Pages: 63-116

As compared to the Great Hungarian Plain in Eastern Hungary, Transdanubia has been far less researched in the last century. This is especially valid for the pre-Roman periods. The relative chronology and the cultural formations of the Late Neolithic, Early and Middle Chalcolithic were elaborated only in the last decades, while some prehistoric problems still remained uncleared. In the course of the West Transdanubian microregional research programmes my main goal was to clear the changes of the cultural history in the second half of the 5th and the beginning of the 4th Millennium BC, as well as to compare these changes with those in neighbouring areas. I tried to clear the problems with one large-scale and several smaller excavations of late Lengyel and also of Balaton-Lasinja culture settlements in the Hahót valley, County Zala. The main results are as follows: There is no break between the two cultures, as assumed earlier: the Lengyel population lives on. The beginnings of the Chalcolithic consists of a series of small, hidden changes, inspired from the Mid-Balkans. Western Transdanubia also played a key mediating role in the Chalcolithisation of Europe. The origins of the Chalcolithic impulses can thus be traced back to the Karanovo VI-Gumelnita-Vinca D2 circle, which was broken up by the migrations toward the Pontus region in the heart of the Balkans. Western Transdanubia and Eastern Austria were undeniably the mediators in this process. In these areas, the surviving Lengyel groups of peoples adopted and eventually transmitted through their commercial ties the new cultural elements. The terminal points of these influences must have been Upper Austria and Bavaria, from where these impulses were spread through secondary (and tertiary) contacts to the emerging Central German and other chalcolithic cultures. All these findings lead us to conclude that the peoples of the western Transdanubian Lengyel and Balaton-Lasinja cultures, and especially the inhabitants of the extensive settlement at Szőlőhegyi mező, played a significant role in disseminating the south-eastern European methods and culture of Chalcolithic metallurgy towards Central Europe.