Mesterházy Károly (szerk.): AZ 1997. ÉV RÉGÉSZETI KUTATÁSAI / Régészeti Füzetek I/51. (Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum Budapest, 2001)
Középkor
found. It is not always easy to interpret them, since erosion and grape cultivation in the 20th century not only obliterated the western part of the fort but also severely injured the inner features, which was especially harmful in the case of the remains of the dwelling houses. In the summer of 1997 we carried on the excavations started two years earlier. This year, beside cutting the moat with a narrow trench on the south-western side of the fort, we worked on two larger surfaces. One was on the upper terrace of the fort in front of the northeastern bastion, the other in a band of the western part of the fort, which joined the surface unearthed in 1996. Ninety-two features were unearthed on a surface of nearly 2000 m 2. Most of them were pits of various sizes, shapes and find quantities. The inner buildings appeared in the form of spots of rubble and daub, rammed clayey floor level fragments, brick foundations and post holes. Besides, latrines, sunken storage cellars, storage pits and garbage pits could be delineated. Judged from the remains, the fort had larger inner dwelling houses of timber structure, brick or daub walls, partly with clay floors. The archaeological data evidence a cramped inner space, crowdedness and temporariness, which is in harmony with the descriptions in the archive documents. The unparalleled richness, beauty and diversity of the find material shows, at the same time, that owing to Styria, the builders or the contractors of the fort, then the first garrison were very well furnished. Rare food (e.g. oyster) and exotic luxury goods reached the officers, which was not revealed as "tangibly" in the written sources. Similarly to the previous years, the excavations in 1997 yielded a large number of sherds, metal objects and animal bones. Beside the fragments, there were many intact, slightly injured or completable objects. From the many vessel finds we may mention an intact spouted jar of a less common type, while the Styrian knives with ornamented handles and a bronze tap deserve mentioning from among the various metal objects. The tap (Fig. 3) is a product of a Styrian or an Austrian workshop, only a few items of the type are known from Western Transdanubia. A pipe, the only one so far in Bajcsa, was also found, among other finds, in the ruins of one of the buildings. The iron mounts and other elements of each a hidden case were found in two pits in the central part of the upper terrace of the fort. An iron vessel stood beside one of them and the completable fragments of a pharmacy vessel Fig. 2: Italian pharmacy vessel, feature 120 (drawing by Sándor Ősi, Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest) Fig. 2a: The spread drawing of the decoration of the pharmacy vessel (drawing by Sándor Ősi) 165
