Majorossy Judit: A Ferenczy Múzeum régészeti gyűjteményei - A Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, D. sorozat: Múzeumi füzetek - Kiállításvezetők 5. (Szentendre, 2014)
Rácz Tibor Ákos: Középkor
traders, Slavs and from the 13th century onwards German settlers, too. In the life of Pest and Pilis counties the vicinity of Pest, Buda, Old Buda, and Visegrád played a decisive role. The urban culture and town life also had an impact on the nearby village settlements. The urban market meant a place of selling and buying goods, thus, served as a channel of trade, but was also the scene of everyday contacts. The urban population was continuously increased by the migrating people from the surrounding villages, though at the same time the burghers purchased estates and vineyards in the countryside. The entire territory of Pest County during the Middle Ages was interwoven by a great number of villages. The scenes of daily life, the frames of work and food production were provided by the settlements and the cultivated hinterlands. On the basis of the intensive archaeological field and topographical surveys, the investigations of the sites with different methods, and with the help of the preliminary excavations one can gain an overall picture about the characteristics of these medieval villages. The network of settlements as well as the inner structure of each site radically differed from the present-day rural conditions, and they even went through continuous changes. The demographic increase of the Arpadian Age can be well illustrated by the growing intensity of ceramic finds and shards on the surface which are the indicators of former settlements. In the first third of the Arpadian Age rare, unevenly spread dwellings can be detected. In the lack of written sources, it is very difficult to estimate the extension of these medieval habitations using only certain archaeological methods. At that time, one cannot speak about villages in the current meaning and with the modern connotations of the word. Instead, these settlements consisted of smaller groups of houses, which revealed a more concentrated, a more regular structure with plots and streets only from the 13th century onwards. In addition, certain buildings with economic functions, pits, water wells, and sheds for the animals were connected to these houses. In the centre of these settlement units one can often find a destroyed medieval church. If the number and the spread of the archaeological finds and features are investigated in most of the cases it can be observed that the settlements became more intensive toward the church buildings. After the church was built, people tried to construct their dwellings in its vicinity, while the sporadic houses slowly became deserted and they withered. Thus, churches became the focus of the later development of the village sites. A significant number of village churches preserved certain constructions from their medieval states, many were later rebuilt on the original place of the antecedent ecclesiastical building of the Arpadian Age. In the surroundings of Cegléd, in a circle with a radius of 10 kilometres, the sites of 13-15 churches could be identified within three kilometres from each other on an average. From the 1980s onwards, several village parish churches were excavated on the territory of Pest County. In those regions poor in stone, the resistant building material was especially valuable, that is why one usually finds only the foundation ditches of the churches, filled up with a large amount of rubble. In most of the cases the ground plan of the churches can be drawn on the basis of these ditches, but often special and rare objects are also unearthed, such as, for example, a bronze pectoral cross from the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12lh century at Inárcs. In Dabas several coins from the Mid-Arpadian Age dated the earliest building phase of the parish church, but the number of coins, jewels, and other findings started to increase mainly from the Sigismundian Age, when the early stone church was rebuilt. From the 1990s on, but especially from the early 21st century a new age began in the history of archaeology, the age of large-scale, preliminary excavations. Perhaps it was the Játék baba festett terrakotta feje egy török kori gödörből / Painted terracotta head of a doll from an Ottoman period pit 62
