Animals in the Urban Landscape in the Wake of the Middle Ages: A case study from Vác, Hungary 9780860547884, 9781407349138

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Introduction
Theoretical Background
Natural Environment and Climate
A Short History of Vac
Site Descriptions
Economic-Historical Context
Demography
Animal Remains and Chronological Periodization
Animal Keeping
Direct Exploitation of the Natural Environment
Craft Activities and Industral Organization
Trading in Animals and Animal Products
Seasonality
Modern Age Urbanization
Plant Exploitation and Agriculture
Conclusions
References
Appendices
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Appendix 4
Appendix 5
Plates

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BAR  S609  1995   BARTOSIEWICZ  

Animals in the Urban Landscape in the Wake of the Middle Ages A case study from Vác, Hungary

ANIMALS IN THE URBAN LANDSCAPE IN THE WAKE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

László Bartosiewicz with contributions by Zsuzsa Miklós and Ferenc Gyulai

BAR International Series 609 B A R

1995

Animals in the Urban Landscape in the Wake of the Middle Ages A case study from V ac, Hungary

Laszlo BartosievVicz with contributions by Zsuzsa Miklos and Ferenc Gyulai

BAR International Series 609 1995

Published in 2016 by BAR Publishing, Oxford

BAR International Series 609 Animals in the Urban Landscape in the Wake of the Middle Ages

© L Bartosiewicz and the Publisher 1995 The author's moral rights under the 1988 UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act are hereby expressly asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied, reproduced, stored, sold, distributed, scanned, saved in any form of digital format or transmitted in any form digitally, without the written permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 9780860547884 paperback ISBN 9781407349138 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9780860547884 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BAR Publishing is the trading name of British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd. British Archaeological Reports was first incorporated in 197 4 to publish the BAR Series, International and British. In 1992 Hadrian Books Ltd became part of the BAR group. This volume was originally published by Tempvs Reparatvm in conjunction with British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd/ Hadrian Books Ltd, the Series principal publisher, in 1995. This present volume is published by BAR Publishing, 2016.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful thanks are due to Dr. Denes Janossy of the Hungarian Museum of Natural history (Budapest) for his help in identifying bird remains. The help offered by the late Istvan Takacs of the Hungarian Agricultural Museum (Budapest) must also be acknowledged here. He provided access to the horns and metapodia of modem Hungarian Grey cattle for the purposes of comparison. Various chapters of the English text were revised by Dr. Alice M. Choyke and Dr. Judith A. Rasson. Valuable comments by Dr. Istvan Torma (archaeology, archaeobotany), Dr. Istvan Voros (archaeozoology) and Csilla Zatyk6 (history, English) helped further improving the manuscript. Graphic illustrations were prepared by Sandor Osi and Maria N. Devay. Photographs were taken by Krisztina Palfay, Tibor Kadas and Antal Fekete. Their important contributions are also acknowledged here.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Theoretical background Interpretive framework Test implications Quantitative methods Nomenclature and terminology Natural environmentand climateby Laszl6 Bartosiewicz and Ferenc Gyulai Topography Climate Flora and fauna A short history of Vac by Zsuzsa Mik16s The Castle Hungarian Town German Town Economic life Site descriptionsby Zsuzsa Mik16s Individual sites Site I: Taban street 20/a Site II: Marcius 15 square 6 Site III: Marcius 15 square 8 Site IV: Szechenyistreet 4-6 Site v: Szechenyistreet 3- 7 Site VI: Koztarsasag street 11 Site VII: Piarist Church(Koztarsasag street 1) Site VIII: EngineeringHighschool(Koztarsasag street 1) Site IX: Kossuth square 2 Site X: Music School Site XI: Castle Economic-historicalcontext Early Middle Ages Late Middle Ages Turkish Period Demography Urbanism German Town Regional demography The formation of the puszta Animal remainsand chronologicalperiodization Preservation and sample sizes Fauna! composition Castle German Town Animal keeping Cattle (Bos taurus L. 1758) Osteological evidence of carcass partitioning Meat quality Quantitative estimates Intraspecific variability Draft cattle Dairying Pig (Sus domesticusErxl. 1777) Sheep (Ovis aries L. 1758) and goat (Caprahircus L. 1758) Horse (Equus caballusL.) Horse skull Horse use Domestic ass (Equusasinus L. 1758) Domestic hen (GallusdomesticusL. 1758) Goose (Anser sp.) ii

i

1

2

3 4

5 6

8

10

11

12 13

15 17

19

20 24 26

35 38

40 42 48 49 52

55 56

57

Domestic duck (Anas domesticaL. 1758) Turke,y (MeleagrisgallopavoGould 1800) Dog (Canisfamiliaris L. 1758) Domestic cat (Pelis catus L. 1758)

58

59 61

Direct exploitation of the natural environment Fishing Sturgeon (Acipensersp.) Carp (CyprinuscarpioL. 1758) Catfish (Silurusglanis L. 1758) Pike (Esox lucius L. 1758) Fishing rights Hunting, trapping Red deer (CervuselaphusL. 1758) and roe deer (CapreoluscapreolusL. 1758) Hare (Lepus europaeusPall. 1778) Lynx (Lynx lynx L. 1758) Crane (Grusgrus L. 1758) Stork (CiconiaciconiaL.) Corvids (Corvidae) Hunting rights Foraging Pests and parasites

64

65 66

67 68

69 70

71

Craft activities and industrial organization Butchers Tanners and furriers Horn manufacturing Bone working Livestock merchants

72

74 75

Trading in animals and animal products 78

Brief history of trading in V ac The regulation of animal trade Cattle trade The catchment area of cattle trade Herd sizes and daily traffic Other animals and animal products Markets and fairs

79 80

82 84 87

Seasonality Modern Age urbanization Plant exploitation and agricultureby Ferenc Gyulai

88

Material and method Plant remains and medieval nutrition Medieval crop cultivation in Hungary Plowland cultivation and horticulture Orchards and vineyards Gathered fruits Written evidence of medieval agriculture in V ac Archaeobotanical evidence

93

89

97 99 100 103

Conclusions 111

Food provisioning Livestock trade Environment Crafts Intersite distributions Medieval attitudes toward animals

112

113 115

References Appendices

131

Herbivore skull measurements Carnivore and bird skull measurements Mandibular and tooth measurements Horn core and postcranial measurements Species distribution of plant remains by samples

132 133

136 158

161

Plates iii

INTRODUCTION Urbanization is often perceived as man's divorce from nature and a form of cultural adaptation reflected in an increasingly complex artificial environment. In modem towns, aside from meat, dairy products and certain raw materials for clothing, the representation of animals is limited to the usually nonutilitarian keeping of pets. These, more-or-less, silent companions are admittedly relics from a time before the urban landscape developed into its present form.

The "zoological" analysis of urbanization offers an inevitably narrow and particular perspective. The ecclesiastical and military history, legal systems as well as the impressive cultural value of medieval Vac, however, are significantly better known than the topic chosen for this study. In spite of the long tradition of archaeological research in the town (Torma 1993), the systematic collection of animal bones has been neglected until recent times. Neither have historical records been analyzed from an explicitly zoological point of view. On the other hand, the analysis of animal remains, whether economic or social/symbolic should be placed within a contextual/interpretive approach (Beech 1993: 377).

The significance of animals in the life of rural settlements is undisputed. Even in an urban setting, however, domesticates provided food as well as raw material for craftspeople and indirectly generated trade benefits. Animals may also have been kept for a variety of less mercenary purposes. While it should not be erroneously suggested that animals defined every aspect of social and cultural life during the Middle Ages, zoological information is expected to further expand our knowledge of urban lifeways in the city of Vac during a hectic period that marked the termination of the Middle Ages in Hungary.

After decades of close cooperation between archaeologists and zoologists in many countries, the first rush of unlimited optimism is over. Archaeozoologists often seem to study their data with much of their attention focused on the animals themselves. Toe integration of environmental, historical and zoological data should illuminate fresh aspects of urban development in the wake of Middle Ages in Eastern Europe.

THEORETICALBACKGROUND Testing theories on scientific data may work pragmatically in zoology which deals with a single hermeneutic system, the researchers' interpretation. Archaeozoology, on the other hand, is a discipline with strong ties to humanistic and social sciences. Conclusions drawn from the archaeological record therefore reflect an inseparable mix of biological facts, past human behavior and current knowledge. Animal husbandry, hunting and the forms of meat consumption may each be looked upon as adaptive responses to historical and economic change. A certain inertia represented by culture and tradition itself may somewhat delay such responses, while trading and capital buildup can, to some extent, buffer changes in the first place. According to Postan (1973: 12) closely interrelated aspects of urban populations, prices and agricultural production are not easily separable when economic change is analyzed. Animal exploitation in general, however, would be expected to increase in a fashion that parallels urban development as a form of provisioning the ever growing concentrations of city dwellers. The emergence of urban centers would not have been possible without the support of considerable surplus in agricultural production. During the late Middle Ages, the contribution of animals to urban development intensified in Hungary since animal husbandry and trading became a major form of accumulating wealth. This trend seems not only to have survived the Turkish conquest, but was enhanced by the fact that anarchy crippled most other economic opportunities. In addition to species of distinct commercial significance, a variety of other animals were part of the daily scene in this late medieval town. Evidence for pets and commensal

1

species is even more difficult to interpret in strictly "objective" terms. They represent a largely unknown, past body of hermeneutics that does not necessarily fit our present frame of reference. Linguistic tradition and ethnographic analogies offer only limited help in enhancing our i.Q_terpretive arsenal in these cases.

Interpretiveframework Animal bone finds have turned out to be poor direct predictors of absolute amounts of meat (not to speak of attempts to reconstruct herd sizes and forms of non meat purpose exploitation). Taphonomic loss, that is the differential post-mortem preservation of bones is largely responsible for tremendous discrepancies (Efremov 1940). Therefore the choice was made to treat the animal remains from Vac as "diagnostic signatures" (Feibleman 1954) of dietary patterns and medieval attitudes toward animals. Bones contributed invaluable first hand information on past urban lifeways in the city of Vac. Middle range theory is aimed at understanding the context within which these animal bones can be appropriately interpreted. In the first place, the research hypothesis concerning the importance of animal keeping may additionally be refined by incorporating research results from zoology and animal science. This is a fundamentally archaeozoological study, evaluating data only from easily accessible (usually secondary) historical sources. Cross references between the osteological material and coeval documents, however, help to create a view of animal exploitation as a sub-system within the city's natural and economic environment.

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Accepting the hypothesis that animals and urbanism mutually influenced each other in Vac at the end of the Middle Ages, one may proceed to characterizing the organization of animal exploitation as a sub-system.

middle range hypothesis testing and the use of simple, descriptive statistics. These types of information could fit within the analysis of historical sources dealing with agriculture and rural as well as urban ways of life (e. g. Gaal 1966; Biddick 1979; Langdon 1986).

Conclusions arrived at on the level of middle range theory raise questions concerning the function and position of animals in the urban development of Vac. Hypotheses concerning the varying roles of the animal species identified are thus formulated by synthesizing osteological observations, zoological as well as general environmental information and relevant historical records on the level of high range theory.

Even studying morphometric variability is a typically tough task in archaeozoology which would all too often be impossible in statistically significant terms (P~0.05) without the use of experimental or at least serial comparative data.

Quantitativemethods The multidisciplinary nature of this paper limited the quantitative analyses of differing data sets to heuristic presentations and sometimes to the use of simple, nonparametric statistics (Welkovitz et al. 1971; Williams 1979).

The fundamental problem of archaeology is that it is very difficult to infer properties of a dynamic system from its static consequences (Cribb 1984: 164). Past ecological and cultural systems were integrated and only a fraction of their multivariate record is preserved for study. Even this is an artifact of the interaction between several sub-systems (Clarke 1968). Of the possible external sources of information written sources, predominantly Turkish toll registers, were available for study. In addition, reference collections of bones from modem cattle, cats and lynx were analyzed to characterize the animals whose bones were recovered from archaeological deposits. They were used on the basis of the uniformitarian assumption that the biological organization of these animals is not immensely different from their medieval counterparts.

Animal bone measurements taken on the excavated material and in modem reference collections were evaluated using a variety of calculations provided by the BMDP statistical software (Dixon et al. 1981). References to these more complex methods are given along with the discussion of results.

Nomenclatureand terminology The standard zoological and botanical nomenclature followed in this study is based on works approved by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Jolsvay et al. 1977; Gozmany 1979; Priszter 1983; Williams and Hunyady 1987). The standardized system and nomenclature of bone measurements was developed by von den Driesch (1976). An additional measurement was, however, introduced on long bones: Dd indicates the depth of the distal epiphysis. While SD conventionally stands for the smallest diameter of diaphysis, this was applied for mediolateral breadth. Smallest dorsoventral depth was coded Sd in the Appendix of bone measurements.

Test implications The processual, hypothesis testing approach might work adequately for the strictly zoological aspects of archaeozoological enquiry. However, even a target-oriented discussion of the sub-system elements in animal exploitation (demographic trends, stock sizes, phaenotypic variability of domesticates etc.) offers few opportunities for formal statistical testing. These non-experimental sets of data were vastly influenced by a combination of natural taphonomic factors and medieval hermeneutics. Both of these played a role in the composition of bone deposits in Vac.

As far as proper names and geographical terminology are concerned, an effort was made to use all names in the dominant language within each region during the time period under discussion (e. g. Maria von Habsburg, Tisza river). English equivalents were preferred in the case of obviously international concepts (e.g. Danube river, Ottoman Empire). "Inconsistencies" in history, however, sometimes made it difficult to consistently adhere to this principle.

Final conclusions drawn on the level of high range theory, therefore, could not always be forced into the Procrustean bed of the rigorous probability criteria of formal statistical procedures. Conclusions, therefore, are based on the synthesis of firm evidence obtained during the course of

2

NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE

(Laszl6 Bartosiewicz and Ferenc Gyulai) Topography

direction of winds is defined by the Danube valley. Annual precipitation in modern times ranges between 550 and 600 mm (Sarfalvi 1983: 7).

Vac is located on the left bank of the Danube river in the northern part of present day Hungary. Elek Fenyes, a leading statistician who initiated systematic data gathering in Hungary at the beginning of the last century, described the surroundings of Vac at that time as 'beautiful and solemn' (Fenyes 1851: 247). Certainly, the city's environment is not only defined by the majestic Danube river but is also characterized by a hilly topography with elevations rising from 500 to 700 meters (relative to the Adriatic sea level) on both banks. The mean altitude of the alluvial deposit upon which the city itself is located is 110 m (Pallas 1897: 569). The highest point in the immediate neighborhood is Naszaly hill (652 m) formed of Triassic dolomite which forced the ancient Danube river to turn southward in a rectangle at this point (Tragor 1928: 5) at the end of the Tertiary Period.

Flora and fauna

Vac is in a very favorable phytogeographical position. The city is located at the conjunction of several climatic zones (Hortobagyi and Simon 1981). The forest steppe belt extends this far to the north. It is characterized by a moderate semiaridity index. Maple and oak associations (Aceri tatarico-Quercetum pubescenti-roboris) are dominant east of the city. Naszaly, a dolomite-limestone hill located north of Vac, is part of the Dunazug mountain. Mixed oak and beech forests occupy the hilltops while durmast oak associations (Quercetum-petreae-cerris) occur in the lower areas. The peculiarity of vegetation is that Carpathian and continental species reach this area from the north where they mix with western Balcanic and sub-mediterranean elements from southwestern Hungary.

The city has an elongated shape because it is confined to the narrow stretch between the river and the hills. The top soil in this area is dominated by fine loess.

Wild animal remains are rare in the urban animal bone assemblages from Vac. Of these, red deer antler may even have been traded. For centuries, however, the Royal Hunting Grounds extended within the same environment around the medieval royal castle at Visegrad just across the Danube river (Bartosiewicz 1989a: 2). Fenyes (1851: 249) also wrote of extensive beach and oak forests around V ac which were rich in deer and hare as late as the mid 19th century. According to Bright (1818), in spite of all efforts by the authorities, wolf commonly occurred in the smaller forests between Vac and the village of Oroszi. Although wolf has disappeared, lynx sometimes occurs in the nearby Northern Mountains even today (Szemethy et al. 1991).

Climate

Discussing the Alpine Foreland, Firbas (1949) classified the present day climate as the sub-Atlantic beech period. Z6lyomi (1952) subdivided the sub-Atlantic into the Beech II and Present phases. The Beech II phase (until approximately AD 1200) was characterized by a relatively mild and dry climate. During the Present phase following 1200, coniferous forests started expanding at the expense of beech and the so-called culture steppe developed. These categories could be further refined using palynological data from the Great Hungarian Plain published by Jarai-Koml6di (1966). The long lasting cool and humid weather in the middle of the 14th century resulted in declining crop production. The history of this phase is characterized by famine and epidemics. This several centuries long 'small glaciation' affected the Carpathian Basin as well.

Another site, Pilisszentkereszt is located at a distance of 15 km from Vac across the Danube. The analysis of pollen samples from the excavations of its late 12th to 16th century monastery (Z6lyomi and Precsenyi 1985) is the only palynological study from the proximity of Vac. It is therefore critical for understanding the impact of cultivation in the region during the Middle Ages. The pollen spectrum of the Pilisszentkereszt monastery displays a typically anthropogenic flora. The contribution of non-arboreal pollens (NAP) is significant. Chenopodiaceae and Artemisia are important weeds within this group. They are indicative of gardening. The high contribution of walnut (Jug/ans) pollen is suggestive of significant nut production. In contrast to these species, cereals and other plowland crops seem to have been less advanced in the area. The small contribution of cereal pollen may be explained by the small extent of plowland. Major forests also occurred in the area. The low intensity of forest clearing at that time is shown by the absence of birch (Betula sp.) pollen in the Pilisszentkereszt samples.

Following warm and dry summers in the middle of the 16th century, the climate again turned cool and rainy. Harsh, cold winters are characteristic for the end of that century. Improvement followed only at the beginning of the 18th century (Racz 1993). The city's current climate is influenced by the warmth of the plains. This is clearly illustrated by the high degree of insolation (1950-2000 hours per year) which rivals the value measured for the Small Hungarian Plain (Bartosiewicz 1989a: 1), although mountain effects temper the weather. Annual mean temperatures range between 9 and 9 .5 °C (January: -2 °C, July: 20 °C) which shows the tempering effect of the hilly surroundings. Late frosts between March and early May are also common. The predominantly northern

Palynological research in the Balaton region (Z6lyomi 1980)

3

Animals in the UrbanLandscape showed a decline in cereal production at the time of the 16th- 17th century Ottoman Turkish occupation. This may be explained by a reduction in cultivated land surfaces. At the same time, from the 17th century onwards, the production of

root crops, vegetables and especially maize became more widespread. A boom in the cultivation of hoed plants is also illustrated by the increasing contribution of Chenopodiaceae pollen.

A SHORT HISTORY OF VAC (Zsuzsa Mikl6s) The city of Vac lies 30 km north of Budapest on the left bank of the Danube river. It is located at the lower end of the Danube Bend Gorge, where the Great Hungarian Plain meets the hills of Northern Hungary. The climate of this city, located on a 105-115 m high alluvial terrace of the Danube river, is mostly characterized by the traits of the Pest Plain, especially in terms of the moderate summer temperatures. The development of this settlement was greatly enhanced by its geographical position. In addition to the water transport route, terrestrial roads connecting various regions intersect here. Those originating in eastern Hungary proceeded westward north of the river and in the direction of the mining centers of the north. They also met the roads running north to south along the Danube as well as the water routes themselves (Sarfalvi 1983: 7, 10, 12; Kubinyi 1983: 56-57).

the 11th century. During the 14th-17th centuries this castle was rebuilt into a major fortification (Site 31/1 in Torma 1993: 380); north of the castle, the first settlement was established during the 11th-12th centuries, which later became known as the Hungarian Town (Site 31/2 in Torma 1993: 382). Following the Mongol invasion, the city further expanded toward the north in the mid-13th century and the so-called German Town was founded (Site 31/3 in Torma 1993: 382).

The Castle The castle was erected on a terrace, 7-8 m above the Danube level. Its protection was naturally guaranteed not only by the steep slope facing the river, but also by 4-6 m deep short valleys on its northern and southern sides.

Medieval Vac consisted of three settlements. In the southern part of the present town an episcopal center, that is a castle, was established in the area of the King Geza square during

Vac was first mentioned in the Anna/es Yburgenses from 1074. It is referred to as Wazenburg' within the context of

Figure 2. King Geza the First depicted in the 1488 Brunn edition of the Thur6czy Chronicle (after Thur6czy 1985)

Figure 1. King (Saint) Istvan the First depicted in the 1488 Brunn edition of the Thur6czy Chronicle (after Thur6czy 1985)

4

A Short History ofVac military help offered by Henrik the Fourth, Emperor of Germany, to King Salamon of Hungary (Torma 1993: 382; Gombos 1927-1938: 215). The episcopate is first known from 1075: 'cum episcobalibus sancte Marie Waciensis civitatis ...' (Knauz 1874: 56-57; Gyorffy 1963: 89-891). At that time the term civitas referred to a castle (Kubinyi 1983: 51, footnote 21). Current research has shown that the Vac episcopate was established by King (Saint) Istvan the First (Figure 1). The organization of the church district was initiated during the second half of his reign but was probably finished by his successor, King Geza the First (Kubinyi 1983: 49- 50; Figure 2).

12th century. The Mongols massacred both the population of this settlement as well as refugees from the neighboring villages on Palm Sunday in 1241. A new settlement, the German Town, was established following the Mongol invasion. Previously developed quarters were distinguished under the term 'Hungarian Town' (civitas hungaricalis Vaciensis). This name was first mentioned in a 1319 document when the borders of an estate were defined 'a proxima. curia civitatis dicte Theotonice' and 'civitatem dictam Hungaricalem' (Knauz 1882: 768; Bakacs 1982: 363).

Rogerious, the chronicler of the Mongolian destruction on March 17 in 1241, mentioned the church and its adjacent fortified palaces (Szentpetery 1961: 565). According to Kubinyi (1983: 50), however, neither the name Wazenburg, nor the mention by Rogerius prove that a castle existed here during the 11th-13th centuries. In addition, features indicative of an early castle have not been found during archaeological excavations (Torma 1993: 382).

The earliest artifacts from the Hungarian Town date to the 11th-12th centuries. The first, dispersed settlement extended, in the beginning, to the east beyond the late medieval. city wall. In a northern direction it reached as far as present day Fiirdo street, which later became the border between the German and Hungarian Towns (Torma 1993: 404). The medieval plan of Hungarian Town may be reconstructed on the basis of later sources. These include house registers from the 1570's (Fekete 1942: 10), a city map dated to 1680 and the maps of the 1718 cadastral register by Althann. These documents, as well as archaeological observations, suggest that the road network remained largely unaltered in the Hungarian Town until the large scale construction work that took place during the 18th century.

During the later centuries of the Middle Ages written sources predominantly deal with issues of the episcopal center. Documents concerning the episcopal castle and its bailiffs are especially important in this regard (Torma 1993: 382). The Ottoman Turkish occupation of Hungary as well as of Vac itself started with the defeat at the battle of Mohacs in 1526. The city was first attacked by Turks during September that year. Although that offensive was repulsed, occupiers of the castle and town alternated almost annually in subsequent times. Permanent Turkish occupation started in 1544 and lasted for fifty years. During this time Vac served as an important Turkish stronghold. Hungarians recaptured the city between 1593 and 1625. A second Ottoman Turkish occupation took place in 1625. Finally Vac was liberated in 1685. Prior to its fall, however, the Pasha of Buda evacuated the city and most buildings (obviously including the castle) were set on fire or blown up (Bel 1977: 62; Tragor 1906: 30; Torma 1993: 382-383).

Population estimations for the 16th century quarters of Vac have been attempted by Kubinyi (1983: 65). According to his data, 87 buildings may have housed 364 people in the Hungarian Town at that time. According to Torma (1993: 405), on the other hand, only 55-56 lots may have been inhabited in the Hungarian Town prior to the Ottoman Turkish occupation of Vac which would result in an estimated population of 227 souls. The landlord of Hungarian Town was the bishop of Vac, although his chaplain also owned part of the estate. On the basis of data available to date, Kubinyi (1983: 63) concluded that the Hungarian and German Towns shared a magistrate, however, they had their own councils and seals.

Since the town lay at the foot of the castle, it experienced a similar fate with a full share of the suffering endured by Hungarians during the Turkish wars.

The Turks who occupied the Vac castle, expelled the population of Hungarian Town. This part of town is not even mentioned in the 1546 Turkish tax records. By that time, as well as later, Hungarian taxpayers were registered in the German Town. During the year 1570, only one single Hungarian house owner was documented in the Hungarian Town. The remainder were mercenaries of Eastern Orthodox or Islamic faith (Fekete 1942).

HungarianTown The first settlement near the castle was established on a 6- 9 m high sand terrace along the Danube. According to Kubinyi (1983: 51-52) its irregular, unplanned street network clearly shows that the streets of this settlement on the Danube's bank, located in front of the castle's northern gate, ran to the gate itself. A rather large, amorphous area in front of this entrance was left empty. The first fairs may have been organized here. This part of town was bordered by the Danube and present day Geza square and Muzeum street. The exact time of establishment as well as the northern border of this settlement are unknown. It is likely, however, that its beginnings reach back to the 11th century, while the formation of a major habitation area may be dated to the

The name Hungarian Town is not even mentioned in more recent written sources. According to Torma (1993: 406), the clerical staff, as well as lay employees of the bishop's immediate environment left Vac as soon as it fell. People who remained were forced to move by the Turkish authorities. The majority of Hungarians must have moved to the German Town. This made attempts to make a spatial distinction between the Hungarian and German Towns obsolete. However, the fact that Vac had two magistrates in

5

Animals in the UrbanLandscape 1559 indicates that traces of independence survived between the two administrations (in spite of the fact that the two parts ofVac had had a single magistrate previously).

had also been preserved until the last 15-20 years when large scale construction work began. The German Town was surrounded by a wall. Although the time of its construction is unknown, 15th century remains identified in the only surviving tower suggest that the entire wall was built around the same time. The wall is depicted in most detail on the 1680 city map. There, the wall starts at the Danube and is interrupted by the Wien and Hatvan Gates at its northern and eastern segments. In addition, this map also shows several towers jutting out from the plane of the wall which were additionally protected by a moat along the outer side (Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 422).

During the so-called Fifteen Years War, the Hungarian Town was re-occupied by Christians and at least part of the Islamic population fled. No coherent census data are available from the time of the second Turkish occupation (between the 1620's to 1685). In any case Evlia Chelebi, the famous Turkish traveler who visited Vac in 1663, described the medieval Hungarian Town as the suburb inhabited by Hungarian rayas (Karacson 1904: 388). At the end of the Turkish occupation, this part of the city was also destroyed.

On the basis of the 1570 house register, Torma (1993: 420) established that 170 houses stood in this part of town even prior to Turkish occupation. Eighteen of these were multistorey buildings although 54 single storey houses were also identified. They were made of stone while 87 houses had wattle structures. For the time being, the construction materials of 11 houses remain unknown.

German Town

The German Town occupied an approximately 350 by 200 to 300 m area in the present day city center. It is generally accepted by local historians that this part of town was established by Germans following the 1241 Mongol invasion. This assumption could be accepted even in the absence of documentary evidence: archaeological investigations yielded only sporadic finds of 11th-12th century artifacts from this area. By the 13th century, however, the find material becomes abundant. Analyzing the parallels to the elongated, triangular market square, Kubinyi (1983: 64) concludes that 'both data and plans make it clear that in cities similar to Vac, markets did not develop from 'wild roots' but in all these cities were consciously established as was characteristic of the mid-13th century. One may even hypothesize that the 'guests' who established the German Town in Vac came from the Austrian-Czech territories north of the Danube river'. According to Mikl6s (in Torma 1993: 418) these settlers may have been brought into the area by Bishop Istvan Bacsa.

Kubinyi (1983: 65) estimated the minimum number of inhabitants in German Town on the basis of 127 houses at the beginning of the 16th century. This resulted in a population estimate of 582 individuals. According to Torma (1993: 420), 170 buildings could have housed 880 people at that time. Vass (1983: 77) mentions that King Janos ordered the German inhabitants of Vac to leave the town around 1530, prior to the Ottoman Turkish occupation. Although no evidence is available to suggest that the population actually did leave, Turkish registers starting in 1546 indeed contain no German names. In any case, conquerors during the Turkish Period changed the original population structure. The inhabitants of Hungarian Town were completely replaced by an Islamic population. Some sections of German Town (along the border with the Hungarian Town and Market square as well as its western side) were also occupied by Muslim inhabitants. On the other hand, the northern and eastern extramural sections of German Town were entirely inhabited by Hungarians (Torma 1993: 420-421). Evidence in written sources is further corroborated by archaeological finds. According to these documents, for example, the inhabitants of Szechenyi (previously called 'Muddy') street were Hungarian. Turkish pottery finds are indeed rare in the area.

This part of town was first mentioned in 1319 as 'civitas teutonicalisVaciensis'(Knauz 1882: 877). Similarly to the Hungarian Town, historical data on the German Town are scarce. On the basis of research by Kubinyi (1983: 49-76) the most important facts may be summarized as follows: the landlord of this estate was the Bishop of Vac. In spite of the dominance of a private landlord, however, Vac is mentioned as a city (civitas) in written sources. It must also have looked more like a city than a market-town on the basis of the composition and appearance of its population. As was mentioned, the two towns shared the same magistrate, although their councils and seals were different. In accordance with the name, the majority of inhabitants here were of German extraction. This tendency is also supported by evidence from names (both persons and localities) although the documents contain Hungarian names as well.

The bishop remained the city's Hungarian landlord even during Turkish times. On the Turkish side, Vac was directed as part of the sultan's estate system. Economic life

The topography of medieval German Town may be reconstructed using more recent documents: house registers from the 1570's, a city map dated to 1680 and the maps of the 1718 cadastral register by Althann. The maps suggest that, until recently, the medieval road network remained largely unaltered in the German Town. The structure of lots

Agriculture: the outskirts of this city must have been small. They included three villages (Csorog, Cselote and Naszaly). Within the territory associated with these settlements arable land was probably available only in the strip of land bordering the city itself. Small kitchen gardens, registered both by individual houses and in the city's southern-

6

A ShortHistory o/Vac southeastern section in 1570, played an important role in providing additional food. The great number and often respectable size of these gardens led Kubinyi (1983: 54) to conclude that they produced a surplus beyond provisioning the local population. He hypothesized that they supplied markets as far as Buda, Visegrad and Esztergom.

The significance of local viniculture is also shown by the macrobotanical remains brought to light during the course of excavations. The majority of these finds consisted of grape seeds. To date, the greatest quantity of grape seeds was that discovered in a medieval pit near the present day Engineering Highschool. This 240 cm deep feature had vertical walls and contained a 70 cm thick deposit of grape seeds at the bottom which was covered with clay and a layer of wood. It may be hypothesized that this pit functioned as a clamp for mare, in which pressed grape was fermented for the purposes of distilling brandy (Document NQ 1567, Archives of the Tragor Muzeum, V ac).

During the Turkish Period, cabbage, onions and legumes grown in the proximity of houses were the most important vegetables. Tax records show that fruit production must have also been significant. Vass (1983: 94) assumed that the produce of the famous V ac walnut and pear trees were tax items of primary importance. The rolling foothills of the neighboring Naszaly hill were well suited to grape production. Pince (Cellar) Valley, first mentioned in 1457 (Gyorffy 1956: 284; Doc. Art. Paul. 3: 408; Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 479), as well as the Hermansgrundt vineyard sold in 1503 (Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 480; National Archives DI. 75 491) both lay in the Naszaly region. On the basis of the name 'Cellar Valley' Kubinyi (1983: 54) concluded that wine cellars not only existed within the town but also in the neighboring vineyards. 'Cellar' is a term that has survived in modern georaphical names (Kispince volgy = Small cellar Valley, Oregpince volgy = Old cellar Valley) 4-4.5 km north of Vac. The significance of grape production did not decline during Turkish times (Ferenc Gyulai, this volume). Prosperous wine production is also illustrated by the presence of cellars under almost each house in the medieval city. To date, research has revealed 16 such cellars in the Hungarian Town while 52 were discovered in the German Town. These late medieval (15th-16th century) cellars were all supported by stone arches. No evidence exists to show that grape juice was pressed within the city. This work must have been carried out near the vineyards, while the wine was undoubtedly stored in cellars in the city. This hypothesis is supported by architectural evidence. Large cellars had two or even three entrances. The broadest of these led to the street while more narrow doors opened in the direction of the courtyard. It seems reasonable to assume that the broader opening was designed to accomodate wine barrels. Although smaller cellars had only one entrance it was always wide enough to accomodate an average size wine barrel (current research by the author).

As far as animal keeping is concerned, written evidence for pig stock is known from the Turkish Period. According to estimations by Vass (1983: 94) a population of over 1000 pigs may have been kept which would have meant an average of five pigs for each peasant household. Industry is represented by references to 14 crafts in the written sources. Of these, goldsmithing must have been the most significant. Its guild was the only such organization during the Middle Ages. The importance of goldsmithing may be explained by the proximity of mining areas in the nearby Kormocbanya region and the considerable demand represented by the clerical landlord of the city. Relatively numerous data are known concerning butchers, who were also involved in the trading of live animals and hides. Additional crafts mentioned in written documents include bootmakers, taylors, turners, millers, mill builders as well as tanners. According to the 1546 register, some 19.2% of the Christian inhabitants of Vac pursued various industrial activities which corresponds to the proportion characteristic of market towns in Hungary at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries. As a consequence of the Ottoman Turkish occupation, however, a number of craftspeople fled the city so that this percentage must have been higher prior to the Turkish conquest. The contribution of craft industries to the economy of late medieval V ac may have been similar to that of other free towns that were granted royal privileges (Kubinyi 1983: 5556). Data concerning both Hungarian and Turkish craftspeople are known from the Turkish Period of V ac. The activity of butchers is particularly important from the viewpoint of this study. The number of animals slaughtered may be estimated on the basis of tax rolls. These taxes were collected at four slaughterhouses in Vac. Turkish records mention four Hungarian butchers.

The relatively great number of cellars is also apparent in the 1570 register. With a single exception, the multi-storey buildings of the German Town, located around the Main square, all were built above cellars. Cellars were found only under one quarter of the smaller, wattle built houses (Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 420).

According to tax rolls, four to six cattle were slaughtered each week in the slaughterhouses of Vac during 1546 and 1547. This number increased to 20-25 animals by 1558 and 1559. Slaughterings of lambs were occasionally recorded in August 1561 with an estimated 1200 lambs killed in that month. The 1560 tax rolls also document the permanent activities of two Turkish butchers. They probably supplied meat to the Muslim population.

Wine storage in these city cellars is indicated by the remains of timber stands that supported the barrels. Naturally, the same cellars must also have served as storage facilities for fruits, butter, pickled cabbage, honey etc. Although no such data are available from V ac, evidence from coeval inventories is well known from other parts of Hungary (e. g. Feld and Cabello 1980: 112-113).

7

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Trading in live animals is especially significant from the viewpoint of this monograph. It is first documented by a 15th century legal case: in 1444 two hundred oxen purchased at the Hatvan fair were to have been driven across Vac. The herd, however, was ambushed and stolen (Kubinyi 1983: 57).

Bootmakers were organized into guilds before the Turkish occupation. By 1570, however, only a single Hungarian bootmaker was recorded in Vac, as a possible consequence of the hypothesized removal of the German inhabitants around 1530.

So-called 'annual fairs' were organized in Vac three times a year. These were both related to export activities and supplying products to the mining towns in the north. To some extent, animal drives were scheduled according to the time of these fairs in February, October and December. Major cattle drives took place in October and December, and numerous sheep were also registered during February, October and December. Most cattle, however, were traded in August, while hide exports culminated in December (Kubinyi 1983: 59).

Fishermen in Vac paid taxes to both the bishop and the Turkish authorities. Sturgeon for the bishop was caught in the Danube, otherwise Turks banned fishing in the Danube near Vac. It is for this reason that fishermen from the city usually worked north of the city in the proximity of Maros (Nagymaros). It may be assumed that fishing declined during the Turkish occupation of Vac (Vass 1983: 95-97). Commerce flourished due to the favorable geographical position of Vac. On the one hand, the city lay on a so-called market line. On the other hand it was also a gateway to the Danube Bend Gorge where the river cuts between the Pilis and Borzsony mountains. Cities developed at both ends of the gorge: Esztergom and V ac. At these points trade routes meet and traffic is mediated by the two 'gate settlements'. Of the routes passing across Vac, the Danube and the road running parallel to it are of greatest importance. In addition, ore mining towns in the north could be accessed through this city. The bishop of Vac introduced customs duties in order to tap the profits of transit traffic (Kubinyi 1983: 56-57).

Due to its role in local trade, Vac functioned as an urban center for a relatively large area. In spite of the leading position of the capital, Buda, it also had its share of long distance trade. It served as an important trade link between the capital, the mining region and the Great Hungarian Plain. For example, tallow sent to the mining city of Selmecbanya came from Vac. It is therefore reasonable to assume that live cattle brought to that city were also driven through Vac (Kubinyi 1983: 62) and sometimes slaughtered there.

SITE DESCRIPTIONS (Zsuzsa Mikl6s) Animal and plant remains discussed in this monograph were brought to light during the course of rescue excavations between 1986 and 1992. Most of this archaeological work preceded or paralleled construction work in the modem town which limited the possibility of on site water sieving of the botanical samples. This method, however would have been indispensable in systematically recovering smaller bones of rodents and fish especially (Takacs 1988).

settlement features were most badly damaged. Rescue archaeology is associated with contemporary earth moving and constructions. Planned excavations could be carried out predominantly in the medieval cellars. This is why most archaeological locations were selected by chance. Since the greater part of modem construction work took place in the area of the medieval German Town, finds from the Hungarian Town are scarce.

Excavations between 1986 and 1992 largely clarified the town's medieval stratigraphy. Present observations suggest that ruined buildings were completely tom down during Post- Turkish Period reconstruction work. Consequent!y, only one building survived with standing medieval walls (Marcius 15 square 6). Fortunately, however, at least the late medieval (15th-16th) stone built cellars were preserved under Baroque or even younger buildings. These cellars reflect the late medieval settlement structure as well as the relationships between houses at that time.

Faunal materials analyzed in this monograph originate from eleven sites within the area of Vac. These were consecutively labeled with increasing numerals in a north to south direction. The location of sites in the city's plan is shown in Figure 3.

Individual sites Over twelve thousand animal bone fragments were brought to light from various strata of the eleven sites excavated in the area of the medieval city.

Below the 18th-20th century modem layers, 15th-17th century late medieval strata and features occur at varying depths (30-40 to 100-120 cm). Their availability depends on the extent of present day earthworking activities. The creation of large 18th-20th century cellars caused particularly extensive damage. They were often dug down into the virgin soil destroying all medieval features. Understandably, Turkish Period buildings and other

A tabulated summary showing the distribution of all animal bones available from the eleven sites is presented in Table 1. Site I: Taban street 20/a This street runs in a parallel direction between the Danube and the medieval Main square. Although it does not appear

8

Site Descriptions

Table I. The chronological periodization and number of all bone fragments by site Code Site name/Century I II

Taban street 20/a Marcius 15 square 6

III

Marcius 15 square 8

IV V

Szechenyi street 4-6 Szechenyi street 3-7

VI

Koztarsasag street 11

VII

Piarist Church

11

12

13

14

Voros 1986

VIII Engineering Highschool

(Turkish Period)

IX X

Kossuth square 2 (Turkish Period) Music school

(Turkish Period)

XI

Castle

9

15

16

17

18

19

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Figure 3. The medieval plan of Vac. Dashed lines stand for the possible location of the city walls surrounding present city blocks. Sites are identified by Roman numerals (drawingby M. Devay; explanationin text)

Jt:2 \

WIEN GATE

---,

\ \

I

\\

II

I

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I

\ \

\

I \

\ \

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FERRY]]

HATVAN GATE

Site II: Marcius 15 square 6 The building of the National Institution for the Deaf occupies two medieval lots. Inventorizing ancient monuments revealed an 'L'-shaped, single storey medieval house in the northwestern corner of the 'U'-shaped modern building. Remains of the stone arched cellar were also found under this medieval house. Only the remains of the cellar could be recognized on the other medieval lot occupied by the southern wing of the institute. When the monuments were restored, finds were often recovered in a secondary position from the fill of various rooms. Identifiable layers contained both medieval and modern sherds, oven tiles, metal, glass and animal bones (Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 433-435). A total of 427 animal bones came to light from various strata of this site. Site III: Marcius 15 square 8

! JC]

At the beginning of the 18th century it was recorded that the owner of the house standing on lot 8 of this square had the earlier building mended and in part replaced by a new construction. The house was again restructured in 1752 as well as during the 19th century, although it encorporates medieval structural elements even today.

oVI

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I I I

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100m

Under the courtyard wing of the 'L'-shaped modern building a two compartment, stone arched cellar with diverging orientations was found. Verifying excavations carried out by Zsuzsa Mik16s in 1989 clarified the stratigraphy of this cellar and revealed a well. Four late medieval floor levels could be distinguished in the less disturbed first section of this cellar. Each contained heavily fragmented 15th-16th century sherds. The completely buried stone lined well with a diameter of 100 cm was discovered in the southern corner of the second cellar. The upper 50 to 60 cm of the fill in this well (which was 154 cm deep below the cellar's floor level) contained modern age (18th century) material. Late medieval sherds, glass and animal bones were found below this layer. Most of them represent the second half of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century (Site 31/3g in Torma 1993: 435-436). A small assemblage of 59 late medieval animal bones was collected at this site. Site IV: Szechenyi street 4-6

on the 1680 city map, this street is probably also of medieval origin. It is called Die LebzelterGasse in the map of the 1718 cadastral register (Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 446). Rescue excavations were carried out at lot 20/a by Klara KlSvariand Zsazsa Mikl6s. The test trench revealed a 13th15th century layer and refuse pit as well as two pits from the 18th-19th centuries (Document NQ 1831, Archives of the Tragor Museum, Vac). These latter two contained no animal remains, while the number of medieval bones was only 20, the smallest within the entire faunal material.

This street leads from the medieval main square in a northeastern direction to the Hatvan Gate. It was also shown in the 1680 city map. Its original medieval name was 'Muddy street'. In 1983, Klara Kovari carried out rescue excavations at this location. During the course of mechanized earth removal two late medieval stone arched cellars and two refuse pits were recovered. An oblong pit with wooden lining was found in a position adjacent to the cellar. Most of the finds from this pit date to the second half of the 15th century. The fill of Pit 2 found under this feature contained 13th century finds. Fifteenth century animal bones (n=310) from this site

Site Descriptions (Mikl6s 1986) were analyzed by Istvan Voros (1986) whose publication was used in this study. Site V: Szechenyi street 3- 7 Between 1986 to 1989, rescue excavations on the other side of the same street were carried out by Zsuzsa Mikl6s. Archaeological work was conducted parallel to mechanized earth moving in the area. Stone buildings from the 13th and 15th centuries were recovered as well as remains of a 15th16th century stone cellar. Additional features included the remains of several 14th-15th century wattle-and-daub houses and 59 refuse pits (Mikl6s 1991: 9-108; Site 31/3i; Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 442-444). Some of the pits, dated to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, are oblong with post holes in the corner and plank lining on the sides as well as the bottom. Remains of this wooden lining could be identified during the course of excavations, while only the holes bear witness to the presence of posts (c.f. Figure 48). The pits contained a rich, dark organic fill which often contained pieces of tree bark. These phenomena suggest that the features in question may have served as tanning pits, although they were subsequently filled with household refuse (Mik16s 1991: 42). This site yielded the second largest faunal assemblage in this study. A preliminary report on these 2295 animal bones from this site was published by Bartosiewicz (1991a). Site VI: Koztarsasag street 11

debris, was discovered in the middle lot. It measured 14 by 6.2 m. Even its original arched entrance and stone stairs were preserved. A semicircular stone frame surrounded the former door (Document N 2 1694, Archives of the Tragor Museum, Vac). The 6416 animal bones gathered at this site provided the largest individual assemblage for the pwposes of this monograph. Site VII: Piarist Church (Koztarsasag street 1) According to the 1319 foundation document of the St. Jacob Monastery the southern end of present day Koztarsasag street (Lots 1, 2 and 4) and adjacent Trinity square belonged to the Hungarian Town. This is also illustrated by archaeological finds from the 10/11th-12th centuries. Following the development of German Town, however, this area was incorporated into the settlement structure of the latter (Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 404,411). Under the northern section of the nave of the Piarist Church a 15th-16th century arched stone cellar was found which served as a crypt during modern ages. This cellar measured 8 by 5.8 m inside. Test trenches opened by Zsuzsa Mik16s revealed three medieval (15th-16th century) floor levels. The depth of the upper floor level was 6 m below the modern street. A coeval refuse pit was discovered in front of this cellar's entrance. A brick corridor was built between the court of the Piarist Monastery and the cellar used as a crypt. When this feature was excavated, the remains of another late medieval cellar came to light. It was filled by a brown layer rich in 15th-16th century artifacts (Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 411).

In the first half of the 19th century, Koztarsasag (Republic) street was alternatingly called 'Main street', 'High street' and 'Old street' (Site 31/h; Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 438). During the Turkish Period the immediate area of this street belonged to the 'High street' mahalle district and was inhabited chiefly by Hungarians (Mikl6s in Tonna 1993: 438).

The bottom soil was found at a depth of 170 cm in the test trenches along the eastern wall of the Piarist Church. It was covered by a layer displaying yellow and brownish spots. In addition to ceramic sherds from the 13th-14th centuries, a 8th-9th century pot fragment also came to light here (Mik16s in Torma 1993: 451). At this site, 104 late medieval animal bones were found.

In 1992, rescue excavations started preceding construction work on the lot located at the intersection between the Main square and this major traditional thoroughfare. The area investigated by Zsuzsa Mikl6s included three medieval lots. During the course of/ excavations several house remains from the early medieval Arpad Period and the Late Middle Ages were discovered. To date, 38 refuse pits were opened. In addition, two 18th-19th century cisterns and a 19th century pit were identified. This latter was framed by posts. Three large modern age cellars were also found in the territory of these three lots. Medieval layers and features were destroyed during the construction of these cellars. Other 19th-20th century disturbances further mixed and destroyed material from earlier periods.

Site VIII: Engineering Highschool (Koztarsasag street 1) In 1987, Zsuzsa Mikl6s carried out verifying excavations in the courtyard of the Engineering Highschool. Additional rescue excavations followed in 1989 when a telephone line was laid in the same area. This work revealed settlement remains from the 10/11th-17th centuries: a pit from the 10th-11th century, 13th century house remains and ruins of a timber construction from the 15th-16th centuries. Additional features included two Turkish Period pits, a late medieval mare fennentation pit' and three late medieval baking ovens (Site 31/2e; Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 411). Smaller sets of animal bones are available from all of these periods. Most of the 628 animal bones recovered here represent the Late Middle Ages.

The majority of medieval pits date to the 15th-16th centuries. They are of similar shape displaying a round plan, and vertical walls somewhat narrowing toward the bottom. Differences occur only in their dimensions. Thirteenth century pits, on the other hand, tend to become broader toward their flat bottoms. A 15th century arched stone cellar, filled with 20th century

11

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Site IX: Kossuth square 2 Preceding the construction of a house, rescue excavations were carried out here by Zsuzsa Mikl6s in 1989. Several 13th century, a 15th-16th century, a Turkish Period and two 18th-19th century pits were found here. Details of a 15th16th century house were also discovered: multiple renovations in its floor as well as the remains of an oven were recognized. The animal bones from this site numbered 152. They represent the Late Middle Ages and the Turkish Period. Site X: Music School (Kossuth square 3) Archaeological rescue work started here in 1987. In 19881989 it paralleled construction activities. As a result of these two campaigns, a 7 by 11 m medieval building with 70 cm thick walls was recovered. Details of several 15th-16th century buildings (probably of wooden structure) were also brought to light. Additional features included the remains of a few late medieval baking ovens and 28 refuse pits. The construction site was densely built-in by the 19th-20th centuries. Three brick cellars damaged the medieval layers over a surface of 100-120 square meters. Medieval strata were also disturbed by 18th-19th century pits, seven of which were found during the course of excavations (Site 31/3r; Mikl6s in Torma 1993: 451-452). With 1494 bones, this assemblage was the third· largest in the material under discussion here.

m. Rescue excavations have been carried out here (with smaller interruptions) since 1962. Characteristic details of the internal stone fortification were identified. These included the northeastern, southeastern and southwestern corner towers as well as the western wall of the castle. Reconstruction was especially common during the Turkish Period. These structural changes could be traced throughout the 15th to 17th centuries. Remains of the medieval cathedral could also be observed. The archaeological material spans a time interval between the 11th-12th century ArpadPeriod and the 18th century. Early stone and ceramic finds are relatively rare. The number and craftmanship of gothic architectural elements are noteworthy. These specimens may be associated with the construction activities promoted by bishop Mikl6s Bathori (1474-1506). While this enlightened bishop largely withdrew from politics, he devoted much of his work to the city of Vac. He organized large scale constructions under the direction of Italian architects and raised the early medieval school to the rank of gymnasium academicum (Tragor 1928: 30). Archaeological evidence of his beneficial activities was brought to light during the 1912 excavations conducted in the Castle area. Outstanding ceramic finds include 15th century renaissance maiolica floor tiles. A variety of Turkish Period dish remains were also recovered. A reasonably large assemblage of datable animal bones is available only from the 11th century. A short report on the 351 faunal remains was published in Hungarian by Bartosiewicz (1994).

Site XI: Castle The entire castle area measured approximately 250 by 200

ECONOMIC-HISTORICALCONTEXT Tendencies in the exploitation of animals in medieval Vac can not be understood without familiarity with the city's economic history within the broader context of events in Hungary and Europe.

support the development of such centers (Stenton 1967: 160). Thus when the church of Vac was established during the early 11th century, the king donated 'great wealth and estates' to it (He also founded the first church in Buda and supplied it with similar generosity; Thur6czy 1980: 150).

Early Middle Ages An open space in front of such episcopal centers attracted an increasing number of merchants. According to Pirenne (1937: 41) 'the wandering life of the merchants, the risks of every sort to which they were exposed, in an age when pillage formed one of the forms of existence... caused them from the very beginningto seek the protection of the walled towns and burgs, which stood at intervals along the rivers or natural routes by which they travelled.'

The urban history of areas east of the Danube is special in Hungary. As opposed to the Roman province of Pannonia on the right bank, there was no tradition of urbanism in the Barbaricum.Medieval towns grew up first where there was a demand for the services they could offer. In the absence of Roman roots, their core areas could have been gathering places for merchants, villages of monastic settlements (Pounds 1974: 245). In former Roman provinces, Roman castella often served as the nucleus of medieval cities. The subsequent development of the surrounding 'ville' and its relationship to the ancient 'cite" (Lestocquoy 1945) is, however, comparable to the formation of V ac during the early Middle Ages.

In the absence of relevant features, we can only hypothesize that the fortification itself was probably formed by earthworks (Novaki 1975: 48). As Pirenne (1937: 53) pointed out, walled crowns in many municipal coats of arms even today show the importance accorded to some sort of ramparting. There were few unfortified towns in the Middle Ages. Trade and defence were the twin engines of early urban development (Stenton 1967: 160).

The growth of medieval towns in any rural society took a long time unless the king for his own purposes decided to 12

Economic-HistoricalContext The estimated maximum area of the Vac center was 2.8 ha, which is comparable to other episcopal centers established at the time of the Hungarian state foundation (Veszprem: 2.9 ha, Pees: 3.1 ha; Kubinyi 1983: 51). In spite of the rapid emergence of competing Buda as the capital after the 1242 Mongol invasion, Vac underwent reconstruction and unprecedented urban development before the 16th century Turkish occupation. The previously described colonisation by settlers (hospes or hotes, from southern Germany as well as Austria and Bohemia) was quite typical of many rural societies in Europe following the 12th century (Pirenne 1937: 69). A new settlement, the aforementioned German Town, was grafted to Vac. The arrival of the settlers from the west usually also meant the grant of extended privileges (Pounds 1974: 248). Vac was also granted royal privileges, and the urban development of what was an early medieval monastic center accelerated. The layout of the city shows, however, that the cores of the Hungarian and German Towns were single street, rural type settlements (Kubinyi 1983: 65).

The fact that this kind of urban growth must have been very typical in eastern Europe is illustrated by the striking similarity between the late medieval city plans of Krak6w (Ennen 1972; Pounds 1974: Fig. 6.4) and Vac shown in Figure 3. In both cases, urban increments seem to have been radiating northwards from the fortified castle, as first the local rural population and then the German settlers occupied an ever increasing area.

Late Middle Ages By the 14th century, peasantry in Hungary became economically stratified. While some serfs were reported to have possessed 40 horses, 28 cattle (including 12 cows), 50 pigs and 50 sheep (Molnar 1949: 230), others had 'neither horse nor goat' (Szab6 1940a: 19). Subsequently, however, feudal anarchy and related warfare often resulted in the pauperisation and displacement of serfs. Uncertainty probably favored extensive animal keeping rather than plant cultivation which is more dependent on a stable, sedentary way of life.

slow pace of urbanization in Hungary, however, could not back up the rapidly increasing expenses of this ambitious policy. Services could be rewarded only by granting estates and positions. Matyas undermined his own centralized power by strengthening competing magnates (Makkai 1988: 41).

Turkish Period Due to the mounting difficulties facing Matyas toward the end of his reign, his life's work collapsed at once following his death in 1490. Four decades of infighting and feudal anarchy weakened the country. Among other things, a poorly organized crusade turned into the coutry's greatest ever peasant uprising in 1514 in which some 60,000 peasants were killed. Thus, the competition between the ruling classes was exacerbated by a violent crack along social strata when Ottoman Turkish expansion reached Hungary by the beginning of the 16th century. At the same time, Fran~is I (Valois), king of France (15151557) had had his fill of the European dominance of the Habsburgs, so he concluded an agreement with the Sultan to attack their ancestral city, Wien. The road to Wien, however, led across Hungary, already stunned by the large peasant revolt. This agreement accorded with the ambitions of the Sublime Porte to become a world power and to expand westwards (Takacs 1991: 28). A decisive battle was lost at Mohacs on August 29 in 1526, when 16,000 Hungarian troops and half as many mercenaries were destroyed within one and a half hour by an army of an estimated 80,000100,000 led by Sultan Suleyman First the 'Magnificent'. According to Makkai (1988: 49), most contemporaries regarded the Ottoman invasion of Hungary as a divine punishment for internal anarchy, party strife, social injustice and moral as well as intellectual profligacy. The Ottoman Empire, however, represented such a formidable force that only massive external assistance could have enabled Hungary to resist the onslaught with success. Princess Maria von Habsburg annexed the western and northern counties of Hungary, while the center of the country came under the rule of the Turkish Porte. The eastern part of Hungary, Transylvania, remained an independent principality under Turkish protectorate. This division was formally recognized in 1568 (Figure 4).

In 1458, Matyas (the First) was elected king of Hungary. The historical importance of this hectic period is worth a short detour here. The 'European perspective' on the situation in early 16th century Hungary is clearly illustrated in a note by Sir Thomas More (1976: 192-193) quoted by Petenyi (1994: 16- 17):

This renaissance style absolute monarch, strengthened central royal power. He curtailed the authority of magnates and land owners by appointing his officials from the ranks of lesser nobility and town burghers. Under his rule the development of large scale manufacturing was encouraged and a tightly observed taxing system was introduced that created a sound financial basis for his regime. At the same time, he also introduced tax and toll exemptions that enhanced urban development.

'In good fayth Cosyn so begynne we to fare here in dede/& that but evyn now of late/For sinnes the title of the crowne hath comen in question, the good rule of this realme hath very sore decayed/as litle while as it is/ And vndowtidly Hungary shall neuer do well, as long as it standeth in this case/that mens myndes harken after newelties, & hauetheir hartes hangyng vppon a chaunge/And much the worse I like it, whan their wordes walke so large toward the favour of the Turkes sect/which they were euer wont to haue in so greate abomynacion, as euery trew myndid christen man & christen

Last but not least, Matyas established a 30,000 man mercenary force under his personal command. He aspired to create a unified 'Danubian Empire' in the face of Ottoman Turkish pressure on Europe. As part of this grandious scheme, he first brought Moravia and Silesia under Hungarian control in 1478, then occupied Wien in 1485. The

13

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Figure 4. Turkish territorial expansion in the Carpathian Basin during the second half of the 16th century. Advancement in Hungary is marked by dots and dashed lines respectively (drawing by M. Devay)

•••••••••

1544

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76.8 nothing of the size or type of many settlements recorded by 112 >482 1522 - 1692 Bihar county >89.0 name. More precise, additional NASP evidence is required >82 9 ? - 1690 Kecskemet district to elaborate on this trend. 95.0 45 300 ca. 15th - 17th Tolna county Sample

area edge

N-NE

16th 16th

peripheral

- 18th - 18th

ca. ca.

69

35

50.7

54

15

72.2

The formationof the puszta

Late medieval feudal anarchy and, ultimately, wars during the Turkish Period destroyed not only the settlement =======================================----------------network in Hungary. With the disappearance of small rural settlements, the traditional patterns of ownership also In Transdanubia (western Hungary), two thirds of the underwent radical changes (Wellmann 1952: 143). Borders population were lost (Heckenast 1957: 224). In Tolna between estates often became irrelevant and the decline of county, southwest of the sample area, the number of land cultivation gave rise to immense grasslands. Deserted settlements fell from an estimated 300 to 45 (Weidlein 1937: villages were replaced at best by dispersed tanya 16). In Somogy county, south of Lake Balaton, the number (farmstead) settlements inhabited usually by single families who practiced subsistence cultivation and animal keeping. of registered houses declined from 11,000 to 99 during this This phenomenon created the renowned concept of puszta (a period (Pach et al. 1961: 5). By the end of Turkish rule, the word derived from the Hungarian term for destruction). entire population of neighboring Baranya county was Especially in the Great Hungarian Plain, a major portion of estimated as 3,000-4,000 people (Kenez 1917: 118). the rural population, at the same time, withdrew to the relative safety of larger settlements. The resulting, The number of villages within the previously discussed 100 km 2 areal units is also interesting from an economic point of comparatively large concentrations of population comprised 5000 to 10 000 persons, while the outskirts of view. Univariate statistics on this parameter are summarized in Table 7. these settlements grew to between 1000 and 1500 km 2 because of the incorporation and renting of the areas of the abandoned villages (Lettrich 1969: 151). The emergence of Table 7: Univariate statistics of minimum settlement density exceptionally large agricultural towns whose citizens tilled (n/100 km 2) within the sample area shown in Figure 5 vast areas, was more than a mere geographical curiosity in the Great Hungarian Plain (Pounds 1974: 268). It was a Before After secondary development brought about by pressing historical Turkish rule events. 16th

central

- 18th

ca.

113

11

90.3

In the absence of powerful economic means and urban Mean value Standard Coefficient

(n/100 deviation

km2)

(n/100

of variation

km2

)

6.582

1.535

2.625

1.304

0.399

0.849

The distribution of areal units among the categories of settlement density (1 to 13/100 km 2) may be considered normal at the end of the 15th century with a majority of 100 km 2 squares having 4 to 8 settlements mentioned in written sources. A clear positive skew occurs in the late 18th century settlement pattern due to the great contribution of completely desolated 100 km2 areal units and a dominance of squares

infrastructure, however, this process was only urbanization by default. Its most characteristic development was a mere concentration of inhabitants. Many of these new settlements remained rural agglomerations rather than true towns and their centers were only moderately built up until the 19th century. Well established cities, such as Vac, where the Turks set up administrative and military centers, developed more intensively even during these hectic centuries (Takacs 1991: 28). Wealthy members of the newly arrived townsfolk often retained contacts with what remained of their patriarchal

19 ·

Animals in the UrbanLandscape economic system (Talasi 1937: 139). Some coordinated large scale extensive animal keeping operations in the countryside from their new town houses. The hinterland of Debrecen, for example, included the Hortobagy section of the Great Hungarian Plain, an area renowned for its animal breeding. While Vac enjoyed profits from the transit of animal herds, Debrecen was the archetype of a trading center whose 16-17th century bourgeoisie exploited the surrounding puszta by extensive animal breeding. Animals owned by local village communities made up only half or sometimes even less of the herds kept on pastures of the Great Hungarian Plain (Fodor 1942: 256). The rest belonged to large herd owners who lived in the town. The social implications of this economic situation included the development of a structure that rather than being a rural-serf society was more akin to the craftsman-merchant system based on stockbreeding/trading activities. Wealth was inheritable and members of extended families collectively ran undivided farms (Lettrich 1969: 152). It should be again pointed out that this form of stock keeping

had its roots in medieval times. The trend was, however, intensified and fulfilled by the Turkish occupation. As revealed by a 1524 family chronicle in the Niirnberg Municipal Library, a goldsmith, son of a wealthy cattle and horse herd owner in Ejtas near Gyula (southeastern Hungary), came to Bavaria leaving behind his brothers, a saddlemaker and a priest (Felvinczi Takacs 1909: 9). It is not known if these burghers were the descendants of hospes, but the example clearly illustrates both socio-economic and geographical mobility during the Late Middle Ages. Within the context of a study on urban archaeozoology it may seem of passing interest that the son of this goldsmith later became famous as Albrecht Diirer. Wolfgang Eysen, a Vac burgher became a member of the Niirnberg City Council in 1507 (Kubinyi 1983: 61-62).

In spite of the primitive techniques used in animal keeping, livestock as private property was protected by complex administrative measures including harsh punishments as shown by several regulations issued between 1601 and 1682 (Herman 1909: 196-227).

ANIMAL REMAINS AND CHRONOLOGICALPERIODIZATION facilitate diachronic interpretation. Unfortunately, however, it ignores continuity in the settlement's life. A too rigid subdivision, even when supported by historical events, remains hopelessly subjective.

Animal bones recovered from settlement deposits should be regarded as chiefly reflecting aspects of meat consumption. Although in depth faunal analyses may reveal additional aspects of animal exploitation, most of the animal bones from refuse pits shed light on dietary habits.

While the average number of bones was 1119 per site, individual numbers ranged between 20 and 6416 resulting in a standard deviation greater than the mean value itself. These extremes were somewhat reduced by the chronological subdivision of the material.

Preservationand samplesizes Ninety-five percent of the over 12,000 animal bones listed in Table 1 were identifiable to the species level. This is, however, not merely the result of inevitably size selective hand collection which limits faunal analysis to the size range of domestic mammals. Since most of the material was well preserved in relatively deep and at most secondary deposits, only a small degree of natural fragmentation and surface erosion/weathering were observed. Even the earliest and most fragmented 11th century material from two deposits in the Castle area displayed only some degree of uniform bleaching. This would be indicative of aerobic circumstances within the deposit.

Some finds represent broad time intervals spanning several centuries or originate from mixed deposits. Table 8 was therefore drafted in order to review the data available for study. Chronological components of the material from the eleven sites presented in Table 1 were sorted by increasing order of dating. Subsequently, coeval animal remains from several sites were pooled for the purposes of further diachronic interpretations. Groups of more-or-less synchronous deposits were then classified into the following periods:

Dog gnawing, an indicator of prolonged garbage exposure on the surface occurs but infrequently on 0.35-1.97% of the bones from various periods of the city. This fact may also be indicative of the relatively rapid burial of food refuse.

Early Middle Ages (EMA): 11th century (Castle) Middle Ages (MA): 12th-14th centuries, Transitional: 13th-15th centuries, Late Middle Ages (LMA): 15th-17th centuries, Turkish Period: 16th century, Modern Age: 18th-19th centuries.

Quantifying animal remains ought to be a cornerstone of reconstructing diet or even practices of animal keeping, in a broad sense, in former times. Acquiring bone samples which are of representative value is of paramount importance. The overall, pooled animal bone assemblage represents nine centuries in Vac and had to be sub-divided into major chronological units which encorporate sufficient osteological information and do not contradict the city's known historical periodization. Periodization itself should be looked upon as an inevitable but arbitrary presentation of data in order to

Two cuckoo's eggs in this classification, aimed at optimizing sample sizes, are the Transitional group, expressing the continuity between the medieval and late medieval samples, and the Turkish Period. This latter overlaps, in part, with the late medieval sample. It contains faunal material from early Turkish features identified on the basis of archaeological artifacts. Other, purely 17th century features, yielded only

20

AnimalRemainsand ChronologicalPeriodization Table 8. Chronological periodization and number of all bone fragments Code EMA

Period/Centu

MA

(mixed) Middle Ages

Transition

Transition

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

(mixed)

LMA

Late Middle Ages

Turkish

Turkish Period (mixed)

Modern

Modern Age

relatively few bones and displayed no distinct evidence of Turkish material culture. They were therefore grouped with the late medieval material. The numbers of identifiable bone specimens (NISP) are listed by this chronological sub-division, individual sites and animal species in Table 9. The number of animal species identified in each site/period assemblage is a function of sample size, that is, NISP. Species composition i. e. taxonomic richness, therefore, cannot be compared directly between samples of greatly differing sizes listed in Table 9. The results thus obtained would be more characteristic of NISP than the differential richness of the samples studied: smaller assemblages are more likely to contain fewer species, and when samples are drawn in a perfectly random fashion, the least frequent species will be the last to occur (Grayson 1984: 137). This is clearly illustrated by animals on the right hand side of Table 9 which shows that rare species are usually better represented in large, mostly late medieval samples in Vac.

The high and significant correlation (P60.001) as well as the low regression coefficient indicate that the recovery of bones from each new species follows a clearly degressive trend. The number of species represented in a sample of 500 bones is approximately 10 and, by and large, includes all domestic species, although more unusual animal remains can be expected only in large assemblages. Urban sites are often characterized by a limited range of animal species. Crabtree (1990a: 160) illustrated this trend by prehistoric examples from the Middle East. She also emphasized, however, the apparently great variability in this regard. Within the general tendency described by the equation, the group of small assemblages (NISP < 100) seems to be relatively richer, since even an odd bone representing an additional species can create a 'different' trend at this level. On the other hand, many large assemblages are dispropotionately dominated by the bones of one species, cattle.

In this study a conscious decision was made to concentrate on NISP as the parameter used in characterizing faunal samples. Grave methodological problems, however, have become increasingly apparent with faunal reconstructions because the way bones are counted has a marked impact on their interpretations (Gautier 1984). This chronic debate culminated in discussions on the calculation of the so-called minimum numbers of individuals (MNI) represented at any

The stochastic relationship between the number of identifiable specimens (NISP = x) and the number of species represented in an assemblage (R = y) is best expressed by the linear regression between the decimal logarithms of these two variables for the 22 assemblages listed in Table 9 (Figure 6). The trend shown in this graph may be described using the following equation: lg R =0.335 lg NISP + 0.098 (r = 0.903) 21

Table 9. Faunal lists available from Vac (NISP only)

Site/Species

iu

fr 1l r.,J

Cll

.... ·c: = ~ u

J

XI

85

25

V

136 2233 165

4

42 4

7

9

4

VI X

Cll

ell

i:S:;

188

23

1

5

8 4

174 27

15 238 27

ti.I '"'

~

ti.I ti.I




c..

\ ', \ '\

14

-----

200g

---------

220g

'.\

8

'\

6

'~

"\ -

4

,___

2

---:::---_-..,_

- ,__ - ---- ::::---::.. -=----=-----=--~ ----==---- =-

------=-

-----= --

------

-

-

--

0

1

5

15

20

25

30

Time interval, year

Figure 21. Estimated carcass components 45

■ MA

♦

40

♦

~

♦

LMA

◊

Turkish

30 ■

25 .i bO ..... a.> ~ ~

□ Transition

◊

◊

35

◊·

♦

•□

A Modem

20

i:i:..

A

15

♦

10

♦

■

.Cb□

♦

♦

5 0 35

40

45

50

55

60

Meat weight, %

43

65

70

75

80

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Figure 22. ArpadPeriod metal mount from Tiszaeszlar-Bashalom (redrawn by the author after B5konyi 1974a)

Trench 5; Site X: Pit 14) and late medieval (Site VI: Pits 9, 23) deposits. Two extremely large horn cores from an unknown context, unearthed during the 1952 construction of a public bath between Site VI and the Danube evidently originate from aurochs. They were not included in the species lists but will be discussed in relation to horn manufacturing. While some of the better preserved large specimens are shown on Plate 1, a plot of base measurements, including those taken on less well preserved fragments is shown in Figure 23. As a result of apparent phaenotypic variability and sexual di/trimorphism medieval data points form two hardly separable groups which may correspond to cows and oxen/young bulls respectively and include a single Turkish Period find as well. A few Modern Age specimens are scattered throughout these two data sets with the notable exception of five large 18-19th century horn cores.

On the basis of the small 15th century bone assemblage from Site IV, Voros (1986: 256) distinguished between a smaller (withers height: 110-120 cm) and a larger, more robust 'breed' of cattle (withers height: 130-135 cm). The increased size variability of the present material (mostly 15th-16th century metatarsals), however, blurred this picture. It is suggested here that large bones originate from oxen rather than bulls. On the one hand, it is unlikely that greater numbers of non-castrated bulls would have been raised to full maturity. More importantly, however, depending on the age of castration, oxen may develop a broad range of size variation between cows and bulls. The withers heights of medieval cows from V ac, estimated using the greatest lengths of metapodia, varied between 104.2 and 135.8 cm. More robust bones, usually identified as metapodia from oxen, yielded withers height estimates of between 104.5 and

1cm of a note from the same period cited by Herman (1909: 232): 'Istvan Pano drove 268 Vlach cattle to Wien. Vlach cattle are very small'. It may be argued that large and spongy horn cores are poorly preserved, however, they occur quite commonly among the remains of aurochs from all prehistoric periods in Hungary. At the medieval site of V ac, the aforementioned commercial meat distribution may have resulted in a selection against these bones in kitchen refuse. Still, fragments of relatively large horn cores, predominantly from oxen, have been found from time to time especially in major medieval (Site VI:

Figure 23. Horn core base measurements 80

§

70

.&

0)

"' 60 .!::l ~

.,

♦

..... ~

il ■ MA ♦

-■

1i 50

~

■

:.a .....

"' 40 ~ ';J

s

Cf.)

30

♦

♦

D

•.\.;.~'

#'r.ff• ..• ~ ♦ •••

D Transition ■

•

■

♦

LMA

◊

Turkish

.&

Modem

■

20 20

30

40

50

60

70

Greatest diameter at base, mm

44

80

90

100

Animal Keeping Table 21. Various withers height estimates based on cattle metapodia from Vac

Parameter Number of bones Mean value Standard deviation Standard error Median Kurtosis Skewness Range Minimum Maximum

Boessneck 1956 ox cow 20 18 120.7 119.0 6.7 7.5 1.5 1.8 119.1 117.4 -0.1 0.0 0.9 0.5 23.8 25.9 109.9 110.3 134.1 135.8

Calkin 1962 ox cow 20 18 114.5 112.8 6.4 7.1 1.4 1.7 113.0 111.4 -0.1 0.0 0.5 0.9 24.6 22.7 104.5 104.2 134.1 135.8

136.3 cm depending on the method of calculation (Boessneck 1956; Calkin 1962; Matolcsi 1966; Bartosiewicz 1988a: 364; Table 21). Differences between the coefficients applied by the first three authors are not significant but stem from the compositions of the reference materials used. Boessneck's (1956) pioneering work is based on a relatively small sample of seven cows of various breeds and two Simmenthal bulls. Estimates for oxen were calculated using the mean of coefficients for bulls and cows. Calkin (1962) used 82 individuals of the traditional Kalmuk breed, while Matolcsi's method is based on 49 Hungarian Grey cattle. From an archaeozoological point of view, the undisputable advantage of these latter two methods is the use of larger, homogeneous samples. As was noted by Prummel (1982), however, Matolcsi's method systematically underestimates withers heights which was interpreted as a consequence of metapodia attaining adult size earlier than other long bones (Hammond 1932; Bartosiewicz 1985b: 260). This is clearly illustrated by an extreme example in Hereford cattle: metacarpal length in adults is only 115 % of the size measured at 19 days of age (Guilbert and Gregory 1952: 12). Metapodial measurements are, therefore, less influenced by effects during the animals' subsequent life than those of more slowly forming bones. This means that in spite of the evidently strong correlation, the relationship between metapodial lengths and withers height is not linear. Allometric equations calculated using data from 73 individuals of various breeds (Bartosiewicz 1988a: 364) were aimed at overcoming this problem. In summary, Calkin's and Matolcsi's method reflect the way phaenotypes may have looked, while consonantly higher values obtained by Boessneck's coefficients and the allometric equations (Bartosiewicz 1988a: 364) express the potential withers height of medieval cattle which would be more comparable to that of modem breeds (Bartosiewicz 1985b: 260). The ranges of withers height presented in Table 21 correspond to estimates for late medieval cattle in the city of Bremen (Nobis 1965: 43). Even if metapodia are more robust and less intensively butchered than most other long bones which tend to preserve poorly, transversal measurements taken on their proximal and distal fragments provide a somewhat larger sample for study. When proximal, dorsoventral 'depths' are plotted

45

Matolcsi 1966 ox cow 20 18 114.4 113.8 6.2 1.7 1.4 7.7 112.8 111.7 -0.5 -0.1 0.6 0.8 21.6 23.6 105.4 105.0 127.2 128.6

Bartosiewicz 1988a ox cow 20 18 119.6 118.9 7.0 7.3 1.6 1.7 117.2 116.7 0.1 0.4 0.9 1.1 23.1 25.5 111.2 110.8 134.3 136.3

against mediolateral widths two groups, suggestive of sexual dimorphism, emerge both in the case of metacarpus (Figure 24) and metatarsus (Figure 25). This phenomenon is not surprising considering that Nobis (1954) used the proportion between proximal width and greatest length in identifying metapodia from cows and oxen/bulls respectively. The interpretation of these patterns is somewhat difficult. While most would agree that the smaller bones represent cows, distinction between the bones of oxen and bulls is more ambiguous. In the case of late castrates, mediolateral dimensions as well as metapodial asymmetry may rival that of bulls (Bartosiewicz et al. 1993). Some medieval (cow) metacarpals form a small group of data points in Figure 24. They may represent young adult or even subadult individuals. Proximal metapodials fragments are difficult to precisely age in the absence of truly diagnostic distal epiphyses. In any case, more animals of small size were slaughtered during the 12th-14th centuries than in later periods. Aside from this phenomenon, no statistically significant differences occurred between medieval and late medieval proximal metapodial measurements at the required level of probability (P 0.05). Distal metacarpal proportions often become especially variable blurring even the vague patterning attributable to sexual 'dimorphism' in the case of proximal metapodial measurements. The great variability shown in Figures 23-25 confirms that beef from all sorts of 'mediocre' cattle was consumed in the medieval German Town of Vac. This may have been a natural consequence of the vast cattle drives cited by historical sources to be discussed later. 'Breeds', even if they existed, may be difficult to recognize, because export shipments may represent a haphazard if not random sample from a national herd that was probably mixed as a result of continuous and intensive population movements. From the Early Middle Ages onwards, a general withers height increase may be observed in Central and Eastern Europe (Matolcsi 1970; Bokonyi 1974a; Fehring 1977: 16). This trend, however, is not clearly manifested in the heterogeneous late medieval assemblage from Vac. In addition to genetic backgrounds, shifts in the regional environment such as the 1350-1450 agrarian crisis in

Animals in the UrbanLandscape

Figure 24. Cattle metacarpus

38 ♦

.... □ ◊

36

♦

□

§ 34 □

0.

Cl)

ca

~

□

□

□

□

..c:" ..... "O

□

□ ♦

32

s ">< 0 ... 0... 30

□□

...

♦

+dJ

QJ■

•□

□

♦

□

□ MA

♦

□

•□

□ [}Qi

28

□

~13

♦

C+

ob□

□

♦

■ EMA

♦

□

♦

LMA

◊

Turkish

...Modern

□

26 45

50

55

60

65

Proximal breadth, mm

Figure 25. Cattle metatarsus

55 ◊

50 ■

35

■■••

■

D □

◊

□

SD

■ Qi;. -~□~□

ii ■ ■■

■ □□ ■ □

8

□

□ ◊

■

□

□

o □•■□ ~ ■

□

□

♦

□

■ MA

■

D LMA

D D

□ ■

+ Turkish ◊ Modern

30 35

40

45 Proximal breadth, mm

46

50

55

AnimalKeeping Sweden may even have resulted in temporary size decline (Sten 1993a: 39) during the Late Middle Ages. Conventionally, late medieval cattle exports are associated with the traditional long-homed Hungarian Grey breed of unknown origin. Unfortunately, the only unambiguous evidence for this breed, horn cores of spectacular size, have not yet been recovered from archaeological sites in Hungary. The V ac material may be considered fortunate in this regard since a great variety of horn cores were recovered (Plates 1 to 3). They predominantly originate from cows and oxen, a phenomenon consonant with the distribution of metapodial measurements. Relatively large, 13th-14th century horn cores of oxen from Cesspool 1 in Plot III as well as Trench V at Site VI (Plate 2) are among the earliest finds vaguely reminiscent of Hungarian Grey cattle. Considering the dynamic evolution of domestic animals, however, it remains a question if today's Hungarian Grey cattle may be considered direct descendants of these medieval beasts. It is likely that, similarly to British Longhorn cattle, early forms of Hungarian Grey cattle were greatly upgraded during the 18th-19th centuries. This resulted in a form that 'bears little resemblance in its outward appearance to its unimproved predecessor' (Armitage 1982: 49). The origins of Hungarian Grey cattle have been widely and sometimes passionately debated (e.g. Brummel 1900: 34; Hank.6 1936: 53; Matolcsi 1970: 24; Gaal 1966: 40; Bokonyi 1974a: 143) as a matter of national prestige. According to one of three antagonistic hypotheses, a long-homed breed existed in the Carpathian Basin before the Hungarian Conquest (local domestication and/or improved Roman forms). The idea that the Hungarian Grey cattle descended directly from aurochs was perpetuated by an authority no less than Charles Darwin in his 1868 book entitled 'The variation of animals and plants under domestication' (Darwin 1959: 418).

The second theory is that of early medieval imports either by conquering Hungarians from the east during the 9th century or by the last waves of migration (Comans) from the southeast. It is noteworthy that large metapodials were identified by Bokonyi (1961) at the medieval Cumanian site of Turkeve - M6ricz. An unusually robust medium phalanx was also found in the material from Szentkiraly, a coeval Cumanian village. These people were renowned for their huge herds of cattle (Gy&ffy 1953: 251) and may, in fact, have introduced the ancestors of the Hungarian Grey breed to the Carpathian Basin (Matolcsi 1975b: 75). It is still questionable, however, to link the appearance of this breed with any single ethnic group (Bartosiewicz 1993a: 55). Commercial imports from southern Italy during the rule of the Anjou Dynasty in the 14th century have also been hypothesized. Gaal (1966: 40) found this latter theory unacceptable as a 'physiological absurdity' since ' ...no breed could spread within a century and a half as an export commodity to such an extent that it would serve as a supply... for a major part of Europe providing characteristically uniform animals abundantly documented in sources abroad even in times preceding the battle of Mohacs'. Matolcsi (1968: 25), however, showed that starting with a stock of 50 cows, over 3,200,000 animals might be produced within one and a half centuries. The absence of convincing osteological evidence raises the question of whether the axiom itself is correct. First of all, the amply documented livestock exports, to Italy, among others would probably have disrupted Matolcsi's previously mentioned reproductional scheme. In addition, while the small size and heterogeneity of most medieval cattle bones from both V ac and other medieval sites would be typical for overexploited populations, it is far from the probably idealistic picture of 'characteristically uniform animals abundantly documented in sources abroad.' Selectivity in

Figure 26. Large ox with "tulip" horn fonnation exhibited in Einsiedeln in 1788 (after De Blue 1985)

47

Animals in the Urban Landscape Figure 27. Longhorn ox. Stone carving on an /;18th century Baroque house in Vac (drawing by S. Osi)

articulated bones from a hind leg which seem strikingly similar to the corresponding bones from a modern Hungarian Grey ox (Matolcsi 1977; Plate 4). However, the range of bone lengths of individual animals in a population is fairly wide and there is a great deal of overlapping between potential 'breeds' (Danell 1993: 101). The comparison of horn core basis measurements clearly shows that, in spite of Matolcsi's fortunate 1977 find, medieval cattle from Vac were significantly smaller than individuals of the Hungarian Grey breed in the 20th century.

%~;1~:,~,\ ....

}~!{

...

..... _

,'•

.::·:\·.·.··

.. ~:-r-:·: :__._.-

Regardless of breed or actual size, late medieval and Turkish Period cattle fattened on the summer pastures had to be strong enough to walk to Niirnberg, Augsburg or Zara (Zadar, Croatia). From this latter port, cattle were shipped to Venezia. Since transportation by sea took 8-14 days during the late 16th century, animals had to be rather fit and tough to survive (Gaal 1966: 475). It is worth considering that excessively long horns would have become a nuisance during such a trip.

l~r: coeval sources may have resulted in the overrepresentation of 'magnus cornuotes boves Hungaricos' (16th century; Milhoffer 1904: 74), whose 'tendons had to be incised in the markets of Wien to make them less violent,' and which were allowed in markets of the German Empire only after they had been 'appropriately tied up' (Takats 1961: 3).

Draft cattle The overwhelming dominance of adult cattle in all samples from the German Town, as well as the documented widespread use of draft oxen in Hungary raises the question of whether the bones of such animals could have been thrown into the kitchen refuse.

Great osteometrical variability is consonant with both Turkish tax rolls from the Great Hungarian Plain and a 1644 inventory from Tasnad. These sources mention a variety of colors including piebald, yellow, black, 'blue' (Herman 1909: 177), red, blond, white, and even something that could be best translated agouti color (Petri 1904: 274) indicating that theories concerning the exclusive dominance of Hungarian Grey cattle should be looked upon with reservations (Gaal 1966: 180). Similarly to the remains of aurochs-like cattle described from late Medieval sites in Upper Austria (Knecht 1966: 53) and Miinchen (Boessneck 1958: 41), hypothetically linked with Hungarian cattle exports (Bokonyi 1974: 147), it is questionable what breed the huge ox with 'tulip' type horn formation depicted in Einsiedeln in 1783 (De Blue 1985: 6465) belonged to (Figure 26). Within the probably heterogeneous stock rounded up for export, the occasional large ox or bull with spectacular horns must have attracted disproportionately great attention. Consequently, the importance of such animals may have been somewhat overstated in subsequent historical analyses. Nagyvathy's (1826: 29) sentence on horses may thus apply perfectly for Hungarian Grey cattle at that time: 'breeding has not been as large (scale) as good and famous'.

Draft exploitation may be inferred from various deformations in the skeleton and especially on the bones of the feet (e.g. Wlisle 1976: 83; Feddersen and Heinrich 1977: 167; Johansson 1982: 59; Davis 1992: 5). Many of these disorders, however, may also be caused by chronic arthritis as well as improper congenital foot conformation (Durr 1961: 32). The volar broadening of the medial distal articular surface (trochlea capitis medialis) was observed on a pair of complete metatarsal bones found in the 13th-15th century material from Site II and on a medieval cow metacarpus from Site V (Plate 5, middle). Similar cases have been described by von den Driesch (1975: 420). Asymmetry in trochlea breadths was linked with biomechanical parameters (Ramaekers 1977) as well as bone mineral content in the metapodia of modern draft oxen from Rumania (Bartosiewicz et al. 1993). Considerable variability observed in the loading of toes within the same foot also indicates the diagnostic importance of asymmetry (Heyden and Dietz 1991: 166; Bartosiewicz 1993b: 327, Table 2). This deformation has widely been interpreted as a symptom caused by many years of draft exploitation (Ekkenga 1984: 76; Wiesmiller 1986: 83).

An 18th century relief showing a long-horned cattle is even known from Vac itself, carved into the gate frame of a Baroque building in the Dunakoz area (Figure 27). During the 19th century, much emphasis was laid on draft exploitation (Bod6 1990: 74). Pictorial representations of plowing with long horned Hungarian Grey oxen became relatively common from the second half of the 18th century onwards. Examples include a 1771 picture from Mezocsat and an early 19th century wall painting from the Greek Catholic church in Gyula (Balassa 1981: 6, 12).

Draft animals sometimes also attained old ages rarely seen in modern domesticates (Baker and Brothwell 1980: 136), and age itself is an important factor contributing to the development of exostoses and other osteopathological conditions. Rough local topography may also have promoted the development of bone deformations in the limbs of cattle

Excavations in 15th century Buda Palace brought to light

48

AnimalKeeping (Van Neer and De Cupere 1993: 231). A Turkish Period acetabulum pelvis fragment found at Site VI displays eburnation on the articular surface and may also be regarded as indirect evidence of draft exploitation (Plate 5, top). Even in these extreme cases, however, the association between the symptoms and aetiology of joint disorders remains largely intangible (Horwitz 1989: 170). Traction work and beef production require antagonistic anatomical features. Carcasses of larger animals preferred for traction work contain a higher proportion of bone and muscle and relatively less fat (Kidwell and McCormick 1956: 114). While long legs are considered a priority in draft cattle as well as for long distance cattle drives, selection for high dressing percentage causes a decline in withers height, decreasing the percentage of bone and fat within the carcass weight (Cazeimer 1964). The resulting animals do not perform so well as draft cattle. Since oxen were more typically commissioned to tillage work than road transport, the topic of draft cattle seems to be of marginal importance from the viewpoint of urban history. Written sources, however, mention that slow oxcarts were used in the long distance transport of bulky produce such as flour and wine (Ecsedi 1914: 253; Gaal 1966: 181). As mentioned above, viniculture flourished in Vac. It is even more interesting that eight-ox teams were used in the transportation of salt (Bokonyi 1974a: 147), a precious but heavy export commodity that represented the greatest value in the town's 1563-1564 toll records (Vass 1975). On the basis of both osteological and historical evidence it is thus reasonable to assume that deformed bones found in the German Town originated, with great probability, from draft animals. These bones, however, are infreqent among food refuse (Bartosiewicz 1993c).

and associated milking. The bones of adult female cattle indeed dominate in the osteological assemblages from Vac. It remains a question, however, to what extent the composition of bone deposits was distorted by the filtering effect of an evidently market-based beef consumption. While dated written sources on medieval milking range between the earliest Christian times in Ireland (McCormick 1992: 202) to detailed notes on manorial milk processing in 16th century Sweden (Bjornhag and Myrdal 1993: 79), documentary evidence is again relatively scarce in Hungary. A great variety of cheeses were recorded in 15th century chronicles, however, many of these documents concern Italian and French imports by the royal court and high nobility (Zolnay 1975: 141). Turkish customs records from Vac regularly mention cows that crossed the Danube ferry, sommetimes in great numbers (Kaldy-Nagy 1968: 39; Vass 1975: 153). It is not possible to tell, however, if the term 'cow' represents a de facto, functional distinction from 'cattle' which were fattened and sold for beef. While 1960 cows were recorded in 1560, five times as many (10,969) were taxed in the 1563-1564 period. The generic term 'cattle' was used for almost 30,000 animals in both time intervals. Even in the absence of direct evidence, it is certain that cows were milked in the Vac area during the Middle Ages. It remains a question, however, how much dairy production remained on a household level and whether surpluses were preserved and marketed on a large scale in the form of butter and cheese. Specialized dairy production started only at the end of the 17th century when the first upgraded Swiss cows were imported to Hungary (Hank6 1936: 14). The unstable political situation characterized by large scale cattle drives in the wake of the Middle Ages did not favor the emergence of dairy industry even if subsistence type milk production may have been important. It was only increasing urban population concentrations as well as the improvement of transport during the Modern Age which created a market for dairy products (Gaal 1966: 405).

Pictorial documents and literary sources would suggest that parties of four oxen were often used during the 17th and 18th century in Hungary (e.g. Balassa 1981: 6 and 12). Although artistic representations could be influenced by conventional symbolism (Richardson 1942: 289), inventories from between 1828 and 1844 show that following single pair teams, four ox parties were indeed most common at peasant farms in Northern Hungary (Z6lyomi 1968: 457). In Hungarian oral tradition (0. Nagy 1976: 526), the unit of six oxen is often referred to as a measure of considerable wealth ('six ox holder') or in the description of physically difficult tasks ('Not even six oxen could ...').

Pig (SusdomesticusErxl. 1777) While pigs were underrepresented in the 11th century sample from the Castle and the Turkish Period material, their percentual contribution (NISP) to the pooled chronological samples steadily increased through time:

Medieval English manuscripts usually portray oxteams of four animals (e. g. Davis 1987: 187, Fig. 8.13). The mean number of oxen put into a team, however, was closer to eight on demenses, although it rarely exceeded 12 (Langdon 1986: 126, Fig. 29).

Early Middle Ages: Middle Ages: Transition: Late Middle Ages: Turkish Period: Modern Age:

6.8% 8.7% 9.9% 10.9% 2.3% 11.5 %

Dairying

In spite of this increasing tendency, however, the contribution of pig barely attains 10-15 % of the NISP calculated for cattle. Considering the smaller body mass of pigs, this points to the relatively minor role played by pork in the diet.

One way to approach the reconstruction of dairy exploitation is to focus upon age distributions in cattle. In a milk producing economy it is assumed that the cattle population will mostly consist of cows used for reproduction

49

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Pigs may be butchered, hung by the hind legs and split lengthwise, sometimes together with the head. Signs of this treatment may be seen on neurocranium fragments and vertebrae found in the German Town. Longitudinally cut pig skulls are well known from even Turkish Period deposits in Hungary (e. g. Bartosiewicz 1992: 405, Fig. 7.1-2). The presence of butchered neurocranium fragments is often interpreted as evidence for brain consumption as well. Indeed, a low but positive (r = 0.458) and statistically significant (P 0.05) correlation was found between the commercial importance of brain and other meat related to the head (muzzle, tongue etc.) in 16 of the present day countries discussed above.

Some late medieval assemblages were sufficiently large (Total NISP > 250) to permit the intersite comparison of pork quality. Figure 28 shows pig remains classified into Uerpmann's (1973) categories. Similarly to the distribution of cattle bones, Sites IV and V located near the center of late medieval German Town were provisioned with better quality pork than Sites VI and X located more to the south. The position of Site II (characterized by high quality beef at the time) within this latter group, however, indicates that many category C bones (notably autopodia of younger pigs as well as head elements) may, in fact, represent the remains of highly valued meals.

A pig may also be butchered lying on its side with the head removed (Van Wijngaarden-Bakker 1990: 171). In this case, most cutmarks occur on the proximal end of ribs. Compared to large cattle carcasses, therefore, split vertebrae of pig are not necessarily a sign of more advanced, special butchering techniques (Audoin and Marinval-Vigne 1987: 48; Grant 1987: 57). They only indicate one possible way of dismemberment, probably less aimed at the removal of complete side bacons (Takacs 1990-1991: 42).

The four late medieval bones preserved in full length in the material yield an average withers height estimate (Teichert 1969: 264) of 69.8 cm (standard deviation= 5.7). Pigs of this size, especially a 74.8 cm tall 15th-16th century specimen, may be considered large. The best known primitive breed in Hungary, the so-called Bakony pig (Matolcsi 1975-1977), was kept in a more-or-less feral state, continuously interbreeding with wild boars in the wilderness of the Bakony hills (Zolnay 1971: 93). An approximately one year old female kept in the Museum of the Zirc Abbey measured only 42 cm at the withers (Hank6 1940: 128).

Among the pig remains, a 15th century mandible cut wide open is one of the most special finds at site (Plate 16). Even today, pig jaws are often opened and then used as an ingredient of Dutch pea soup (Van Wijngaarden-Bakker 1990: 171). This form of marrow extraction, however, has entirely disappeared from Hungarian cuisine. Additional hack marks occur on two medieval humeri and three late medieval metapodia. Knife cuts are more common in every period. The tip of a loose lower canine tooth from Site V shows dark discoloration that may be the result of singeing (Takacs 1990-1991: 51, Fig. 15).

Lower third molars from Vac also seem to originate from relatively large domestic pigs (Figure 29). Most medieval pigs seem to be smaller than Modern Age specimens in Figure 29, but it is difficult to tell how much this overall picture is influenced by sexual dimorphism and possible 'feralization'. In the case of pig, care must be taken when attempting to separate sexes using bone size as a criterion (Bokonyi 1984: 53). Distal humerus breadth is assumed to have correlated with overall body weight in medieval pigs

Figure 28. Late medieval pork

100% 90% 80% 70% ,,....._ 11..

60%

z....,,

50%

■A

ti)

Os

bO

l:i:;

■ c

40% 30% 20% 10% 0% IV

VI

V

Site codes

50

II

X

Animal Keeping

Figure 29. Pig lower third molar

18 17.5 0

17

§

□

16.5

.a .....

♦

16

'-g

□

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0

♦

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(1)

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♦

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14

♦

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LMA

◊

Modem

♦

♦

13.5 13 25

30

40

35

45

Alveolar length, mm

Figure 30. Pig humerus

42

♦ ♦

41

♦ ♦

♦

40 ■

39

§ 38

-s fr

37

til .....

36

"O

a

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mCattle

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z

400 200 0 1696

1743

1699

91

1828

Animals in the UrbanLandscape Roman Catholic (Fenyes 1851: 249).

In an even broader, international comparison compiled after Szechenyi (1828: 14), the relative importance of sheep keeping in Hungary becomes yet more evident (Figure 59). Live cattle exports to Austria and Germany remained significant even after the 1867 creation of the AustroHungarian Monarchy (Tormay 1887: 24).

Animal keeping obviously became increasingly unimportant in the town's immediate environment which was characterized by small plowlands and only a few, sandy pastures 'no more than 90 house lots large' in the middle of the last century (Fenyes 1851: 249).

The continuing but qualitatively different importance of V ac as an urban center in the proximity of the capital is shown by the fact that the first train line in all of Hungary was opened between the towns of Pest and Vac on July 15 in 1846. The main professions in Vac by this time included trading, crafts, transportation, shipping, land cultivation and viniculture (Fenyes 1851: 249).

At the same time, cattle drives continued across the V ac ferry. In 1818, 6793 animals were recorded during August and September, 5416 in October and 7864 in November (Karcsu 1880: 68). Data in Table 38 show that, although on a smaller scale, cattle remained an export commodity of nationwide importance (Milhoffer 1904: 264).

In addition to religious buildings (cathedral, episcopal palace etc.), the predominantly Baroque and Neoclassical style downtown area and the attractive Danube enbankment formed the core of the modem urban settlement. As far as social institutions are concerned, the bishop's old palace was converted into an Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in 1802. During his 1814 trip Bright (1818) was impressed with this advanced institution as well as the Academia Ludovicana. This latter building functioned as an educational powerhouse for noble youth between 1808 and 1825 but was turned into an infamous penitentiary in 1855 following the failed revolution and liberation war against the House of Habsburg in 1848-1849 (Pallas 1897: 569).

Table 38. The percentual distribution of export incomes in the Hungarian Kingdom by various animal species Total

Cattle

Sheep

Pig

(1000 Florins)

1780

3,825

67.7

12.6

19.7

1781

3,414

65.3

13.6

21.1

1782

4,960

73.3

11.0

15.7

1819

5,432

70.9

13.9

15.2

1820

5,103

73.8

10.6

15.6

1821

5,249

73.4

9.3

17 .3

By the turn of this century, the textile industry had become important in addition to a shipyard and a metal manufacturing plant. In 1914, Kodak opened a factory in Vac (Tragor 1928: 86), which following its nationalization after World War II, became one of the country's most important chemical producers. An even more conspicious industrial giant in the area is the Duna Cement Works. It has utilized the flank of the hillside overlooking V ac. The quarrries of Naszaly hill had been rented out by the episcopal

As far as the percentual contribution of cattle is concerned, these figures are strikingly similar to the 1546-1564 Turkish tax register data from Vac cited in Table 32 in this study. It must be added, however, that by the 18th century introduction of Merino sheep, wool export revenues were three to four times more important than export incomes for live sheep.

Figure 59. Proportions between domesticates in Europe, 1818

France

Hungary

II

Horse

Germany

D

Sheep

■ Cattle

Austria

0

20

30

40

50

% of national stock

92

60

70

80

90

ModernAge Urbanization authorities for centuries (Tragor 1928: 158). However, it was large scale industrial exploitation starting in the 1950's that

ripped the hill open so that the scar may even be seen from Budapest.

PLANT EXPLOITATIONAND AGRICULTURE (Ferenc Gyulai) Macrobotanical remains provide us with a glimpse into plant exploitation by the city's medieval inhabitants, an integral part of food consumption and commerce. The first archaeobotanical investigations in Vac were carried out by Borbala P. Hartyanyi (Mikl6s 1986). While animal bones from Szechenyi street and the Castle area (Voros 1986; Bartosiewicz 1991, 1994) have already been published, a comprehensive analysis of plant material has yet to be carried out. This archaeobotanical review is intended to complement information on the use of agricultural resources in the medieval city.

contained no macrobotanical remains. They contained sporadic fragments of charcoal, fish scales, fungal sclerotia and insect remains. In addition to carbonized and noncarbonized finds (Figures 60 and 61) rare, subfossil (calcinated) plant remains were also recognized. Since remains of vegetables and fruits were preserved without carbonization, it may be assumed that plant material from refuse pits and cess pools underwent a calcination process that has not yet been identified in detail. Preservation in a carbonized form is more characteristic of cereal grain than other plant remains (Sagi and Fiizes 1966).

Plant sociology and ecology open up opportunities for grouping various plant species into ecological categories on the basis of appropriate criteria (Jacomet, Brombacher and Dick 1989) which ultimately permits us to draw conclusions concerning the thanatocoenosesstudied. Thanatocoenoses include all plant remains from the site's environment that are recovered from a broad range of feature types (pits, cesspools etc.; Willerding 1983).

Soil characteristics in Hungary favor the selective preservation of grain and weed remains. Typically, these latter occur in sufficiently great numbers to permit more detailed conclusions. The well known habitat requirements of cereals are instrumental in understanding crop cultivation by various cultures. In addition, archaeobotanical samples from V ac are unusually rich in fruit remains.

In more fortunate cases, the simultaneous occurrence of species representing the same plant association may be observed in the same archaeological feature (e. g. cereal grain and associated weed remains). In such cases, palaeobiocoenoses may be reconstructed. While autochtonous palaeo-biocoenosesoriginate from the location of recovery, allochtonpalaeo-biocoenosesrepresent areas different from the find spot. The V ac assemblage may be considered autoctonous.

The ecological conditions mirrored by macrobotanical remains brought to light during the course of excavations are studied by thanatocoenology. This discipline is concerned with the reconstruction of flora and plant associations, that is the description of botanical characteristics near the site (Willerding 1983). Due to its fundamental nature, thanatocoenology applies widely but also critically the indicator roles played by various plant species (Ellenberg 1950, 1974). The plant sociological and ecological system adopted for archaeobotanical finds by Jacomet, Brombacher and Dick (1989) permits the classification and evaluation of subfossil plant remains. The software developed by archaeobotanists in the Botanical Institute of Basel University also takes diachronic change into consideration. This program utilizes dBASE III PLUS data files designed to record and analyse plant remains by excavation parameters and individual samples.

Material and method The 43 samples listed in Table 39 were gathered at Sites III, V, VI, VIII and IX in Vac. Five samples originate from the Middle Ages (13th century), while 28 belong to the Late Middle Ages (15th-16th century). Three 'transitional' samples represent the overlap between these two periods (13th-16th century). Two and three samples were dated to the Turkish Period (16-17th century) and Modem Age (1819th century) respectively.

During the course of carpological identification a modern reference assemblage was used. The samples contained 101,621 individual finds which represented 52 plant species. Identifications were possible at various taxonomic levels.

Plant remains were recovered from a variety of features, mostly from pits (36 samples). Additional samples were taken from the fill of ditches (n=2), cess pools (n=2) as well as a well, an oven and a house. Thus, materials gathered from late medieval features dominate in the assemblage.

Automatic data processing lists plant species as well as the occurrence of carbonized and non-carbonized seeds and other types of remains by samples. The species list also contains the numbers of individual finds and their relative frequencies. Should sufficiently great numbers of plant species be available, additional, ecological analysis becomes possible. This is supported by the expandable ecological

The samples were first water-sieved (0.5 mm mesh size) with inorganic material being separated by flotation. The organic residue was sorted under a stereo light microscope in order to separate plant remains. One third of the samples

93

Table 39. The distribution of macrobotanical remains by samples

"' "' ·o "' ·o ....

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cii

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0

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cii

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Feature

Century

cii

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= "Cl .... cii

r.r.i

cii CJ cii

... ~ 0

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cii ,J:J

cii

cii Q.

"' "Cl cii

·a 0

cii Q.

OJ)

"Cl "' "Cl cii ~ "' .... ·c = ~ ~ cii .... = "Cl cii "Cl ~ cu "Cl cii -; 0 cii cii ~ cu N .... "'t "O .... "Cl cu '"' .... cii OJ) -; '"' cu .:I 0 .... "Cl cii cii "' 0= cii "Cl -e ~ cii"'0'"' ~0'"' ~ cii0 ucii'"' ~ u

-e z= u = z 8

~

=

~

CJ

~

I

0

\0

~

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

V V V V V V V V V V V V V VI VI VI IX III IX VIII V V V

Pit 5, bottom Pit 7 Pit12 Pit 7 Pit12, edge Pitl 1 Pit12 Pit 41/a Pit 5 Pit 7 Pit 7 Pit 8 Pitl 0, NW pillar Lot I, cess-pool Lot 1, cess-pool Pit 5/a Trench 1, W Well bottom Trench I, burnt Pit 5, mare deposit House I/Pit 2 Pit 5, bottom Pit 24

late 15th late 15th-16th 16th-17th late 15th-16th 16th-17th 13th-15th/16th 16th-17th 15th-16th late 15th late 15th-16th late 15th-16th late 15th-I 6th 13th 18th-19th 18th-19th 16th-I 7th 16th 15th-16th 15th-16th 16th late 15th late 15th 14th-16th

F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai F. Gyulai B. Hartyanyi B. Hartyanyi B. Hartyanyi

1 1 3

I

= 2

I 1 3

"Cl

"' cii

"Cl

cii

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cii

"Cl

"Cl

·a 0

"'

cii N

cii N

·a 0

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z= 0

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2

53 1 4

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If I::)

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1:;" ~

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6 1 4 4 8 8 7 5 1 1 1 10 3 1 1 7

I

6 2 5 5 9 9

2 1 1

2 1 1 2 2 3

2

1

6 6 I 2 1 7 3

I I I

I 1 I

2 2 2 I 8

I 1 1 1 1

I I 1

3

1 I

3

I

I

2 1 1 1 3 2 4 5 1 I 1 7 3 1 I 1 I

1

1036

93 812 1537

249 2 93 816 145 2571 877 81 I 97 107 40523 74 29 34

~ I::) ~

I:"


Table 39. continued

....