"This monograph is a minimally modified version of my PhD dissertation only updated in the most necessary cases, which having been defended at the Eötvös Loránd University in 2010. A fundamental antecedent of my PhD dissertation constituting the basis of this monograph is my MA dissertation also defended at the Eötvös Loránd University, Institute of Archaeological Sciences in 2003, titled Goods in the Neolithic of the Carpathian Basin. 

Results of this essay formed the basis and an integral part of this work. On the one hand, the need for analysing the model generalized for the entire time of the Neolithic and the whole area of the Carpathian Basin in detail, and within a nar-rower region and period, which could provide sufficient amount and quality of information, has already arisen during preparing the MA dissertation. On the other hand, in order to gain a comprehensive view of onetime societies, traces of social inequality should not only be studied through material culture (as prestige and status goods), but on the basis of burials and settlements too. Accordingly, the structure of present doctoral thesis is partly similar to that of the MA dissertation, and partly completed with detailed analysis of burials, and the comprehensive study of settlements. All these are initiated by theoretical and methodological chapters forming basis for social archaeological analyses." (excerpt from the Introduction)