Frontier, Contact Zone or No Man´s Land?

The rivers Thaya and Morava today define large parts of the border between Austria and the Czech Republic. In the past this border-region underwent serious transformations that culminated in the fall of the Iron Curtain. Fortunately the frontier has again become permeable for interaction, exchange and communication. Also for the Early Middle Ages serious transformation processes can be observed and depending on the context the Morava-Thaya-region is seen as frontier, as contact zone or as no man`s land, where in different periods different systems meet: For the 6th and 7th c. no real border can be seen. This changes in the 8thc., when a separation of different systems subsumed under the terms Slavic and Avar takes place. In the 9thc. there is the Carolingian Empire on the south-western and Great-Moravia on the north-eastern part. Due to the Hungarian wars and also because of ecological changes the region lives through regression in the 10th c. However only a few decades later new settlements flourish aside from the old centres. Finally in the 11th c. the region evolves to a border triangle between the Premyslid Moravia, the rpd Hungary and the Babenberg march. The proposed project aims to research these manifold transformations with an international team of specialists from both Austria and the Czech Republic regarding certain key questions: Where are settlements of the particular periods, how can they be characterized and how do they develop? How do the local humans interact and what kind of social systems can we observe? What can we learn about craft, trade, economy and communication by analysing material culture and technological attributes? Overall and within these questions we want to discuss where borders and where contact zones manifest and how they develop. Where are similarities or differences between several systems? Next to a quantitative collection of hitherto known archaeological sources, selected sites (e.g. Hohenau an der March, Pellendorf, Oberleiserberg, Bernhardtsthal, Lny, Mikulov, Kostice) will be investigated in detail to gain new insights on the region`s development in the Early Middle Ages. A combination of classical archaeological methods with modern and interdisciplinary GIS-analyses, anthropology, archaeometallurgy, geophysical prospection, surveys, archaeobotanical, archaeozoological and other scientific analyses etc. will lift the state of research that in particular on the Austrian side is rather poor onto a new and international level. Especially recent finds show the enormous potential that this region holds for archaeological research. The current call for proposals now offers the ideal opportunity to initiate bilateral archaeological research that in the past has not been possible in such an amount.