Balogh Csilla – P. Fischl Klára: Felgyő, Ürmös-tanya. A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Monumenta Archeologica 1. (Szeged, 2010)

The Excavations at Felgyő (1955-1977)

A felgyői ásatások története (1955-1977) 23 THE EXCA VA TIONS A T FEL G YO (1955-1977) Csilla BALOGH - Klára P. FISCHL Before immersing themselves in the present volume, readers wishing to learn more about the earlier excavations at Felgyő might find it instructive to leaf through Gyula László's study, "Felgyő. Egy honfoglaláskori falu ásatásáról" [Felgyő. Excavations in a Conquest period village] (LÁSZLÓ, n.d.), explaining László's ongoing fascination with the site for over twenty years. He returned to the site in spite of the fact that the working conditions were often far from ideal. The reasons for the delay in the publication of the site and its finds also become understandable from László' essay. The Archaeological Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Department II of the Academy assigned László the task of researching the settlements of the Conquest period. After consulting with István Méri, the decision was made to investigate the outskirts of Felgyő, based on the findings of Júlia Kovalovszki's earlier field surveys (Fig. 1). The excavations were funded by Department II of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and, occasionally, by the Directorate of the County Csongrád Museums. Felgyő was founded around the manorial centre of the Károlyi estates in 1948. The construction of the new "Socialist" village centre some 2 km from the former manorial centre was begun in the early 1960s. The opening of new excavation trenches was initially constrained by the extensive cultivated fields and, later, by the growth of the village, which spread towards the excavation areas. The modern settlement now overlies the Árpádian Age village, whose extent could nonetheless be reconstructed from the surveys and excavations. Several generations of archaeologists participated and cut their teeth on the excavations at Felgyő. Kornél Bakay, Csanád Bálint, Elek Benkő, József Csalog, István Dienes, István Erdélyi, Éva Garam, György Goldmann, Attila Kiss, Judit Kolba, Judit Kvassay, Emese Lovász, Katalin B. Nagy, Margit Nagy, András Pálóczi-Horváth, Ildikó Szathmári, Júlia Szénánszky, Péter Tomka, Ottó Trogmayer, Andrea Vaday and Ilona Valter all worked at Felgyő at one time or another, either as László's colleagues or as archaeology students. In 2002, a team of specialists was formed on the initiative of Gabriella Vörös, the then director of the county museum, for evaluating the finds and findings of the excavations according to archaeological periods. The Bronze Age finds were to be analysed by Klára P. Fischl, the Sarmatian burials by Gabriella Vörös, the Avar cemetery by Zoltán Rózsa and the Árpádian Age finds by Elek Benkő. The surviving documentation in the Koszta József Museum of Szentes, where the finds from the excavations are housed, was collected by János József Szabó. Sadly, nothing came of this initiative owing to the lack of necessary funds. Plans to publish the finds were revived again in 2006, when Csilla Balogh began to study the Avar grave finds from Felgyő as part of her study on the Avar finds from the Danube-Tisza Interfluve. When the detailed report on the Bronze Age and Avar period archaeological finds was completed together with the assessment of the anthropological and zoological material of these two periods, the authors of the present volume decided to publish the volume on the centenary of László's birth. It is an irony of fate that this volume contains the find assemblages which László regarded as "by-products" of his excavation. The appendix to the volume contains the report on the archaeobotanical sample retrieved from one of the Árpádian Age ditches of the 1971 campaign. A new excavation was conducted at the Ürmös-tanya site in spring 2009. A brief description of this excavation and of the Bronze Age and Avar period finds brought to light is included in this volume because they complement the findings of the earlier investigations at the site. The find assemblages published in this volume represent major contributions to the study of both the Bronze Age and the Avar period. The assessment of the material called for the careful examination of the available documentation, including the surviving drawings, excavation plans and photographs, without which this enormous body of finds could hardly have been interpreted and placed in its proper context. An impressive graphic documentation of varying quality survived from the successive excavation campaigns, ranging from survey plans (Fig. 2), combined excavation plans, grave plans, trench plans, section drawings and detail drawings to small sketches in the field diary or on separate sheets of paper. The graphic documentation was georeferenced using a GIS programme, without which this graphic material, often of highly differing quality and drawn at various scales, could hardly have been fitted into a uniform system. The general procedure was to proceed from combined excavation plans drawn at a smaller scale to more detailed plans drawn at a larger scale. Presented in this volume are the original drawings - or, in a few cases, their re-drawn version - in part for the sake of authenticity and in part for illustrating why it proved impossible to create a wholly uniform system for the surviving graphic material. The publication of the graphic documentation both in a printed format and on DVD-ROM was preceded by the full review and assessment of the available material. At the onset of this work, we were confident that the evaluation of the finds from all archaeological periods would be completed and that the results could be published in a single volume. The description of the excavations thus quotes and refers to all the excavation plans and reconstructions (Figs 4-43), while the description and interpretation of the Sarmatian and Árpádian Age features is omitted. The excavations at Felgyő were conducted in several well-definable locations (Fig. 3). After sifting through and examining the surviving documentation, our initial plan was to publish the original text of the field diaries describing the archaeological features brought to light in the smaller excavation areas as an appendix to the volume. It must be admitted that the selection of the relevant passages and the identification of the various features described in them proved to be a more difficult task than the assessment and interpretation of the actual finds. The written documentation of the excavation conducted at the Geda-halom site was omitted because the rights to publication do not belong to the present authors. The Avar cemetery lay north and south of the dirt track leading to Ürmös-tanya (Location V), the Bronze Age settlement and cemetery was discovered on the sand hillock east of the Szeged road (Location III) and in the trenches opened at the Ürmös-tanya site. Included in this volume is the detailed description of the Bronze Age and Avar period finds brought to light during the campaigns conducted between 1960 and