Miklós Kásler - Zoltán Szentirmay (szerk.): Identifying the Árpád Dynasty Skeletons Interred in the Matthias Church. Applying data from historical, archaeological, anthropological, radiological, morphological, radiocarbon dating and genetic research (Budapest, 2021)
Editors’ preface
of the royal bones should be performed by a dedicated institution, whereas we conducted this in the National Institute of Oncology in Budapest, which has a very different profile. Several people, including Kinga Éry, expressed serious concerns about whether or not we were even capable of carrying out this task. Her doubts were especially great with regard to the fact that there had already been an attempt to identify the particular royal bones with foreign help, but it yielded no results at all. Others doubted that a team of researchers primarily composed of doctors could even distinguish one human skeleton from another. Others still gave advice on how to begin such a task. An example of the latter is Balázs Mendes study Hogyan ne azonosítsuk az Árpád-házi királyokat? [How not to identify Kings of the Árpád Dynasty?], in which he suggests using relics as controls. However, we did not want to use relics even if we were able to, not only for reasons of piety, but also because there was no pressing need to do so, seeing that we could rely beyond doubt on the genetic data provided by the skeleton identified as belonging to King Béla III. We needed to learn new things along the way, a process which was facilitated by constant communication. Gábor Tusnády, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), provided us with some particularly useful insights: his stern, but well-intended constructive criticism helped us to repeatedly re-evaluate the data from different perspectives. We needed to be able to connect and interpret data distant from each other, and should the need arise, to make the necessary adjustments to achieve a clear result. We developed this method of problem solving while performing modern diagnostics of tumours. 22
