Bujdosné Pap Györgyi (szerk.): Agria 49. (Az egri Dobó István Vármúzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2016)
Patay Pál: Régészkedtem Heves megyében is
Pál Patay I also excavated in Heves county As an archaeologist I have had the pleasure of working all over Hungary, Heves included. My first dig in the county was as a university student; 1937 it must have been. A member of the general public with an interest in archaeology had suggested that megalithic monuments could be found on Galyatető, one of the peaks in the Mátra Hills. So I climbed the hill, accompanied by Sándor Gallus, an archaeologist from the National Museum. Although we found some rocky outcrops on the peak, they were not megaliths. As an archaeologist at the Palóc Museum in Balassagyarmat in 1953 the powers that be sent on a one-day exploratory dig to a Copper Age site to Tamabod, which Nándor Kalicz (at this point still a university student living in the area) was subsequently to write up. It was my elders and betters who in 1955 also gave me the task of cataloguing the prehistoric finds made up 487 items and 1148 objects which the Eger Museum had just acquired on behalf of the state from the Lyceum. It was during my stay in Tamabod that I first came into contact with the Csörsz Ditch which forms one stretch of the enormous defensive earthwork system of unknown origin that encircles the Great Hungarian Plain to the north and east. I recognized that any research into this feature would be an archaeological matter, particularly bearing mind that machine-based intensive farming would sooner or later leave no physical trace of it, even in those places where it still survived. In 1957, I joined the staff of the National Museum in Budapest, and it was in 1962 that I was entrusted with the task with conducting research. The fieldwork, the surveying of the ditches, and the mapping thereof, we conducted with the help of a brigade that had been briefed by Éva Garam and Sándor Soproni. It was during the course of the work in Heves County that János Győző Szabó also joined us. Within Heves County the dyke system was laid out in four, for the most part, parallel lines. In order to calculate how much soil had actually been excavated during the course of its construction, and how high the resulting ramparts were, we cut a cross-section across the barrier in a number of places. Its most undisturbed section exists between Kál and Erdőtelek where the earthwork forms the border between the two villages. Here the dyke’s ditch was 10.4 m wide and 2.9 m deep. The work conducted here was also written up. During the course of the archaeological work undertaken in connection with the construction of the Tisza lock in Kisköre it was my job not only to conduct fieldwork in both Tiszanána and Sarud, but also to excavate an early Copper Age 149
