FSU Anthropology - Körös Regional Archaeological Project

Previous Research in the Study Area

Before the Körös Regional Archaeological Project began conducting research in the region in the late 1990s, southeastern Hungary had been the focus of archaeological research by Hungarian and other foreign research teams. The following projects and programs were particularly important for laying the groundwork upon which the Körös Project has built in recent years.

The Magyarország Régészeti Topográfiája Series

Northern Békés County has been the focus of intensive fieldwork by Hungarian research teams for the last thirty years. As part of an ambitious project to document all of the known sites in different counties, the Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and various regional museums have joined forces to publish a series of volumes, known as the Magyarország Régészeti Topográfiája, the Archaeological Topography of Hungary (MRT). This series combines the comprehensive documentation of all of the known sites and private collections within an administrative district with intensive surface survey directed explicitly at locating new sites. To date, ten different volumes have been published. Volumes I-V, and VII concentrate upon the area north of Lake Balaton, in northern Transdanubia, and upon the region to the north of Budapest near the Danube bend. Volumes VI, VIII, and X concentrate upon northern Békés County.

Volume VI (Ecsedy et al. 1982) is the earliest of the three, and covers the eastern administrative district in the northern portion of county Békés � the Szeghalom district (see Figure 5.4). This volume covers ca. 1220 square km and includes 13 parishes. It was begun by Gyula Gazdapusztai (then of the Békés County Museum) in 1968, and was continued by several others over the next decade, until it was published in 1982. Volume VIII (Jankovich et al. 1989) concentrates upon the northwestern portion of the county � the Szarvas district. It includes eight parishes and covers approximately 850 km2. Work on this volume began during 1974, and fieldwork was completed in 1979. Makkay (1989:9) notes that some 1200 (10-12 hour!) workdays went into the volume, and some 1262 new sites were found.

Volume X (Jankovic et al. 1998) � Békés and Békéscsaba districts � was published in 1998. Volume X includes 12 parishes and covers approximately 930 square km to the south of the first two volumes. Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain the fieldmaps from this volume (see below) and it therefore is not included in the current research.

Each of the MRT volumes meticulously documents the location of all known archaeological sites in the district and the findspots of private collections. In addition, a program of intensive field research was instituted to discover additional sites within each district. According to Makkay (personal communication, 1998), an attempt was made to intensively field-walk all of the water-free areas within each district. With the aid of 1:10,000 scale topographic maps, fieldwalking was generally conducted at 15-20 meter intervals. Since the vast majority of the land has been deep-plowed, and since the surface geomorphology of the region has remained relatively stable since the Neolithic, the region is ideal for such intensive fieldwalking.

When a new site was identified, an attempt was made to estimate roughly the size of the surface scatter, and a non-systematic collection of diagnostic sherds was conducted to discern which periods were represented. The 1:10,000 fieldmaps for each district are stored at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, and the artifacts collected during fieldwork are stored at several museums in Békés County, at the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, and at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

Sherratt�s K�r�s-Beretty� Project

In addition to the extensive Hungarian research in the region, a collaborative British/Hungarian project under the direction of Andrew Sherratt (1997a [1983]and 1997b [1984]), was undertaken in the D�vav�nya region during the late 1970�s and early 1980�s. The results of Sherratt�s research were initially published in the first two volumes of the Oxford Journal of Archaeology (Sherratt 1983, 1984), and these articles have been reprinted in a recent volume (Sherratt 1997d). In that volume, Sherratt (1997a:270) noted that:

Fieldwork in Hungary was designed to track changes in object-distributions and settlement-patterns over thousands of years, from c. 6000 down to 2000 BC, in order to see how long-term social processes worked out on the ground in a modal area of central Europe�The contrasting patterns of site-distribution in the survey area are a unique record of fluctuating (and slowly evolving) forms of spatial organisation over long periods of time, with a comprehensiveness and degree of resolution unequalled anywhere.

In addition to synthesizing a good deal of the information that had been provided by earlier Hungarian research, Sherratt�s team also conducted more intensive investigation at select sites near D�vav�nya (see Sherratt 1984, 1987, 1997a and b).

Excavations at V�sztö-M�gor and �rm�nyk�t 13

In addition to the intensive surface surveys that have been conducted throughout the study area, two important sites with Early Copper Age settlement features that previously have been excavated within the study area � V�sztö-M�gor (V�sztö 15; see Heged�us 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1982, 1983; Hegedüs and Makkay 1987; Makkay 1986) and �rm�nyk�t 13 (�rm�nyk�t-Makonczai-Domb; see Andr�s 1996; Juh�sz 1991) � were available for the present research. The former is a large Late Neolithic tell site that was abandoned at the end of the Late Neolithic and, after a hiatus, was reinhabited during the Early and Middle Copper Ages The latter is a medieval cemetery that yielded several settlement features, mostly pits, that date to the Early Copper Age.