The biological reconstruction of the population of the Late Neolithic Lengyel culture of Alsónyék-Bátaszék

During the excavations prior to the construction of the M6 motorway between 2006 and 2009, an extensive settlement and nearly 2400 burials of the Late Neolithic-Early Copper Age Lengyel culture were found at the Alsónyék-Bátaszék site in south-eastern Transdanubia. The size of the site was not known at the beginning of the excavation and at the time of my application to the doctoral school and this choice of topic for the dissertation. It was also only much later that it became clear that the various excavation areas with different names belonged to the very same site and cemetery. Thus, the anthropological processing of the entire material would have significantly exceeded the temporal and
spatial limitations of a doctoral dissertation. Therefore, out of the excavated burials, I present the results of the anthropological examination of 862 graves found in the northern, 010/B excavation area. According to the currently accepted archaeological position, the people of the preceding Central European Linear Pottery culture played a decisive role in the formation of the Lengyel culture in Transdanubia, but the possibility of the influx of new ethnic groups (from the south) has also been raised. In the course of my work, I sought primarily the answer to this fundamental question through the morphometric, taxonomic and craniometric comparison of the biological anthropological finds of the Alsónyék cemetery. In addition, I carried out a detailed analysis of the demographics of those buried here, and I examined each pathological lesion and dental disease combined with frequency data. According to the demographic analysis, the population of Alsónyék has favourable mortality rates: the proportion of 0–1-year-olds and children is lower than the expected values, the number of individuals of adultus and maturus age is the same, and the incidence of women is higher. Archaeologically delineated grave groups in the cemetery do not correspond to a kinship unit based on their demographic indicators, the analysis of which I supplemented with the examination of inherited anatomical variations. Based on this, in some cases the appearance of these traits on the skulls of individuals buried beside each other can be interpreted as a kinship based burial order, but in many cases this cannot be justified due to the demographic disproportions. According to the results of the taxonomic analysis, the previously hypothesised predominance of the Atlantic-Mediterranean and Nordic types within the culture can no longer be maintained after the processing of the Alsónyék finds, since here, in a cemetery with a large number of cases, the dominance of the gracile Mediterranean variant can be observed. According to biological distance calculation methods based on the average of skull sizes, only women show a significant relationship with the Mórágy series of the Lengyel culture, the Bruchstedt cemetery, and the combined Czech series of the Central European Linear Pottery culture. This confirms the previous results reached by Zoffmann (1984; 2004a), according to which the biological origin of the people of the Lengyel culture can be traced back to the local Central European LBK population. According to the results of pathological and oral pathological analyses, the number of traumatic lesions, non-specific inflammations, as well as degenerative joint lesions is small. In contrast, malnutrition-related cribra orbitalia and enamel hypoplasia, as well as increased stress-induced enthesopathy, were more common. During processing, some rarer lesions were also observed, the most important of which was the occurrence of tuberculosis in this Late Neolithic population.