Mediating Marginality: Mounds, Pots and Performances at the Bronze Age Cemetery of Puri-Ljubanj, Eastern Croatia

Mediating Marginality draws on eight years of excavation and survey at the newly discovered Bronze Age Cemetery of Puri-Ljubanj in the county of Vukovar-Syrmia in eastern Croatia. It also incorporates data from an ongoing landscape project that continues to provide evidence of an extensive, hitherto unknown, cultural group living on the margins between well known and documented groups, such as the Belegi and West Serbian variant of the Vatin cultural complex. The monograph explores what this marginality may have meant for these people and how they built a strong community identity through ongoing landscape modification that involved appropriating materials from a very limited palette and reworking and redepositing these in very specific ways over an exceptionally long period of time. Ideas surrounding the deployment of skill, stocks of knowledge and scales of performance are used to interrogate the social world the Spava-Ljubanj mound builders created for themselves and reveal that although apparently marginalised they were far from impoverished and indeed appear to have created a thriving cultural heritage. The monograph closes with a discussion of how the project intends to go forward, placing particular emphasis on how the modern community can best benefit from continued research in the area.