Folia archeologica 6. (1949)

BANNER JÁNOS: HERMAN OTTO LEVELE PÓSTA BÉLÁHOZ A MAGYAR ŐSKŐKOR KUTATÁS HARCOS IDEJÉBŐL

13 is explained by the structure under it, being necessary for levelling the surface, which 'became Uneven through the previous settlement. From the structure, however, nothing remained, but the layer of burnt plaster (Pi. VIII, figs. 11) has safely kept the imprints, from which the whole structure can be reconstructed. There is no question about a special structure, but still we must call it like that, because the plaster was not put on the ground itself but on cleft and round beams which were carefully placed previously. This wcod material, which was not joined by anything, rendered the foundation which on the one hand lay close to the surface of the uneven ground and on the other hand was pressed deeply into the layer of piaster. It stands to reason that this wcod material just touched only the Subsoil in some places and after taking off the piaster, on the 'basis of the remaining imprints on two tides, -the shapes and even the sizes of the thinner £nd thicker branches could be well determined. From the knotty parts of the imprint it is doubtlessly evident that for the ground of the floor not fir-trees but some kind of fcliared 'trees were used; from which naturally nothing remained. It is quite natural as it was not placed en a damp area, but on the dry ground, Which was so high above the water, running beside it, that it got under water only for a «hört time in the most extraordinary case, when the rarely occurring immense floods reached it.

4 The partly cleft and partly round beams •were carefully laid beside each other on the plain ground in the narrow direction of the foimd-ation. Beneath them were no splicing beams. Some of them were as broad as a narrower plank, but among them were such ones too which were split to a lath-shape. The beams "were laid so close to one another as the natural bent form of each branch allowed it. Thus it is quite apparent that sometimes thicker plaster got between the branches. It seems that it was necessary to build this foundation because the determinable phenomena 4 That this case could have happened is already pointed out in the referred paper in the Folia Arch, in the description of the concerning part of the excavation in 1940, of the previous settlement made the ground soft in several places and it was necessary that the whole surface should be even and so habitable. After the uncovering of the foundation which was carried out most carefully, we found all the four corners of the house and so we could determine accurately the entire groundplan of the house. It is worthy of attention that the corners inside the house were never built .angular, but were carefully rounded. Naturally from the outside there were no traces ci that. The form of the ground-plan and these rounded corners remind us of a box built on the ground which was found during our 1940 excavations and was stuck to bundles of reeds, a few meters far from the foundation of this house. It can not be surprising that this has a more elongated form by nature, but in any case it is striking that while here the structure was made of wood, there these were substituted by bundles of reeds.

5 And this structure is very strange here on a territory far from any pile-dwelling. Namely it can net be denied that their conception reminds us of those buildings which belong to the group of the „not original" pile-dwellings.

6 These were built on such places where the already dried soil made it superfluous to set up „original" pile-dwellings which required much work and time. The very ground-plan may suggest that an already known kind of hut of greater size was standing on it, but the remaining part of the southern shorter wall makes this presumption quite impossibile. On the fragment of the wall the carefully plastered opening is sharply outlined which shows the one side of the breach, roughly 50 cm wide (Pl. IV, fig. 6.). On the place of the breach there was no trace of the wall and on the other side a similarly carefully smoothed part followed. Between the two carefully elaborated parts only so much is different that to the former a part of wall, pointing outwards, was joined and to the latter one pointing inwards. Doudtlessly this Ь Fol. Arch. 1945, Pl. I, figs. 4—^6; Pl. JU figs. 9a

—b. ' . 6 Ebert: Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte, vol. X* p. 89, ... i -Li . » I- -li