun in 2008 and ran for four years. Sampling sites across the southern distribution of the LBK for isotopic analysis (carbon, nitrogen, and strontium isotopes primarily) and including osteological study, this project concentrated on issues of regional and site-based diversity in diet, mobility and burial. In this paper, we present a comparison of the Moravian and western Slovakian results from this project, including new data from the cemetery and settlement burials at Vedrovice, as well as from the Nitra cemetery and the settlements of Těšetice-Kyjovice and Brno-Starý Lískovec/Nový Lískovec. Like Zvelebil et al. (2008), we find communities formed of heterogenous identities, though we suggest that such diversity was also found alongside evidence for shared practice at different scales of human life.