This interdisciplinary project proposes to challenge and significantly improve current understandings of Bronze Age history and cultural entanglements in the Eastern Carpathian Basin (ECB), through the application of archaeological analysis of metals in funerary contexts, anthropology and archaeozoology, along with frontier high-resolution chronology and aDNA analysis of human remains.

         Recent research places the cultural crucible of southeast Europe as a crucial motor in the development of European societies and the ECB at the very crossroads of these Bronze Age entanglements. The implications of cultural networking of this phenomenon are even more so important today, since active shifts of populations and daily felt effects of globalisation are more present than ever before. Historical consequences of metals, as agents of status and identity negotiators, will be investigated in museums by the project director and team members with specialisations in archaeology, anthropology and archaeozoology.

         A reliable temporal grid, based on 14C dates will be provided by the AMS Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark. Kinships of the most prominent deceased individuals buried between c. 3000 and c. 1200 BCE in the ECB will be researched by the Max Planck Institute for Science of Human History, Department of Archaeogenetics in Jena, Germany. Lastly, the prestigious Springer publishing house has expressed its commitment to print and distribute the book, the crowning deliverbale of the project, within two years from the successful completion of the present undertaking.

      The Romanian Academy is the leading academic institution in Romania. The Institute of Archaeology and Art History in Cluj-Napoca, the hosting body of the “Death metals II” project, is a major facility and its library has access to both printed books and journals and to a wide range of electronic journals and databases, which are vital for the completion of the work.