Viola T. Dobosi: Paleolithic Man in the Által-ér Valley (Tata, 1999)

Tata - Porhanyóbánya The city of Tata is well-known for its monuments and springs. It can boast of, however, another type of curiosity which is neither spectacular nor known to many of us. Tata is one of the oldest recognised palaeontological localities in Hungary. The English traveller R. Townson visited Hungary in 1793 and published an itinerary on his journey in 1797. In this little note, apart from making an absolutely adequate account on the formation of travertine that leaves not much to complete even today (travertine is formed by carbonatic incrustation of plants, with fossil vegetation preserved like mosses etc.), he gave an account on fossil bones found here as well. His guide used to mention that some years before his visit, teeth of elephants were excavated from here. The size of the teeth were 8-9 feet, that is, in our present vocabulary, they could only be mammoth tusks. He reported also that the town was built on a red cliff which can be studied today at the openair Geological Park under the water tower. Bones of mammoth were mentioned from here several times during the next century; real archaeological results, however, had to be waited for till 1909. This is how Tivadar Kormos, excavator of the site reported on the first excavation of the site: „In the month of February 1909, bones of large fossil mammals were found in the calcareous tuff quarry of the Tata Esterhdzydemesne during mining operations. On the hearing the news, the author of the present lines immediately travelled to Tata and saw there, to his utmost surprise that on the place of the new outcrop a thin, sandylimy loess-like loose sediment is intercalated into the seams of the calcareous tuff containing pieces of burn bones, charcoal and silex flakes while on the bottom of the upper calcareous tuff layers, immediately overlying this loessy layer, huge mammoth bones were embedded in the limestone. By the end of May in the same year scientific excavations ivere started here under my direction, lasting in the first year for one month, on the spring of 1910, nearly two month and were also finished. The result of this work is my study entitled „A tatai őskőkori telep" fThe Palaeolithic settlement in Tata], the main statements of which are the following: It was ascertained that on the place of the finds the operation of thermal springs were stopped for a while in the Ice Age and during this time, a small, dry, grassy space was formed here on which prehistoric people settled and camped there for a long time. Their primitive stone tools and their „fabrication" 48