Nagy Emese Gyöngyvér - Dani János - Hajdú Zsigmond szerk.: MÓMOSZ II. (Debrecen, 2004)

V. Szabó Gábor: Ház, település és településszerkezet a késő bronzkori (BD, HA, HB periódus) Tisza-vidéken

GÁBOR V. SZABÓ HOUSES, SETTLEMENTS, AND SETTLEMENT STRUCTURES IN THE TISZA REGION OF THE LATE BRONZE AGE (PERIODS BD, HA, HB) Along the stretch of the river Tisza from Polgár to Szeged, the epoch starting with the period BD and lasting until the end of the period HB1 can be divided into two separate time periods, which are organically interconnected but are also clearly discernible on the basis of the characteristics and interrelationships of material culture. These time periods are identified as Proto Gáva (BD-HA 1) and Gáva periods (HA2-HB1). According to the data collected in the article, two types of buildings can be identified in the period examined at the sites around the river Tisza. The first one is represented by the so-called long house, unearthed at the Jánoshida site of the proto Gáva-period, but formerly known mostly from the region of the urn field culture complex. The other type would be the smaller size, wooden frame, adobe wall buildings, with a floor area of 3-4x5-8 meters. Examples of these latter buildings, which continued the constructing tradition of the Bronze Age in the Hungarian Great Plain, have been uncovered at the Doboz and Poroszló sites dating back to the period of the Gáva culture. During the analysis of the settlement structure, I focused primarily on the potential functions of the buildings explored. The building types from the Poroszló and Doboz settlements can be clearly identified as dwelling places or houses, while the long house of the Jánoshida site might have functioned as a community building. There are two forms of settlement structure that can be distinguished on the basis of the intensity of settlement saturation The majority of the settlements that we have found traces of belong to the category of scattered structure settlements. In their case, the groups of objects consisting of pits or pit complexes that indicate basic units, i.e., houses or yards, of the given settlement are located in a relatively large area, at distances of 50-250 meters from one another (Site Polgár 29, Polgár 1). There seem to be much less sites that belong to the category of closed structure or intensive settlements. As the settlement near Poroszló-Aponhát demonstrates, the buildings in these are located close to one another and in an almost identical position. The site types which used to belong to different levels in the contemporary hierarchy of settlements can be classified into three categories on the basis of their size and the finds uncovered in them. One of the categories comprises the closed structure, intensive settlement types, while the other two are made up of the scattered structure sites of different sizes and positions. The question is whether these types can be identified with such site categories as regional centers, local or secondary centers, villages or farmsteads or satellite settlements. This dilemma is further complicated by the fact that the finds (e.g., the casting mould of a sword from Site Polgár 1) suggest that, beside the central settlements of intensive population saturation, scattered structure settlements also had some presence of the contemporaray elite in the given time period. It is easily discernible that, in the Late Bronze Age, the human communities tended to occupy such geographical-ecological zones (e.g., the areas of mountains of medium height that are higher than 400-500 meters of altutide) in several regions of the Carpathian Basin that had been uninhabited and unused before. Simultaneously, as a parallel phenomenon with the above, the occupation of previously uninhabited and agriculturally virgin lands was also begun in certain regions of the Great Hungarian Plain. Compared to any preceding age, groups of people during the time period of the Gáva culture tended to settle in much larger quantities in higher altitude areas of plain loess ridges that were far from flood areas, scant in regular hydrological conditions, and meager in vegetation. Due to the lack of specifically targeted research concerning the reasons for the occupation of these new regions so far, I had to make do with work hypotheses at the present moment. These are as follows: