Balogh Csilla – P. Fischl Klára: Felgyő, Ürmös-tanya. A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Monumenta Archeologica 1. (Szeged, 2010)

The Bronze Age settlement and cemetery at Felgyő

A felgyői bronzkori temető és település 107 burials are not known. Grave 44, an inurned burial, was not marked on the available cemetery plans. According to the field diary, the grave lay near the western wall of Trench VIII, opened in the 1961 campaign. Grave 45, another inurned burial, is not marked on the cemetery map and neither is it mentioned in the field diary; however, the finds from this burial were inventoried and were thus available for study. The grave goods are published in the order they were inventoried. Preceding the description of the grave assemblages are the entries taken from the field diary. If a particular grave is not mentioned in the field diary, the number of the trench in which it was found is specified as its location. In many cases, the number of grave goods and the composition of the grave furniture recorded in the field diary are at variance with the artefacts inventoried as coming from a particular grave.

2 In these cases, the entry in the inventory book was followed in the lack of other precise data. Together with a few stray finds and artefacts from uncertain contexts, the grave goods from the 56 inurned burials and 8 crouched inhumation burials are inventoried under nos 65.2.1-134 in the archaeological collection of the Koszta József Museum in Szentes. An additional 12 inurned burials and 3 crouched burials were uncovered during the 1971 and 1972 campaigns (Graves 142 and 144-145), whose finds were inventoried under nos 78.1.1-22. Several artefacts are missing from the collection: their description is quoted from the inventory book. THE BRONZE AGE SETTLEMENT Settlement features (pits) were uncovered in two locations during the archaeological investigations at Felgyő. Bronze Age finds were recovered from pits excavated in Trenches I I/a and lib of the 1972 campaign at Ürmös-tanya. The pottery finds from Pit 1 in Trench lib date from the Middle Bronze Age and the ceramic assemblage from the pits in Trench IIa can probably also be dated to the same period. The pits lay among the Bronze Age inurned and inhumation burials. The pit uncovered in Trench Xf of the 1974 campaign can also be assigned to the Bronze Age. The finds indicate that the pits and the burials were roughly co-eval. Bronze Age settlement features had been found during earlier excavation campaigns too. The features uncovered on the sand hillock by the Szeged road, investigated during the 1964-66 campaigns, were contemporaneous with the cemetery at Ürmös-tanya. This area was probably identical with Location III of the 1955 campaign (BALOGH-P. FISCHL 2010, Fig 42). The single documentation of this site is the combined plan of the 1955 excavation. The field diaries from 1966 are not known. The 1965 campaign was begun by Ottó Trogmayer and Katalin Nagy; the excavation was continued by Gyula László. The surviving records, however, only describe the investigations near the building of the local council and the ditch dug for the water-pipes in the middle of the village. No mention is made of the sand hillock east of the Szeged road. The brief report on the 1964 campaign merely notes that "we examined the area of the sand-pit by the road, where we uncovered three pit-houses of the Vatya population using the cemetery by Vidre-part."' The report on the 1965 campaign too mentions the investigation of the Bronze Age settlement: "One of the elevations at Vidre-part, where the remains of a Bronze Age and an ancient Hungarian settlement have been brought to light in the trial trenches that had been opened earlier, was sold to the road construction company and had to be excavated."

4 The distance between the cemetery at Ürmös-tanya and the assumed location of the settlement uncovered at Location III beside the Szeged road is ca. 200-250 m, which corresponds to the usual distance between settlement and cemetery recorded at other sites of the Early and Middle Bronze Age. At the nearby Csongrád-Vidre-sziget site, the distance between the settlement and the cemetery was 200 m (G. SZÉNÁSZKY 1977, 23). According to the entries in the inventory book, the settlement was indicated by pits; no residential buildings or other structures were identified. The excavations in the sand-pit beside the Szeged road in 1965 and 1966 brought to light a section of the settlement where pottery finds of the Makó and early Nagyrév cultures were recovered from features which also yielded finds of the Vatya culture. It seems likely that the Vatya occupation was preceded by an Early Bronze Age settlement and that the finds from the earlier settlement had become mixed up with the Middle Bronze Age assemblages during prehistory. A similar phenomenon was noted at the Baks-Homokbánya site (P. FISCHL-K1SS-KULCSÁR 1999). Not all of the finds from the settlement are published here. Our main consideration was to present a selection of all the artefact types, as well as an overview of the proportion of different pottery wares in the ceramic inventory." Decorated pieces obviously enjoyed a priority during the selection of the finds. Owing to the shortcomings of the surviving documentation, the inventoried finds from the settlement cannot always be associated with a particular context: while we have quoted the data in the inventory book in all cases, the identification of the features or contexts proved impossible. The finds are therefore described according to the year they were brought to light. 2 For example, an additional howl was inventoried as coming from the buried in Grave 5. In the case of Grave 19, the field diary mentions a single urn in the burial, while the inventoried finds include also the body fragment of another urn, as well as a cup and a stone amulet. In the case of Grave 22, vessel "d" was a flat bowl according to the field diary, but this vessel is missing from among the finds inventoried from this burial. 3 RégFüz Ser. I. No. IS (1965) 48. 4 RégFüz Ser. I. No. 19(1966) 44. The field report for the 1966 campaign does not mention the area investigated east of the Szeged road. 5 The finds from the Bronze Age settlement are housed in the Koszta József Museum of Szentes (inv. nos 66.6.1-85, 66.8.1-112).