Marosszentannától a Zápolya utcáig. Gondolatok egy Pósta-tanítványról
From Marosszentanna to the Zápolya street. Thoughts on a Pósta disciple

Summary/Abstract: The beginnings of the professional archaeology in Transylvania can be connected to the period of Béla Pósta’s activity in Cluj/Kolozsvár at the beginning of the 20th century, when his disciples achieved important results in various fields of archaeology. This is particularly true for the archaeology of the Migration Period and the Hungarian Conquest, mainly because preceding Pósta’s appointment at the head of the archaeological department of the Franz Joseph University, very few discoveries were known, most of them without a clear archaeological context. The intensified field research at the beginning of the 20th century brought to light several new archaeological sites which are highly relevant even today in the research of the mentioned period. Despite that his main area of research was numismatics, from the perspective of the Migration and Hungarian Conquest Period archaeology István Kovács played the most significant role among Pósta’s disciples. One of his main excavations, the cemetery from Sântana de Mureș/Marosszentanna became the eponym site of one of the most important archaeological cultures of the Late Roman Imperial Age and the Early Migration Period in Eastern Europe. The cemetery from Band/Mezőbánd was the first archaeological site where a burial ground of an Early Avar Age community with strong Germanic traits was discovered. As already pointed out by Kovács, the necropolis from Band/Mezőbánd shed light on the complexity of the ethnic relations in Transylvania during the 6th–7th centuries. An important merit of István Kovács was the correct chronological and cultural classification of both cemeteries, in spite of the fact that no other comparable finds were known from Transylvania at that time. The accuracy of his conclusions was confirmed by the partially unearthed cemetery from Târgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely, Mikszáth Kálmán street, where Kovács identified graves that were contemporary with those from Sântana de Mureș/Marosszentanna and Band/Mezőbánd next to each other. The third important excavation led by Kovács in Cluj/Kolozsvár, Zápolya street changed radically the previous theories related to the Hungarian Conquest Period in Transylvania and is even now among the most significant archaeological sites of the period. Of course, the conclusions of István Kovács’s decades or even century-old publications needed partial revisions and corrections, but his main chronological and cultural remarks proved to be correct even in the long run. From a methodological point of view his excavations and papers reached rather high scientific standards for that period, standards which were unfortunately not achieved by many later publications.

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