Majorossy Judit (szerk.): A Ferenczy Múzeum Évkönyve 2014 - Studia Comitatensia 33., Új Folyam 1. (Szentendre, 2014)
Szentendre. Adalékok a Pajor család, a Pajor-kúria és a Ferenczy-család történetéhez - Martos Gábor: Két talált kép „megtisztítása”. Ferenczy Valér ismeretlen nagybányai művei egy magyarországi magángyűjteményből
Studia Comitatensia 2014 - Yearbook of the Ferenczy Museum - New Series 1 - English Summaries Ákos Tibor Rácz Changes in the Árpád Age Settlement Forms and the Problems of Terminology In the Árpád Age there was an open possibility for expansion within the village boundaries. The cultivation of new production areas or the transformation of the landscape was an elemental interest of the peasant society being in a significant demographic growth and resulted in the establishment of many new colonies. Major possessions were divided up, which also favoured the creation of new settlement germs, while the originally extended border of the village was split into several small units. Smaller bodies of possession, economic structures were not necessarily inhabited, and most of them withered early or merged with one another. The apparently uncontrolled proliferation of Árpád Age settlements, in fact, reflects a settlement structure subjected to agricultural production. It had not yet evolved to a regulated system, and the quick depletion of arable lands necessarily brought the change of fields and the migration of settlements. Due to the frequent construction, destruction and relocation of the short life-span pit houses, the morphology of the settlements was in a continuous transformation during the centuries of the Árpád Age. The changes pointed to more and more stabile communities. The key trends in this process were that the single houses were integrated into groups and the dispersed settlement traces gave their place over to concentrated structures. The changes can be well illustrated by the examples of Maglód and Ecser sites (Plate 1). In the tenth century the houses were scattered, standing alone with some additional economic facilities. Due to chronological uncertainties that traces back to pottery typology, one cannot tell whether in Maglód (Plate 2) and in Ecser (Plate 3) the buildings of a bigger community living in a dispersed structure were unearthed or the migration stations of a single household were documented. The two distinct groups of features at the site Ecser 7 (Plate 4), located in a motorway junction, can be evaluated as typical examples of “isolated farmsteads”. Immediately west of the junction, on the other side of a one-time rain-wash the intense core of an Árpád Age village was excavated in 2014 during the research of a four-metre-wide pipeline track. The seven buildings dug into the ground in the close proximity to each other can be dated between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. If the excavated settlement traces are regarded separately, the results are several “isolated farmsteads”. If the houses found along the MO motorway are regarded as one unit, it means a dispersed settlement. However, if the settlement traces identified in the track of the pipeline are included, a large Árpád Age settlement is obtained, which emerged from the tenth, eleventh century scattered germs and reached a late Árpád Age village with at least one stable core. In the tenth-century settlement of Vecsés, in addition to the households spatially separated from each other, there existed a core zone including more than one families (Plate 11). The ground plan of this part of the settlement was more complex than that of the farmsteads. A spatial structure has been documented, where the residential function and the economic activities, like forging and grinding were clearly separated. Life did not cease on the site after the tenth century either. Based on the finds of the field survey and the excavations, the habitation was continuous until the Late Middle Ages (Plate 10). The features show a slowly stabilizing settlement: the houses are mobile, but the village itself does not move. The centrally located church and churchyard must have played an important role. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries already groups of houses can be found, for example, in the west side of Vecsés (Plate 12-13). The five, evenly dispersed houses of the site Üllő 2 (from the end of the eleventh, the beginning of twelfth centuries) formed one group (Plate 6). On the neighbouring site, Üllő 1 the habitation was more intense and perhaps lasted longer (Plate 7). The twelfth-century phenomena were still dispersed on a relatively large territory, but the thirteenth- century core of the village could be well defined on a smaller area, on site Üllő 7 (Plate 8). The three sites of Üllő, linked in time and space, must have been created by the same community (Plate 5). Unlike the spacious, but unevenly scattered settlement traces of the early Árpád Age, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century settlement details were smaller, but much more intense in terms of their finds. The Árpád Age settlements appeared in countless variations of diffuse and concentrated structures, thus it is difficult to systematize them on archaeological basis. The greater part of the single dwelling structures, the isolated farmsteads had no continuity after the tenth century and rarely, for example, in the case of Vecsés formed the core of a later settlement (Holm in the written sources). This village even by the middle of the Árpád Age was just a set 268
