at Cetea, a village near the city of Aiud in western Transylvania. The workshop
evidently specialized in making Stangenknebel, and the archaeologists found in
it two dozen antler tips at various stages of preparation. In addition to the eight
finished Stangenknebel from the workshop, another sixteen antler tips from the
same shop were undecorated and mostly unbored. After having been kept for more
than a century in the Aiud museum, all twenty-four have finally been described
and published by Boroffka (the sixteen unfinished pieces are not included in his
catalogue of thirty-one cheekpieces from the Romanian Bronze Age). The Cetea
workshop was producing its cheekpieces in the Bz A2 period.^59
Although many of the cheekpieces from the Carpathian basin cannot be dated,
some came from secure contexts. The earliest were placed by Hüttel toward the
end of the Frühbronzezeit, which is to say toward the end of the Bz A2 period.^60
Boroffka agreed that cheekpieces—both Scheibenknebeland three varieties of
Stangenknebel—first appeared in the Carpathian basin during the Bz A2 period,
although not necessarily toward its end.^61 Boroffka dates the earliest of them
closer to the beginning than to the end of that period, and no later than the
nineteenth century BC.^62 So early a date depends on the similarities between
the Scheibenknebelfound in the Danubian lands and those found at Sintashta
and elsewhere in the southern Urals. Although the latter apparently belong in the
nineteenth if not the twentieth century BC, the type continued to be produced for
a long time. From the dozen that have been found in Mycenaean Greece it appears
144 Militarism in temperate Europe
Figure 5.2Antler cheekpieces (Stangenknebel) from the Hungarian plain. From Hüttel
1981, Tafel 6, nos. 52 and 53. Courtesy of C. H. Beck Verlag and the
Prähistorische Bronzefundeseries