Obiceiuri funerare în epoca bronzului la Dunărea Mijlocie şi Inferioară 12. Bronze Age Burial Customs in the Middle and Lower Danube Basin Abstract The study of funerary phenomena, as an expression of a typically human conscious activity, is not just one branch of prehistoric archaeology, but constitutes its own domain in archaeology. With the continuous increase in the amount of documentation on the subject and given the specific issues it raises, as well as the methodology it entails, this field comes to represent a self-sufficient archaeological discipline. The careful examination of the funerary practices, which has brought to light their structure, is susceptible to reveal a number of social facts serving as a complement to the strictly chronological preoccupations which carry so much weight in the specialized literature. However, it is necessary to focus on the study of the funeral practices’ variability as well as on sociological, structural research, when defining the great number of archaeological phenomena which belong to the Central European and South-East-European Bronze Age. This could be the way to brace up against all the manifestations of national pride fostered by the typically Balkan mentality and likely to impair honest research while also being wary of the excessive, often insidious, politicization affecting archaeology under communism in this part of the world. Even nowadays, unfortunately, such abusive syntagms as “the ethno-cultural aspect”, “the ethno- linguistic crystallization” or, in general, thracism references will crop up in archaeological research at all costs when dealing with the Bronze Age north of the Danube; these mark the archaeological research by their compulsive intention of creating ethnical attributions for practically every archaeological phenomenon. The growing multitude of “cultures”, “cultural groups”, “aspects or facies” should be added to this, spawned by research on rather limited areas or by superficial documentation paired with hasty analyses. In contrast, the original study proposed here considers the Danubian Bronze Age cultures as ceramic groups and tries to make a clear statement about the correspondence between these and the burial practices, in view of the fact that both of these factors can be circumscribed more widely and more precisely in space and time. For the Bronze Age, an impressive number of burial finds exists in the Middle and Lower Danube Basin, some of them belonging to large cemeteries. In spite of this, there are no comprehensive studies which manifest more than the strictly archaeological aspects: the social factors, supported by the chronological and spatial dynamics characteristic for the funerary phenomenon. The present study does not undertake to fill the gaps in the literature, being aware only too well that such an undertaking would be as good as impossible given the continuous increase in the archaeological documentation. Instead, it undertakes to review the discussions preliminary to defining certain archaeological phenomena from the perspective of the burial customs. Based on already published research material rather than on the latest finds, I am quite aware of the shortcomings due to lacunae in on-site research or to the less than satisfactory publication of some funerary discoveries. The choice of the geographical space is related to the territorial expansion of the Bronze Age archaeological phenomena recorded on the territory of Romania. However, since some of these transcend the modern political frontiers, it is high time the research area is extended. This does not mean, however, that the consequent extension of the research area, with a view to including more material treated in a more unitary manner, can be achieved in a sufficiently satisfactory way; consequently, for the periphery of the work-space studied, the limits considered have had to be a quite arbitrary merger of the natural and archaeological borders for the area studied; the area extends roughly from the Black Sea, to the Stara Planina mountains, and then to the Danube and the Tisza. One further difficulty comes from the fact that there is no unitary chronological system covering the space under consideration. The reference to the older, or newer, systems used for Central Europe or for the area of the Aegean are not always satisfactory, though a clear tendency to adopt a common system for the Bronze Age archaeology in the Mid-Danubian and Lower Danube basin can be noticed, following the Aegean system as a model. Our study takes into consideration over one thousand funerary finds, starting approximately with the second half of the 4 th millennium BC and ending towards the year 1000 BC. The number of finds is only apparently great, since many of them are either isolated grave discoveries or groups of burials and cemeteries with just a few burials; further, the quality of their publication is often poor, which causes them to be hardly worth considering for in- depth analysis. Consequently, the time-interval gains in importance, overriding other considerations, which is why it is becoming essential to consider that the archaeological phenomena still currently attributed to the so-called “transition period” actually have features that require their integration into the Bronze Age, starting from the end of the Eneolithic period and following a rhythm of development closer to that in the Aegean area. Setting out to open a discussion about funerary practices, the present publication rests on the collection of material as its core structural configuration. This recommends it primarily as an attempt to order and classify existing material in accordance based on the criteria of the funerary finds, in a kind of research that has become more than necessary at a time when cultural groups are growing almost as numerous as the sherds themselves! The catalogue of funerary finds includes publications to the year 1999. I have included, however, a number of recent finds, the last of which were made shortly before the final drafting of my 5