Rusu, Adrian Andrei - Szőcs Péter Levente: Arhitectura religioasă medievală din Transilvania 4. (Satu Mare, 2007)
Contexte / Összefüggések / Contexts - Ritoók Ágnes: A templom körüli temetők felfedezése
271 A templom körüli temetők felfedezése THE DISCOVERY OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCHYARDS (Abstract) The churchyard archaeology has a long tradition in Hungary. The first steps were taken at the end of the 19th century by Béla Posta, who aimed these type of research to learn the culture of the people (1892). István Méri pointed out in 1944, that a churchyard is a complex of archaeological, anthropological and ethnographical phenomena. In the Carpathian Basin, unlike in the European practice, the deads were often dressed under the shroud and, therefore, the accessories of vestments could be excavated. It is no wonder, that at first, the interest focused on the finds. The lack of other historical sources made the research of deserted churches very important, as the only possibility to reconstruct the network of parishes in some regions of medieval Hungary. The excavated church foundations and burials have been dated often to the Arpadian (11th to 13,h century) or to ’late medieval’ (14lh to 16th century) or simply as 'medieval ’. These wide time limits can be narrowed only through the complex analysis of the completely excavated churchyards. The use of these cemeteries was a process. During the centuries of use there were changes in their structures, in the burial customs and even in the anthropological features of the population. Instead of a simple enumeration of the finds, of the burial customs and of the anthropological data, these information must be examined in the vertical and horizontal stratigraphy of the cemetery. Looking after the analogies it should be remembered, that the churchyards had double linkage. They belonged to the Catholic Church and they were used amenably to the Canonic law under the control of the local clergy. Some phenomena and changes known in medieval Hungary as well as in medieval Europe reflect the universal public worship and its changes: changes in the position of the arms, disliking the northern side of the church, stones or loose masonry in the graves, charcoal burials etc. At the same time some local features can also be observed: frequent occurrence of dress’ accessories in the Carpathian Basin or the segregation of genders in country churchyards of Scandinavia during the 11th and 12th centuries.
