Majorossy Judit: A Ferenczy Múzeum régészeti gyűjteményei - A Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, D. sorozat: Múzeumi füzetek - Kiállításvezetők 5. (Szentendre, 2014)
Czene András: Kora bronzkor
THE EARLY BRONZE AGE 2700 B.C. - 2000 B.C. Due to the different migrations at the end of the Late Copper Age, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C. the material culture, which had shown a homogenous picture in the former period, changed. From the East a horse nomadic people arrived at East- Hungary, whose leaders were buried under great earthen mounds, kurgans. From the South traditional farming groups reached the territory of present-day Hungary, bringing with them the knowledge of developed metallurgy, the secret of making bronze - which was prepared by alloying copper with tin or arsenic, or sometimes antimony. The people arriving from the West along the River Danube had the same pottery and tool kit as the peoples on Europe-wide territories from Portugal through the stone circles of Stonehenge to the Polish Plain and to the Csepel-island. During the earliest phase of the Early Bronze Age Pest County was populated by the Makó culture of Southern origin. Unfortunately, no larger cemeteries of this culture were uncovered, only single graves and burial places consisting of a few graves. They cremated their dead, and put their remains into vessels used as urns which were covered by plates. In Pest County the ruins of more than thirty settlements of this culture have been found. The Makó culture people used two types of settlements. One of them consisted of only a few pits which were scattered over a large area. This type had a shorter life-span, and these places could be temporary dwellings, their characteristics are explained by the nomadic stock-breeding lifestyle of the culture. On such sites even within the excavated area of more hectares only a few pits or graves were found, often 20 metres far away from each other. On the other hand, on the basis of the publications of the former findings and that of the large-scale excavations of the last few years and decades, it became evident that there must have been more intensive Makó culture sites with more objects/houses and longer lifespan, too. On one part of such more intensive sites one can observe a loose, long stretch of settlement organisation, which is characterised by smaller or larger groups of pits far from each other, with large, empty spaces between them. Supposedly, these groups of pits of such kind of sites couíd have belonged to buildings which stood on the surface or were only shallow pithouses, and that is why they cannot be identified with archaeological methods. The Early Bronze Age site excavated at Üllő with scattered groups of pits belongs to the latter type of settlements. The site is special for the moulds and melting pots that were found there. No signs or any remains of metal were detected in any of them, though each mould and melting pot bear the traces of strong heat, and every artifact was burnt very hard, to the “knocking”. With the exception of one mould, each of them is intact, complete, most of them survived in a fairly good condition. On the inner side of many forms cracks and small damages can be observed that evolved during the moulding process. Moulding destroys the inner side of the forms, and that is the reason why the two-part moulds could be used only once. Moulds were used for preparing different kinds of tools: socketed chisels, flat chisels, flat axes, and shaft-tube axes. The sprue can be found on the shorter side of the moulds, while during the preparation of the shaft-tube axes the melted metal was poured into the mould through the bottom side, between the head of the axe and the shaft-tube. On one of these moulds, at its two comers tiny groovings were engraved, which served exhausting gases that had been released during moulding. They used melting pots for pouring metal into the mould. The melting pot from Üllő is a large, well-formed artifact. It is slightly oval, and its wall is not too thick, but strongly burnt. There are two spouts on its rim. The prepared raw material was heated in the melting pot. Smelted metal should have Harangedény / Bell beaker 23
