Gyöngyössy Márton (szerk.): Perspectives on the Past. Major Excavations in County Pest (Szentendre, 2008)
An Early Iron Age village in the Benta Valley ■■Ml■МММ (6100-4500 ВС) (4500-2700 ВС) (2700/2500-800 ВС) Altogether 1672 archaeological features of a multi-period site were uncovered along the planned line of the M6 Motorway in 2004 during the excavation directed by Katalin Ottományi. The site represents the most extensively investigated Early Iron Age settlement in Hungary. Outstanding among the one hundred features dating from the Hallstatt period is a cremation burial, a solitary grave beside a house in the centre of the settlement. The graphitic urns with conical neck and the bowls indicate that the burial was contemporaneous with the cemeteries opened from the Hallstatt C1 period onward. Little survived of the internal structure of the eighteen sunken houses. However, the layout of the settlement could be quite well observed. A weaving workshop, yielding an unusually rich find assemblage, was surrounded by a cluster of houses and pits. The most remarkable find from the workshop, which contained forty-three loom weights, was a short bladed knife whose hilt is decorated with a punched pattern. A broken brooch of the Navicella type from one of the houses and a pair of brooches linked by a bronze chain of the same type from one of the pits, whose analogies can be quoted from Italy, provide a date for the settlement's occupation since we know that these brooches were popular in the Hallstatt C2 and D1 periods. The ceramic finds reflect the survival of Urnfield traditions (bowls with facetted rim and channelled and bossed decoration) and the appearance of new Hallstatt elements, both as regards vessel forms (vessels with funnel shaped neck, bowls with horn shaped handles, Kalenderberg type pots) and their decoration (graphitic vessels, lattice and band patterns, lentil shaped impressions, smoothed-in bands, garlands, fluted and divided knobs, appliqué ribs, pseudo-bucchero wares). The pottery does not include wheel-turned wares, and neither were pre-Scythian or Scythian-Thracian vessels found, even though these occur frequently in other Hallstatt assemblages from the same period. The finds indicate that the settlement was co-eval with the Early Iron Age hillfort at Százhalombatta and the tumulus burial ground beside it. The hillfort flourished during the Hallstatt C2/D1 period on the testimony of the grave goods, a date that seems acceptable for this settlement too. The distance between the two settlements is a mere 1.5 km, suggesting that the settlement in the Benta Valley can be interpreted as the workshop settlement of the hillfort. Máté Tóth-Vásárhelyi
