Szabó Miklós, Petres F. Éva: Decorated weapons on the La Tene Iron Age in the Carpathian Basin. (Inventaria Praehistorica Hungariae 5; Budapest, 1992)

I. EXPERIMENTATION - The post-Waldalgesheim design

gives the compositional framework for the Waldalgesheim derived tendril filler motifs. Even though the decoration of the Jorissant spearhead (Fig. 12) is not exactly identical, it does betray a similar ornamental spirit with its tendril pattern framing a swastika grid.

111 Fig. 12 JoTÍ3sant (Fribourg), incised decoration on a spear-head (after De Navarro [1912] fig. 35) This eclectic ornamental schema which blended the geometric tradition of the Early Style of the Marne region

112 with the Waldalgesheim Style tendril pattern is illustrated by a further piece from the Carpathian Basin. The socket of a spearhead from Szob (Cat.no. 69; PL 73) is engraved with well-recognisable palmette derivatives above and below the lozenge grid. Morphological and technical analyses would suggest that the Rezi-Rezicser (Cat.no. 56, Suppl. 3) and Liter scabbard (Cat.no. 39; PL 43) were products of the same workshop. Unfortunately, László Horváth who first published the former could not reconstruct the find associations.

113 According to our present knowledge scabbards related to these two specimens appear to have spread to the Carpathian Basin in the La Tène B2 period, whilst their closest Italian parallels cannot be dated earlier than 300 B.C.

114 This definitely supports the above assumption that decoration in the Waldalgesheim Style and Waldalgesheim tradition first appeared in the workshops of the Carpathian Basin at a later date than in the west. Before drawing any conclusions we must briefly survey a few problems in connection with the Hatvan-Boldog sword. It was Jacobsthal who presented this find to the scholarly world,

115 and Ilona Hunyady who introduced the category "Hatvan-Boldog type" in her typological system of La Tène swords and scabbards emphasizing that this type is not restricted to the Carpathian Basin.

116 This category reappears in an early study by De Navarro,

117 but later disappears from his monograph, probably because of the noncanonic features of the type specimen which reflect the transition between the early and middle La Tène period.

118 The usage of the Hatvan-Boldog type in recent studies reflects the difficulties arising from the uncorrelated terminology of western and eastern La Tène studies.

119 Some misunderstandings can be attributed to the fact that the Hatvan-Boldog sword has not been personally studied since the end of the 1930s and that the badly preserved scabbard probably perished with the sword during World War II (cp. Cat.no. 18; PL 18). The situation became somewhat more favourable with the emergence of the sword from Gáva in the Museum of Nyíregyháza (Cat.no. 12; Pl. 13; 111. 111,1) which is virtually identical with the Hatvan-Boldog specimen. In other words, if the examination of the former offers chronological starting points,