One of the best known Copper Age cemeteries in Europe is located as Tiszapolgar-Basatanya in eastern Hungary. Used between 3600 and 3000 BC, this cemetery, containing 156 burials, illustrates the beginnings of social differentiation, with valuable objects being placed in certain graves.
Favoured grave goods included long flint blades, copper perforated hammer axes, stone axes, beads and gold pendants.
For example, well endowed burials include those of a little girl, aged 5-6, containing necklaces of stone beads, copper rings and bracelets and six pottery vessels, and of an adult man interred with flint blades, an antler hammer-axe, a copper bracelet and other jewellery, a number of pots, a dog and many animal bones.
The bones and pots probably represent food offerings, and these accompanied most burials.
The dead were interred in individual shallow pit graves, placed on their sides in a contracted position. The graves were neatly set out in rows: this shows that the graves were marked in some way, so that their location remained obvious over the centuries.
