Folia archeologica 23.

Garam Éva: Avar temetők Andocson

AVAR CEMETERIES AT ANDOCS Between i9Ó2and 1965,in the territory of Andocs, County Somogy, 147 Avar age graves were found in Temető Street and 27 ones north of the village, while making a fish-pond there. Based on the typical grave goods (stirrups with oblong hoops, reed-shaped spears, horse trappings with fringe decoration, earrings with globular lamella pendants, eye-beads, bronze chains, stamped belt mounts with geometric pattern) we can number the Újha/astó cemetery among the earliest ones of the Avar period. The cemetery was being in use in the 5 70s, after the Avar occupation of Transdanubia, and was abandoned about the end of the first third of the seventh century, due to the Kutrigur upheaval and internal troubles. The cemetery of Temető Street was used, on the evidence of its material, from the middle of the seventh century on. The grave goods of the latest graves are typical for the early ninth century, which would probably mean that the community using it was annihilated by the Frankish raids of the early ninth century. The cemetery is but incompletely unearthed so that a continuity in the burial cannot be proven. This is also the cause of the fact that we cannot give an exact outline of the structure of the community using the cemetery. The cemetery map gives only the conslusion that the community was divided into smaller units whose heads were presumably the men buried roughly in equal distances, with one arrowhead each.