Big wheels keep on turning: Some diagnostic phenomena within knapped stone tools of the Hungarian Neolithic

Research into the Neolithic period in Hungary (between 6000 and 4600 or 4500 BCE) began at the turning of the 19th and 20th century, and the cultural frameworks that we use today were coined relatively early. In the last hundred years, Hungarian prehistoric research has done much to delineate these cultures' spatial and temporal boundaries. On this basis, the territory of present-day Hungary can be divided into two major regions - one in the west and one in the east - and three major chronological phases. Although systematic research on Neolithic knapped stone tools in Hungary does not have a long history, the lessons of the last thirty years are sufficient to compare the experience with other elements of material culture and to draw further conclusions by integrating them at a higher level. It is generally agreed that the expedient nature of Neolithic stone tools does not allow for the kind of sophisticated typologies that we know from the Palaeolithic or Mesolithic. However, we are not necessarily lacking general phenomena that could be used to distinguish one region, period, or archaeological culture from another. These phenomena may be differences in the choice of raw materials, differences in typology sets, or technological changes, which are exhaustively discussed with numerous examples from the last decades in this paper. Utilizing Fernand Braudel’s tripartite system, we can reconstruct the processes that influenced the choice of raw material as relatively rapid and frequent changes in both areas, thus reflecting short-term cycles. Typological changes were much less frequent and had an impact in both the eastern and western parts of the region. However, if we look at the broadest period, only one detectable change can be observed, which is in the field of technology, and it occurred at the end of the Early Neolithic. For the rest of the Neolithic, we almost exclusively encounter debitage products and tools derived from indirect percussion applied to regional raw materials, largely using a prismatic or orthogonal core strategy.