Folia archeologica 34.

FOLIA ARCHAEOLOGICA XXXIV. 1983. BUDAPEST DATA TO THE EVALUATION OF THE MIDDLE PALAEOLITHIC INDUSTRY OF TATA In memóriám István Skoflek Viola T. DOBOSI István Skoflek—pedagogue, educationalist, palaeobotanist

—began first to be attached to archaeology when the Palaeolithic settlement laying under his one-time workplace, the high school of Tata, was rediscovered in 1958; the connection lasted till his tragic death in 1981. This contact, so fruitful for archaeology, is documented by several sites discovered by him and by his collection which came after his death in the Palaeolithic stacks of the Hungarian National Museum. The bulk of this collection comes from the very site of Porhanyóbánya. The publication of this archaeological collection gives us now a possibility of surveying the archaeological material of the Middle Palaeolithic site of Tata. I. Research history The site was mentioned already in 1817 as "the burial ground of elephants"; one part of it was discovered in February 1909 and excavated consequently by Tivadar Kormos. He published the results of his research in 1912 ". . .in a study valid even in our days as an example of a small monograph on Palaeolithics which considers several aspects and has a geological view."

1 The second great period in the history of the Tata Palaeolithical site is the excavation campaign of 1958 —59 led by László Vértes; its results were published in 1964.'- Referring to the chapter of this volume dealing with the history of research, we look in the followings onlv over the evaluations published after 1964. 1 Vértes, L., Az őskőkor és átmeneti kőkor emlékei Magyarországon. A magyar régészet kézikönyve. 1. (Budapest 1965) 93.; Kormos, T., Földt.Int.Évk. 20(1912)3—66.; Id., La Station moustérienne de Tata. (Budapest 1913) 2 Vértes, L. et al., Tata, eine mittelpaläolithische Travertin-Siedlung in Ungarn. АН 43. (Budapest 1964), (in the followings: Tata). — As far as these two works can be compared at all, we can state that the volume was as much an equal continuation of the "interdisciplinarian" elaboration method, started by Kormos, as it mirrored the development of archaeology and social sciences in these five decades.