The Poieneşti-Lukaševka culture and its northern European connections. The crown-shaped neck ring from Miroslava (Iași County), Romania

The Late Iron Age witnessed a high degree of human mobility across temperate Europe. “Celtic” communities contributed to the spreading of the La Tène to the south, reaching northern Italy, and to the east, reaching the Carpathian Basin. Shortly after the arrival of “Celtic” communities, the area occupied by “Germanic” populations expanded to south-eastern Europe, the Poieneşti-Lukaševka culture defining this migration from the Baltic Sea to the north-western Pontic region. Its emergence in the eastern Carpathian region was not caused by a large and homogeneous group of people suddenly moving from one area to another. Instead, several small groups usually identified with the Bastarnae from ancient literary sources gradually migrated to the south-east. They contributed to the circulation of cultural goods, including both “visible” material things and “invisible” ones (e.g. knowledge, behaviours and practices). The crown-shaped neck rings (Kronenhalsringe) are some of the most visible markers of human mobility and their different handling from one region to another indicates the manner in which certain ritual practices were brought over by different communities in a given territory. The scope of this article is to discuss these aspects in the context of the Poieneşti-Lukaševka culture starting from a relatively recent discovery from Miroslava, Iași County, Romania.