Garam Éva szerk.: Between East and West - History of the peoples living in hungarian lands (Guide to the Archaeological Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum; Budapest, 2005)

HALL 2 - The Neolithic and the Copper Age (6000-2800 B.C.) (Nándor Kalicz, Pál Raczky)

and waterproof. Clay for daub was mined from local clay pits near the houses and mixed with grass and straw. The burnt daub fragments from houses destroyed by fire have preserved many details of house building techniques. Floors and the horizontal ceiling were constructed using split planks, which were then daubed with clay, both for firmness and insulation. The remains of two-storey houses made using this technique were uncovered at Berettyóújfalu-Herpály (Figs 22-23). Comparable buildings constructed in the same way are known mostly from South-East Europe. Neolithic and Copper Age settlements range from small hamlets with a few houses (Mezőkövesd, Öcsöd, Zalavár, Győr) to large villages with several dozen buildings (Szárszó, Lébény, Polgár). The houses built by Neolithic and Copper Age communities were not randomly sited; in most cases, their place was carefully chosen within the settlement lying in a particularly favourable location. The houses of a settlement could be arranged in one of several ways: if the settlement lay near water, houses were usually aligned into one or two rows along the shore; sometimes, the houses formed a looser or denser cluster around a central area. Settlement size ranged from small hamlets covering an area of no more than 2-300 m

2 to villages extending over 30 hectares. The extensive settlement sections uncovered dunng recent, large-scale excavations (Füzesabony-Gubakút, PolgárCsőszhalom) revealed a consciously planned, uniform settlement structure. The Neolithic settlement types and their houses in Transdanubia are closely allied to contemporary sites in Central Europe, while those of the Great Hungarian Plain reflect cultural impacts from the Balkans in the south. The settlements in both regions were often protected with a ditched enclosure and, occasionally, a fence of timber posts. In many cases, the houses were spaced extremely close to each other and if they accidentally burnt down or were intentionally set on fire, a thick debris layer accumulated. As a result of the repeated destruction and rebuilding of the houses on the same spot, the superimposed occupation levels accumulated into several metres high mounds called tells. This settlement form was typical for the southern part of the Great Hungarian Plain, alongside villages with a looser structure, whose houses were aligned according to the prevalent wind direction. This settlement structure allowed stockbreeding in the open areas between the houses in the Late Neolithic. One of the buildings unearthed on the tell settlement at Vésztő-Mágor had a cult corner with an assemblage of objects which were unlikely to have been used in everyday life. These unusual objects and their special arrangement have been interpreted as an expression of a mythical world and its associated rituals. The settlements at Zalavár-Basasziget and Győr-Szabadrétdomb are good examples of Copper Age settlements in Transdanubia; the Tiszalúc site in the Great Hungarian Plain is typical for that region. The latter settlement with its twenty-six buildings covered about one hectare and was protected with a palisade fence. The houses were arranged into four rows and there was a 5-10 m wide open area between the palisade and the houses, where the animals were perhaps kept. Most houses had two rooms, similarly to the other residential buildings known from the Carpathian Basin. The houses themselves differed little from the buildings typical for the Neolithic. The small village had an estimated population of about 50-100 people, and it was occupied for some 100-120 years. 4. THE WILD ENVIRONMENT: THE RELICS AND CULTS OF HUNTING The "domesticated world" of Neolithic man, whose perhaps most expressive symbols were the family hearth, the house and, in a wider sense, the settlement itself, was surrounded by the broad and occasionally terrifying, unknown wild world. This dichotomy undoubt-