Szólád I.

The 76th volume of the series "Römisch-Germanische Forschungen" focuses on investigations of man and environment in the surroundings of a Longobard period cemetery at Lake Balaton. It is a result of the investigation of the Szólád cemetery begun in 2005 by the Romano-Germanic Commission of the German Archaeological Institute (RGK) and the Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The careful presentation and evaluation of all data from archaeological and natural scientific investigations forms a fundamental contribution to the discussion of collective or ethnic identities: Which historical actors were buried in the graves? Do they represent historiographically attested groups - such as the gens of the Lombards known from written sources? Thus, the data collected in Szólád also became part of the reference group for the large-scale international research project "HistoGenes", which plays a major role in the current discussion about the significance of aDNA analyses for the archaeology and history of the Migration Period (4th-8th centuries).
The volume Szólád I deals with the carefully documented features of the cemetery together with the results of investigations on the area as well as on anthropology and archaeozoology. The planned second volume will present the finds and the combined evaluation of all results.
The village of Szólád lies on the periphery of the southern bank of the Balaton. How the landscape presented itself to the arriving settlers in the 6th century and how human influence, despite fertile soils, weakened in the following period is the subject of this volume, as is the question of how the farming community practised agriculture, animal husbandry, and fishing and used the natural vegetation. The loess in which the graves were sunk offers excellent preservation conditions, and so, for example, wooden plates can still be recognised, from which the eggs seem to have rolled down only yesterday. In addition to tools and equipment put in the graves, we also encounter birds and fish and a whole horse. But the bones of the buried are also excellently preserved and allow extensive examinations of adults and children. In addition, the good conditions allow a detailed reconstruction of the burial grounds and thus provide insight into how death and the dead were dealt with in a small farming community at the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages.