Garam Éva szerk.: Between East and West - History of the peoples living in hungarian lands (Guide to the Archaeological Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum; Budapest, 2005)

HALL 8 AND CORRIDOR - The Avar period (567/568-804 A.D.) (Éva Garam)

AVAR LIFEWAYS AND CRAFTS 6a. LIFESTYLE The Byzantine and Frankish chronicles contain a wealth of information about the Avars' wars, their diplomatic activity and the various peace treaties, but very little about how they lived. The rather scanty information provided by the written sources is supplemented by the extraordinarily rich archaeological material, which reveals much about everyday life. The finds from the over fifty thousand burials uncovered in some two hundred cemeteries and the settlement excavations conducted in recent decades throughout the Carpathian Basin paint a vivid picture of the Avars' everyday life - the ingenuity of their craftsmen, of male and female costume, of jewellery and of the many diverse traditions blended in their art and culture, as well as of their beliefs, customs and spiritual life, including writing and music. The position of graves and grave groups in the burial grounds are a reflection of the hierarchical nature of Avar society. Members of the ruling elite were buried in solitary graves; the different clans too had their separate graveyards, while the commoners were laid to rest in large cemeteries with grave rows. Belief in an afterlife called for the deposition of the deceased's prized possession and of the articles indicating social status: costume adornments, the belt or belts, weapons, tableware and, occasionally, a harnessed horse. The articles deposited in graves included also the tools and implements of everyday life and an assortment of objects associated with religious beliefs. On the testimony of the settlements (and the grave finds), the Avars' economy was based on agriculture, animal husbandry, pastoralism, fishing and hunting. The Avars' living standards were no worse than those of the inhabitants of the average Merovingian period village in the Upper Danube region during the 6th—7th centuries. The small aute of the early Avar period were replaced by larger, permanent settlements around the mid-7th century. The cemeteries lay near the settlements. The small, sunken houses with a ridge roof all contained a stone or clay oven, which also provided heating during the cold winter months. All settlements had open-air ovens, storage bins and refuse pits in the open areas between the houses; each of these features could be associated with a specific house. Water was drained with an intricate system of ditches. These permanent settlements and villages were both a precondition to and a characteristic feature of agrarian lifeways. In addition to the sunken huts, the Avars probably built wooden houses and even palaces. We know that Bayan had built a bath for his wife. Accessories of urban culture, such as the folding chairs found in Transdanubia, suggest the existence of larger, more spacious buildings catering to all creature comforts. The houses roofed with thatch and reeds in the small villages often fell prey to fire or simply decayed and were rebuilt. Most houses contained very few finds, suggesting that they had been systematically stripped of their furnishings before their abandonment. The broken pieces of pottery, the few metal artefacts and the enormous amounts of animal bones (providing an insight into the diet) were mostly recovered from the refuse pits between the houses. The Avars ploughed their fields, but they also used mattocks for loosening the soil. Cultivated crops include wheat, millet, barley and flax, which were harvested with sickles. Cereals were ground using handmills, while larger tuber and leafy vegetable plants were chopped up using special knives. The iron knives, whetstones, strike-a-lights and flintstones necessary for kindling a fire (tinder decays in the earth) used by herdsmen are commonly found in male burials. These articles were usually kept in a linen or leather pouch, of which only the bone clasps have survived. The emergence of permanent settlements meant that in addition to the large domestic