A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve 2014., Új folyam 1. (Szeged, 2014)

RÉGÉSZET - Szeverényi Vajk - Priskin Anna - Czukor Péter: Csanádpalota-Juhász T. tanya késő bronzkori erődített település feltárása - előzetes jelentés a 2011-2013. évi ásatások eredményeiről

Szeverényi - Priskin - Czukor Excavations at the Late Bronze Age Fortified Settlement of Csanádpalota-Juhász T. tanya

Excavations at the Late Bronze Age Fortified Settlement of Csanádpalota-Juhász T. tanya (M43 Site Nr. 55): the Results of the 2011-2013

Campaigns

Vajk Szeverényi - Anna Priskin - Péter Czukor

Preventive excavations preceding the construction of the M43 highway between Makó and the Hungarian-Romanian border at Site Nr. 55 took place between 2011 and 2013. The area to be excavated was 119 080 m2 large, and we unearthed 1000 archaeological features that contained material from a number of periods between the Late Bronze Age and the medieval Árpád Period. The aim of the article is to provide a short description of the research on the Bronze Age features and the presumably coeval system of fortifications. We managed to excavate 96 Bronze Age features: 64 pits, 29 ditches and three find concentrations without a clear context. We had some information on an oval fortification north of the planned track already before the excavation from surveys and aerial photos. During our work we identified a number of large V- and U-sectioned ditches that belong to a fortified site whose area is estimated to be ca. 400 hectares, which makes it the largest prehistoric fortified settlement in Hungary. These were associated with a series of narrower and shallower ditches and a gate with a timber structure allowing entrance across the ditches to the central area of the Late Bronze Age settlement from the southeast. A number of pits were also excavated that contained a material richer than the rest of the

features: bronze and bone tools, animal skeletons and fine pottery. These are interpreted here as structured depositions, probably the remains of various ritual activities and feasts. The preliminary stylistic analysis of the pottery has shown that the material can be dated to the so-called Pre/Proto-Gáva and Cruceni- Belegis II period (ca. 1300-1100 BC). The most frequent traits include facetted and channelled rims, channelling on the shoulder, knobs with multiple fluting, incised and channelled garland motifs, incised line bundles. The bronze finds include ornaments, arrow heads, flat and socketed axes, and a unique bronze knife with a decorated bone hilt. The results of the analysis of faunal remains indicates fairly typical Bronze Age animal husbandry, while those of the archaeobotanical remains are somewhat unusual, discovering a large amount of common wheat, typical mostly of later periods. These results are complemented with the analysis of grinding stones that show that they had been used outside food processing as well (grinding of graphite and red pigments]. The Late Bronze Age fortified settlement of Csanádpalota was part of a larger system of fortifications in southeast Hungary and northwestern Romania that probably served as the centres of the Late Bronze Age elite in the area.

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