A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1997-1998 (Debrecen, 1999)

Utak a múltba - Kivonat az M3 autópálya nyomvonalán feltárt régészeti leletek kiállítási katalógusából

unusual. No body was placed in the pit with its regular shape. On the other hand, a boar mandible, a small lump of ochre, a small stone axe and a few beads were found where the head should have been. It is noteworthy that hardly any burials of babies or children were found in this peripheral section of the settlement, while graves of infants occur most commonly at the tell associated with this site. The lifeways of the population who inhabited the Polgár settlement can be best reconstructed on the basis of animal bones and plant remains. Of the animals kept, cattle and pig were of decisive importance, while aurochs, red deer and wild boar were outstandly important among wild animals. It may be assumed, however, that the people of this settlement also intensively exploited the rich riverine resources available in the floodplain of the Tisza. Of the plants cultivated, the remains of wheat and barley were identified most frequently. The enormous quantity of ceramic material brought to light at this site contained a number of culturally characteristic import types. These represented the Transdanubian Lengyel culture, the so-called Stichband ceramics of eastern Slovakia, the Iclod group of Transylvania, the Samborzec-Opatów cultural unit from Little Poland, as well as the Tisza and Herpály cultures of the Great Hungarian Plain. On the basis of the aforementioned it becomes obvious that the Polgár settlement maintained intensive contacts with cultural units within the broader region. This observation is also supported by the presence of numerous imported raw materials such as bitumen, Spondylus and cowrie shell, as well as lithic materials. According to our present appraisal, the Neolithic settlement of Polgár does not represent an independent cultural unit, but rather a special mixture between the Late Neolithic archaeological cultures of the Carpathian Basin at the interface between two major cultural regions: contacts between the populations of the tell (Tisza and Herpály) cultures of the Great Hungarian Plain and those of the Transdanubian Lengyel culture. It embodies the symbiosis of these two cultures in the Upper Tisza region. It is very important to note that the structure of the Polgár settlement is fundamentally different from those of the tell settlements known from the Great Hungarian Plain. At these latter, cultic life took place in the houses built within the tell part of the site. At Polgár, similarly to the Transdanubian settlements of the Lengyel culture, communal activities, including rituals, took place in an area separated by a system of rondels from the scene of everyday life. The Late Neolithic settlement of Polgár-Csőszhalom was established at the time of the Tisza culture. It was probably inhabited until the time when the use of red and white painted ware, generally distributed in the Upper Tisza region, was abandoned. Phenomena observed in the external, horizontal settlement parallel the early phase of the tell and it is the stratigraphic section related to the system of rondels that represents the Late Neolithic interval. According to radiocarbon dates available, this approximately 500-600 years long time interval corresponds to the period between 5000 to 4400 B.C. in terms of absolute chronology. 164