Folia archeologica 33.

FOLIA ARCIIAEOLOGICA XXXIII. 1982. BUDAPEST FOREIGN FINDS IN THE PALAEOLITHIC COLLECTION OF THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM Viola T. D О В О S

I In the Palaeolithic Collection of the Hungarian National Museum a varied find material of foreign origin is kept, remarkable both quantitatively and qualitatively. Though our collecting area is — similarly to other collections of the Hungarian National Museum -— the area of Hungary, a fine material came together from abroad by way of gifts, exhange, purchase, bequests, and field surveys in the course of study-tours abroad. In 1947, the Palaeolithic Collection was created, fusing the material taken over from the Hungarian Geological Institute (Magyar Állami Földtani Intézet), and the Palaeontological Department of the Museum of Natural Sciences (Természettudományi Múzeum), adding the material removed from the Prehistoric Collection of the Hungarian National Museum. The keeper of the Collection became László Vértes. It was then that several larger units of the foreign material came in one place, and the recording became uniform. The marking of finds, yielded by excavations of research workers of the Geological Society is: Pb (Palaeolithic, Hungary) plus serial numbers beginning with 1, that of the foreign material: Pk 1- (Palaeolithic, foreign). The material, taken over from the Museum of Natural Sciences and the Prehistoric Collection of the Archaeological Department was recorded according to the system used in those institutions. László Vértes did not alter the recoding of the material inventorized before but, beginning with 1947, he introduced uniformly the letter-mark "Pb", the last two figures of the year of inventorizing and the ordinal number of the year. (The accession number of the object inventorized in 1958 as the 324th item bears the number Pb. 58/324.) He stopped using the letter mark Pk and inventorized the foreign material among the rest of the collection. This seems to be illogical but the increase of the foreign material did not make the introduction of another letter-mark, another system and a new inventory book necessary. According to traditions we register the finds from between the chronological limits but not found in the territory of Hungary also to the basic material. In the first part of the present paper I describe the finds breaking them down according to periods as Lower Middle and Upper Palaeolithics and Mesolithics, in alphabetic order; in the second part I make a detailed description of the Taboun material of D.A.E. Garrod.