Zalai Múzeum 15. Horváth László 60 éves (Zalaegerszeg, 2006)

Mitja Guštin: Between the Slavs and the Madyars

250 Mit]a Gustin Murska Sobota as belonging to the Slavic tree is indicated by several characteristics. A number of these are, in fact, the characteristics of the wider Central and Eastern European area, but in combination with others, more specific ones, they offer the possibility of a more exact ethnic determination. Having said that, the first wave is characterized by settlements on plains near water, with dispersed individual farmsteads or small hamlets composed of a few farmsteads with simply built residential and outbuildings as well as their contents. The first immigrants' buildings were dug into the earth and covered by simple tent-like roofs of reeds. The roof construction was light, with the cover attached to wattle without support beams and weighed down with stones underneath the roof ridge so as not to be blown away by the wind. One of the residential buildings uncovered also had a hearth, made of cobbles and clay in a side niche. The contents of the residential and side pits contained handmade porous and mostly undecorated pottery, ascribable to the wellknown Prague type. The early dating of these settlements to the end of the 6

th and the beginning of the 7

th century is supported by numerous C

14 analyses and corresponds to the historical sources speaking of Slav settlements after AD 568. The ethnic determination is made possible by a direct comparison of the material culture with related finds from western Slovakia, Moravia and Lower Austria that, together with the characteristics of settlements mentioned already above, construction and building contents, attest to the Slav immigration into Prekmurje through the Middle Danube region (GUSTIN 2002, 60-62; 2004, 264). The contents of individual semi-subterranean huts also included fragments of Roman pottery in secondary use, that had been picked up on the near-by „ruins" of Roman farmsteads. It is surprising, though, that the material culture of this early Slav settlements of the 6

th and 7

th centuries in Prekmurje, Podravje and other sites between the Alps and the Adriatic reveals no typical pottery or other objects of every-day use, such as pieces of attire and others, that could be of Avar origin. Relatively rare decorative metal objects tied to the culture of the Avar Khaganate only appear in this and other areas of Slovenia in the 8

th century (BITENC-KNIFIC 2001). Rural settlements with dispersed but better built farmsteads and outbuildings continued without an apparent break into the 8

th century, when the first cemeteries with inhumation graves appeared in Slovenia. The latter can be defined, based on the pieces of attire and pots offered in graves, as the heritage of the pre-Christian era. In the 9

th century, however, the life at Nova tabla as well as on other near-by sites of the „Slav countryside" around Murska Sobota ended. It appears that, at that time, major social changes occurred with the rule of Pribina and his son Kocelj in Lower Pannónia, who built their centre at Blatograd or Blatenski Kostel (Masapurch, Zalavár). These changes were tied to the formation of feudal estates and the missionary work of the Christian Church and thereby to the shift of settlements to new feudal and religious centres that became the bearers of the administration of the Carolingian state. The settlement picture for the „dark" period between the 9

th and 12

th centuries is, for the region of Prekmurje as well as elsewhere in Slovenia, practically unknown. It is illuminated neither by historical data nor by archaeological research and based solely on a few chance finds and cemeteries with typical grave goods of the Köttlach and the Bijelo Brdo cultures. The scarce preRomanesque and somewhat more numerous Romanesque churches and secular buildings as well as the few cemeteries of that time fill the void until the appearance of the architecture of the well-known medieval market-towns (Fig. 1; VALTER 2005). This hiatus in the knowledge of settlements and the characteristics of residential and outbuildings was also filled by the excavations conducted within the highway programme in Slovenia, with a few sites uncovered in the surroundings of Lendava. The research at Gornje njive near Dolga vas in 1997-1998 and particularly in 2006, as well as at Pince and Zatak (GUSTIN 2005, 29-31) in 2005 have brought to light surprising material evidence of a fairly intense settlement in the period from the 10

th to the 15

th centuries of this flatland near the hills of Goricko that separate the area of the Mura and the Ledava/Lendva in Slovenia from that of the Zala river in Hungary. Field research has revealed that the early medieval settlement in the area around Lendava shows a rural character with a partially compact village pattern. This developed, through time, into nucleated settlements. The earliest farmsteads were composed of simple wooden buildings partially dug into the earth and therefore called semi-subterranean huts. Hearths are a constituent part of the ground-plans of these houses; there was also a case where two well preserved hearths were uncovered at the outer walls of a house (Fig. 2). Like the other houses, this one was also surrounded by refuse pits, which were dug when clay was needed to plaster the houses. Such residential buildings are usual for early medieval Continental Europe and can therefore hardly be ascribed to ethnicity. At the site of Zatak near Lendava, a semi-subterranean house (House 1) (Fig. 2) with its outside hearths has a good analogy in the early medieval sett-