Gyöngyössy Márton (szerk.): Perspectives on the Past. Major Excavations in County Pest (Szentendre, 2008)
A Quadic settlement lying by the foot of Mount Csörögi was excavated in 1994 as part of the excavations preceding the Vác bypass of Road 2/A (М2). The presence of the Quads, an eastern Germanic tribe, in the Danube Bend was earlier indicated by a few stray finds and the material brought to light on smaller excavations. The greater part of the corpus of known finds came from Slovakian sites. With its 178 settlement features, the site at Vác-Csörögi-rét is the largest investigated Quadic settlement in Hungary. It lay on the Germanic-Sarmatian-Roman 2. frontier and the interaction between these three cultures is reflected in the finds. The wheel-turned wares, for example, were predominantly made by Sarmatian potters. At the same time, the abundance of Roman pottery is rather striking: the settlement’s occupants used both terra sigillata wares, a luxury commodity, and coarse household pots. Glass wares and brooches too came from the neighbouring Roman provinces, as did bricks manufactured in Pannonia, found in the refuse pits of the Germanic village. This is hardly surprising since the River Danube, the ripa (river frontier) separating Pannonia from the lands of the Quads and the Sarmatians, lay but a few kilometres from the settlement. The Quadic settlement was occupied in the 3rd-4th centuries. The most common artefacts brought to light were hand-thrown pottery vessels (mostly deep bowls and pots), bone combs and iron spurs. Even though only a narrow section of the settlement falling into the planned line of the М2 Motorway could be investigated, the aerial photo of the site clearly shows that the houses were aligned more or less parallelly along a street. The community’s cemetery has not been identified yet. Two refuse pits contained the skeletons of an adult and a child, who had perhaps been thrown into the pit as part of a ritual. The remains of other Quadic settlements were identified along farther-lying sections of Road 2, suggesting that the Quadic settlement territory extended to the northern fringes of modern Budapest. ^ • Valéria Kulcsár 6. A Germanic settlement at Vác
