Mobility of Bell Beaker people revealed by strontium isotope ratios of tooth and bone: a study of southern Bavarian skeletal remains. A reply to the comment by Peter Horn and Dieter Mueller-Sohnius

摘要

In their comment, Peter Horn and Dieter Mueller-Sohnius agreed with the authors' methodological approach (Grupe et al., 1997) to the reconstruction of mobility in prehistory in general, however, they have major objections against sample preparation, data handling and interpretation. We thank the editor of Applied Geochemistry for giving us the opportunity to reply to these comments, which while partly very useful, are however, mainly not justified. The conclusion by Horn and Mueller-Sohnius that the samples analyzed do not belong to the same statistical population is correct, and their advice to treat every burial site individually is greatly acknowledged. Moreover, the samples analyzed by the present authors may not even belong to the same population in the demographic sense, because of a lack of Bell Beaker settlements and larger burial sites. This fact on the one hand puts certain constraints on our study, but was on the other hand the prerequisite for the problem arising about the Beaker folk which the authors tried to help solve by an archaeometric approach: to shed light on the exceptional 'Bell Beaker phenomenon'.