| Paper 614-b | Burials and Death in Transylvania, 10th-12th Centuries
(Language: English)
Ioan Marian Ţiplic, Faculty of History & Patrimony, Universitatea Lucian Blaga, Sibiu
Index terms: Archaeology - Artefacts, Archaeology - Sites, Geography and Settlement Studies, Pagan Religions |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
My paper illustrates how, in a context of a quasi-illiterate society, a struggle for land between small (peasant) landowners and noblemen owning great estates brought about the use of writing. The great crisis of the accumulation of land estates into great latifundia, which marks Wallachia's 16th century, led to the gradual impoverishment of small landholders. As available land was scarce and kin relatives enjoyed the right of pre-emption, the only way for noblemen to acquire free peasant's land was to became a part of the peasant's community through the practice of 'fraternal adoption' (which transformed two strangers into blood brothers). As this practice belonged to the realm of uncustomary land inheritance, it needed the approval of the prince, and it demanded the support of written evidence. At their turn, peasants wishing to protect themselves from powerful 'brothers' with the potential legal right to purchase their land and freedom, turn to the use of written documents to take out their land from communal ownership and secure it individually.
Paper -c:
The archeological research of the early Middle Ages in Transylvania is extremely important due to the fact that the historiography of this period has limited possibilities of referring to contemporary documentary proof concerning the events of the 9th-12th centuries.
The chronological limits fixed for this short review have in view the entire period of occupation of the Transylvanian space by the Hungarian ducal authority which ended with the formation of local ethnicity through the fusion of various elements belonging to allogeneous or local groups. There are various examples of discoveries such as the Blandiana group A and B (9th-11th centuries), Ciumbrud group (9th century), Cluj group (the end of the 9th century - the first half of the 10th century), the Dridu - Alba Iulia group - Statia de Salvare II (9th-10th centuries) and Ciugud group (11th-12th centuries).
In the intra-Carpathian territory between the 9th and the 12th century we have to do with more cultural areas that define more ethnic elements. These cultural areas were ethnically established on the basis of the burial rite and ritual. K.Horedt named the following cultural groups: Blandiana A or Dridu-Alba Iulia (Slavs-Bulgarians), Ciumbrud (Christian Moravian Slavs), Cluj (early Hungarian), Blandiana B-Alba Iulia (Christian mixed population), Ciugud (Slav-Romanian population). Beside those, Gh.Baltag introduces in the field literature the so-called mountainous culture that defines the local Romanic population during the 8th-10th centuries, that used to live in the regions with an altitude between 600-800 meters. He also brought proofs of ceramics elements from the settlement in Albesti, Mures County.
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