Viola T. Dobosi: Paleolithic Man in the Által-ér Valley (Tata, 1999)

fore, will not lose its carbonic acid contents but takes up extra quantities and no precipitation of lime will take place here. Let us imagine know that in an uninhabited valley the trees of the wood falling over each other covers the ground with plant waste in thick layer. On this slowly rotting waste, a new vegetation will grow. The water is infesting this whole mess and cannot cement the rotten parts because at those parts the lime with carbonic acid will not precipitate. At the same time, lime is precipitated on the living plants without killing off the vegetation because the roots are fed from below, the rotten plants and the accumulating fine silt between them. The limy crust is slowly getting so thick with new and new generations of vegetation on the top that the roots of the plants cannot work any more and turn limy as a results of infiltrating water. Under the thick deposits of calcareous tuff therefore we find always a great amount of plant waste. These are however slowly disintegrating and the drifting groundwater will carry away the products of decay and on the place of former trunks, heaps of twigs etc., smaller and bigger disordered cavities will appear." (Barlangvilág, vol. V.,/1-2. (1935), pp. 4-5.) These cavities render the travertine so attractive as construction material, why layers of barren are worth to detach till they reach the profitable layers. The speed of deposition of the calcareous tuff result in the preservation of the tiny plant details with complete adherence. The outcrops of calcareous tuff therefore got into the focus of natural science experts, and later on, to the interest of archaeologists as well. This is how attention was drawn to Vértesszőlős in the first years of the 20th century. There were two quarries within the confines of the village: a small quarry along the Tata outlet of road 100, at 140 m altitude a.s.l. and a more important one, a calcareous tuff quarry at the altitude of 170-180 a.s.l., towards the confines of the village facing the village Baj. In the 1920-ies, 1930-ies several publications were published on palaeontological finds collected from here and other calcareous tuff occurrences. The events started to take a faster turn by the fifties. Viktor Budó and István Skoflek, teachers of biology at the Tata secondary school discovered the rich fossil flora of the quarry and founded a major collection by the plant prints collected from here. In 1962, Márton Pécsi visited the upper quarry with university students of geography to study the phenomena of the formation of calcareous tuff. In the meantime they became attentive of features which proved to be the settlement of Early Man. The excavations were lead by László Vértes, and the work lasted till the opening of the open-air museum and finishing the manuscript of the book on the Vértesszőlős 21