Kalicz Nándor - Koós Judit: Mezőkövesd-Mosolyás. A neolitikus Szatmár-csoport (AVK I) települése és temetője a kr. e. 6. évezred második feléből - Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén megye régészeti emlékei 9. (Miskolc, 2014)
Mezőkövesd-Mocsolyás - A brief overview of the Szatmár group (ALBK 1) in the light of the excavations and the assessment of the site and its finds
A brief overview of the Szatmár group (ALBK 1) in the light of the excavations and the assessment of the site and its finds Nándor Kalicz-Judit Koós Mezőkövesd-Mocsolyás The excavation at the Mezőkövesd-Mocsolyás site in 1994 yielded remarkable results for Neolithic research in Hungary. The excavated features and their finds uniformly represent the initial phase of the Neolithic across much of the northern-eastern Alföld (Hungarian Plain). In contrast to the earlier small-scale excavations, the extensive investigations at Mezőkövesd-Mocsolyás have provided a wealth of data on the settlement’s layout, its buildings (the burnt remains of five houses were uncovered) and the diversity of material culture - in other words, on many dimensions of the occupants’ daily life —, while the twenty-five burials offered an insight into funerary rites and beliefs. The assessment of the finds indicated that the site can be culturally assigned to the Szatmár group (earlier labelled Szatmár II), i.e. to Phase 1 of the Alföld Linearbandkeramik (ALBK.). Although the site itself can be assigned to the category of smaller settlements, the investigated area exceeds by far that of the period’s other excavated sites. (Even though one of the site’s investigated sections was roughly 120-130 m long, the number of houses would suggest that its population hardly numbered more than 40 to 50 people. The settlement’s extent and the exact duration of its occupation remain unknown for the time being.) The distribution of the Szatmár group and of its material culture extended to Novajidrány or perhaps even as far as Kassa/Kosice in the Hernád Valley in the north, to Rétközberencs in the east and to Ebes in the south. The currently known southernmost site of the Szatmár group is Kőtelek on the right Tisza bank, where a horizontal stratigraphy was observed between the group’s settlement feature and a feature of the Körös culture. The settlements of the Szatmár group have a roughly similar layout and the nature, the orientation and the size of their buildings tend to resemble one another, although local variations can be noted in contemporaneous buildings. Large contiguous layers of burnt debris concealed the remains of five closely spaced houses with above-ground, vertical walls aligned parallel to one another, which had apparently burnt down simultaneously. The form and the north-west to southeast orientation of the houses could be clearly established from the closer examination of the finer details of the burnt daub layer. Their form and dimensions could be determined from the finds unearthed in and under the debris, and from the few extant post-holes. The surviving and scattered debris of each house had a length of 9-16 m and a width of 4-6 m, suggesting that the houses of the Mocsolyás settlement were 10 m to 15-16 m long and most probably 4-6 m wide. These figures also take stock of the destruction caused by intrusions from the site’s later occupation (features with a rich find material from later periods) and by modem deep-ploughing. The Middle Neolithic houses at Mocsolyás were small, with a floor area of 45-60 m2, and they differed substantially from the size and architectural canon of the contemporaneous buildings of Transdanubia and Central Europe. The structural differences between the buildings of Mezőkövesd-Mocsolyás and Füzesabony-Gubakút, two sites lying close to one another, provide an excellent illustration of the persistence of local traditions in the case of two communities with a similar material and spiritual culture. POTTERY MANUFACTURE Owing to their immense quantity, pottery finds play a major, often decisive role in site assessments and archaeometric analyses. Various vessel types were manufactured using more or less the same techniques. We can distinguish between fine and coarse wares based on the quality
