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

István Skoflek (Felsögalla, 1934. - Tata, 1981.) László Vértes expressed probably the best and most amusing way, what can we, archaeologist, be specially thankful to István Skoflek, among other many things: „At that time, around 1957, we were struggling hard with Pál Kriván geologist to overcome „white noise". What about Tata? What do we know about it? How would it look like, after nearly fifty years in the light of the accumulated experience? We jumped into a car to look. It was just a late March day threatening us with a blizzard. The jeep was a friendly loan, as it was not very likely for the archaeologists and geologists of those days to own a car. When we reached the site, the early spring sun just popped up. I had already been to the former Porhanyó-quarry, left off because the continuation of mining would have endangered the building of the secondary school. I could collect from the clefts of the rock some bones myself which could stick to my tongue after licking them, a primitive but effective test on their fossil age. They were bones of an old type of bear and some fragments of old deer antler - we had them inventoried duly as finds contemporary to the Tata Moustérian finds of Kormos. I could not find, however, any Palaeolithic stone tools. The jeep turned into the left-over quarry and our eyes were immediately attracted by a heap over yellow sand, shining at the bottom of the moss-covered grey cliffs. Beside the sand-heap there was a little girl standing in a school-cap, obviously fulfilling some mission. - What are you doing here? - we asked her, bewildering. - We are just... well., collecting - she said in a great dismay, our teacher will surely tell, and shouted inside a cavity of a size of a badger-hole: Mister Teacher! Mister Teacher! From the badger-hole, we heard noises of somebody moving about and in a few minutes a little man pressed himself out of the ground whom I would rather call a buster, but seemingly he was Mister Teacher. It was also apparent that he realised my beard as token of an archaeologist because as soon as he sprang out from the muddy hole, he stepped to me and handed me, in a dirty cap, a selection of most beautiful stone implements. Later on the buster-like Mister Teacher became a special friend of mine and my best co-worker: István Skoflek, remembered the same scene that I myself, in a minute, jumped in the badger-hole with closed legs, hand over my head like a diver. Somehow, this fits my faint remembrances, too... István Skoflek, teacher of the Tata Secondary School, and expert of fossil vegetation, collector of leaf-prints used to collect plant 62