Connections between the Mediterranean and the Carpathian Basin inthe 8th century AD. On the hinged strap-ends of the Late Avar Period

The paper examines hinged strap-ends adopted from mediterranean sources into the material culture of the Avar Period carpathian basin (7th–8th centuries Ad). According to the common patterns in the local use of several formal or technical elements the appearance of the hinged strapends inter alia in the Avar context must be related to direct and contemporaneous contacts with the mediterranean. Two levels of communication could be identified in the archaeological material. if hinges generate more complex variations of object types embedded in simpler form in the common material culture of the same period, the mediator was most probably the late Avar elite, deriving a material culture from an elite communication that was not structured primarily by geographical distances. A second group of hinged strap-ends clustering at the borders, but principally in the western region of the carpathian basin, are largely independent of the common Avar types. Their characteristics, alien in the local context, originated from direct interregional exchange with the neighbouring mediterranean peripheries.