Horváth M. Ferenc (szerk.): Vác The heart of the Danube Bend. A historical guide for residents and globetrotters (Vác, 2009)
Tartalom
VÁC IN THE ÁRPÁD ERA (895-1 301 ) 55■ The excavation in the Main Square of pithouse, covered with earth and turf on the roof, scattered all around in the place of today's Main Square, with felt tents, covered ovens, pens and hurdles among them. They kept pigs, sheep and goats in the pens, while the cattle pastured in the fields surrounding the village. There were a few wells among the houses and tents, but most of the water supply was probably supplied by the Danube. They dug pits of different sizes mostly to store crops, but they may have needed a lot of earth for constructions - for daubing the walls or covering the roofs of the houses - as well. The pits that were not needed any more were filled up with rubbish from the households, which provide useful information for the archaeologists. Organic waste has become humus by today, but the pieces of broken pots, animal bones gnawed and thrown away, and also some metal objects have been preserved and help us find out when these pits were filled up, or which parts of the animals were eaten by the inhabitants of the place in different eras. The settlements of the early Árpád era were inhabited by only a few families, usually 50-200 people. Their ploughlands were in walking distance, one or two kilometres away. Whenever someone tilled a field or cut down a forest to obtain some new ploughland farther away, they would move somewhere near this area with a spring or brook nearby instead of covering the long distance every day. This might have resulted in new settlements, which could have been named after their first settlers. If the ploughlands around the village became infertile or depleted in 15-20 years, the whole settlement migrated to some uncultivated area. As a result, researchers today know about several small and long-forgotten settlements or their traces from the Árpád era within the administrative boundaries of Vác. As to the Main Square of the town, we know neither the name nor the exact history of the village that could be related to this place. Medieval well Jug (PMMI-TIM 53.55.4)
