A Boleráz, Baden és Kostolac kultúrák kronológiai és térbeli ...

as long distance market and trade. In this case, after Sydney W. Mintz the market can be
explained not only as a place for exchanging goods and service, but also as the repository of
social self-adaptation. 4
At the same time, despite all efforts, archaeologist did not succeed to define the exact
date and location when and where the wheel was invented.
Cavalli Sforza and Ammermann argue that the yearly expansion of the Neolithic revolution
was 1 km. 5 (Later the pace was calculated by other scholars and by other methods, but
everybody agreed that this was an extremely rapid process.)
The expansion speed of the wheel and the wagon drive — in my opinion — might
have been similar to the distance that a wagon could reach, and this distance was surely
more than 1 km/day, even if the presumed lack of routes is taken into account. Woodenstave
roads were built between lakeshore settlements, 6 and the Moravian earth mounds were
excavated with wide ramp-entrances, 7 thus, most probably Europe should not be seen as a
roadless wilderness in this period. It is obvious that such exposion-like development cannot
be surveyed by archaeological methods (radiocarbon dates are also not suitable for this
purpose, and dendro-dates are not available at every sites) after such a long period in details,
only at a general level. Thus, these questions will probably be further refined in the next
decades, but most likely the problem will remain unsolved. Moreover, from this aspect,
archaeological research is exposed to lucky finds.
However, improving archaeological methods reveal that greatest developments and
revolutionary improvements cannot be connected to stabile, flowering cultures, but to other
seemingly unimportant, not-named mixed populations (“Misch-Kultur”). Usually, the world
shattering innovations and novelties appear in such dynamic communities which are in
peripheral or semi-peripheral positions. As it was demonstrated in the second part of this
study, the Baden culture produced the dense network of connections. This complex was
continuously changing during the life of the culture, considering both the place, object and
direction of the communication.
During its existence the Baden culture produced several internal development phases
(IA/B: formation, IIA: from Boleráz into Baden), flowering (IB/C: classic Boleráz, IIB/III:
classic Baden), crises (IIA: from Boleráz to Baden: this process was successful; IV: disastrous
process, disintegration the Baden complex), and stagnation (retarding of the Boleráz culture
in the Baden period, retarding Baden parallel with the Early Bronze Age cultures). These
social and economic processes were accompanied by local expansions and contractions. The
centrum/periphery situation inside the Baden–complex wandered during the time, as it was
described in the first part of this paper.
Parallel among the contemporaneous core cultures of the Continent (North-Central
Europe: Funnel Beaker culture — a culture having strong megalithic traditions and with
roots in the Neolithic period; East-Central Europe: Cucuteni-Tripolje — an agricultural
civilization, which flowered from the Neolithic period; Eastern Europe: Yamnaja culture — a
herding tribal culture inclined to conquest) the Baden civilization was not able to develop
such structures neither in space nor in time, to accomplish such continuity and stability.
Still, its potential for adaption and innovation insured one thousand years of
existence. This openness and success was the result of the cultural and ethnic diversity. It is a
fact, demonstrated on the example of the development of capitalism that business comapies
develop more powerfully, if the political system is not solid behind them (i.e. a strong
empire).
4 MINTZ 1959, 20.
5 AMMERMAN – CAVALLI SFORZA 1974..
6 PÉTREQUIN et al. 2006.
7 BALDIA et al. 2008.
2