Wolf Mária: A borsodi földvár. Egy államalapítás kori megyeszékhelyünk kutatása - Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén megye régészeti emlékei 10. (Budapest - Miskolc - Szeged, 2019)
Irodalom- és rövidítésjegyzék
386 found in a house that also contained grain, ploughshares, a short scythe, a bell, an axe, and pottery. In other words, the house was no different from others in the village; its inhabitants were probably simple, farming members of the village. Most likely, the bridles were made on site, carved by one of the household members, who obviously decorated the piece with a familiar design, one that was his own. We have no information on when the village was established. The structure and the economic life, however, suggest that several decades prior to its destruction, a group of Hungarians had already settled in the area. In Borsod village we found two types of houses, both aboveground. The majority were made of wood with stone foundations. Their thick, burned clay ruins show that the stones of the foundation were laid in clay or the upper levels of the houses were daubed with it. In addition, however, a loghouse erected on stumps was also found. The houses had rammed earth floors, and in several cases we found the burned and fallen remains of the roofing. The houses’ small stoves were made of stone. In two cases we found the stove’s spark arrestor, which had been used to keep the houses smoke free. In three cases, we observed that the houses had attics. Thus, wooden houses were presumably an integral part of Hungarian villages from the earliest times; wood construction, therefore, must have played a far greater role during this period than was previously thought. We know of several 1 Oth-century villages near Borsod that were not dominated by pit houses. Besides to the smaller houses is a square, 5.5 x 5.5 metre building made of stone and clay with 0.8-metre-thick walls. This feature could be the stone foundation of a building whose walls we can only hypothesize about. As the foundation walls are just 0.8 metres thick, the building could not have been very tall or the upper levels were not made of stone. An investigation of the collapsed, northern stone wall suggested that most likely the walls, and not just the foundations, were also made of stone. We have very little information from the entire Árpád Age about non-religious buildings made partly or entirely of stone. A large portion of the observations pertain not to simple village houses but to the homes of more highly ranked people, priests and landowners. It is also likely that the stone building excavated in Borsod was the home of the head of the village. The other wood houses with stone foundations, however, were without question the homes of common members of the community. The Borsod houses were positioned alongside the northern depression just as houses are along both sides of a street, with their orientation adjusted to the path of the depression. Although many of the houses stood very close to each other, we cannot assume they date from different periods, primarily because we found charred grain seeds and ceramics deformed from exposure to fire in every house. It is therefore certain that when the settlement burned down, every house was inhabited and destroyed at the same time in the fire that consumed the village. This is verified by Carbon 14 analysis and archaeomagnetic measurements that show the houses were of the same age. The houses in the Borsod settlement stood side by side in a closed, orderly arrangement. The layout of the village reminds us much more of later villages with streets than of the diffused settlements covering a larger territory that were characteristic of the entire Árpád Age. The Borsod settlement, as we have seen, clearly dates to the 10th century based on the artefacts found among the ruins of the houses. Additionally, every excavated house in the 10,h-century village was aboveground and made of wood or stone. All of this strongly contradicts the generally accepted view, which is based chiefly on the primary research of István Méri. Méri’s own excavations and the results of earlier digs led him to believe that during the Árpád Age, one-room, semi-subterranean residential dwellings with stoves were characteristic of village settlements. Later, from the 14th century onwards, these were replaced by aboveground houses with many rooms. However, on several occasions, Gyula László, Róbert Müller and Győző J. Szabó called attention to the colourfulness of life during this period, the varied forms of dwellings, and the co-occurrence of aboveground and pit houses. Independent of each other, István Fodor and Károly Mesterházy reached similar conclusions. Examining the history of the development of the Hungarian house, they established that one-room pit houses could not have been the direct predecessors of the aboveground, multi-roomed houses that generally appeared from the 14lh century onwards. The sudden appearance of aboveground homes, without any precedence, cannot be explained by any kind of socio-economic change. Therefore, both researchers posited that aboveground houses had always existed alongside pit houses and were integral to our view of 10th-13th century villages. The significance of villages with walls rising above ground or built entirely above ground, however, was far greater from the 10th century onwards, during the entire Árpád Age, than we had previously thought. Thus in Borsod, neither the structure of the settlement nor the construction material fit with the standard view of the characteristic village throughout the entire Árpád Age. Instead, these are similar to what we find in newly excavated settlements in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. In the Slav regions neighbouring on Hungary in the 10lh and 11th centuries, aboveground wooden architecture was generally widespread in areas settled by commoners. As we have seen, the 10th-century Hungarian village of Borsod does not differ from these in any respect. Its mere existence contradicts those notions that, during this period in Hungary, villages not only lacked permanent borders but few had winter lodgings. We need
