Looking closer: the eastern gate of the Early Bronze Age fortifications on Zyndram’s Hill and its relation to ritual practices

In the oldest phase of the Early Bronze Age settlement on Zyndram’s Hill in Maszkowice (Western Carpathians), the hilltop plateau was partially surrounded by massive stone fortifications which were extensively excavated between 2015 and 2020. In our paper, we shall focus on the unusual element of this fortification system, described as the “eastern gate”. This passage functioned only in the oldest phase of the Early Bronze Age settlement (ca. 1725-1690 BC) and was later filled in and partially destroyed – a change that could have been of a violent nature. Various features of this structure suggest that its function was not purely utilitarian, instead being to some extent related to ritual practices. We shall try to justify this assumption based on various categories of evidence: the layouts of the entire defensive system of the settlement on Zyndram’s Hill and of similar fortifications in the Balkans, the landscape and astronomical context, the symbolism of some of the elements used in the gate (stone stelae) and the artefacts discovered in it (anthropomorphic figurines), and finally, the results of archaeological-botanical and microstratigraphic analysis of sediments.