Kecskemét - A cemetery next to the Eastern Ditch of the settlement complex

A team of Salisbury Ltd. led by Zoltán Farkas discovered an Avar Period cemetery in an excavation conducted in the then-future industrial area of the Mercedes in 2017. The completely unearthed cemetery comprised 174 graves; it was established on top of a slight elevation by a right-angle corner of the Eastern Ditch of the settlement complex.
This site is particularly important because of the unparalleled size of the researched area: not only could the cemetery be entirely excavated, but the settlement features could also be unearthed in an exceptionally large area, due to which today we have the best possible understanding of the lifestyle, society, funerary practice, and material culture of its one-time residents.
The graves were arranged in regular rows but with smaller and bigger gaps between some features and a relatively rich burial or that of the head of the family at the centre. Most were directed roughly along NW–SE, aligning with the line of the ditch surrounding the settlement and the inner division of the settlement. The grave pits were similar to those seen in the Danube–Tisza Interfluve: rectangular shafts with the traces of a wooden structure supported by posts. Both dual burials included a woman and a man, respectively, who were either kin or two persons buried by accident in almost the same place in two independent but indistinguishable graves. Some graves were reopened in the Avar Period; the disturbance mainly affected the head, chest, and hip area, or the whole upper body.
Among the 149 individuals whose skeletal remains were suitable for anthropological evaluation, men and women appear in roughly equal proportions. No grave contained the remains of a newborn, and only twenty were the final resting places of children under fourteen, which is way too few compared to a natural demographic distribution. Cultural reasons may be behind the seeming lack of children (for example, the youngest ones were buried elsewhere), but one must also keep in mind that their bones, being thinner and smaller, are more prone to the harmful effects of taphonomic processes, and their graves are usually smaller and shallower than adults’, thus ploughing destroys them more easily.
The clothing elements and accessories recovered from the grave reflect a not particularly wealthy community. Several undisturbed graves of both men and women contained nothing more than a single iron belt buckle and an iron knife. Women typically wore copper alloy hoop earrings with bead pendants and bronze bracelets; two had an agraffe pair with glass inlays on the left shoulder, indicating a cloak-like overgarment fastened there. One of the women was buried with her bronze pinzette, a cosmetic tool.
Some men’s mortuary costumes included belts decorated with metal mounts and fittings, an accessory marking the social position and wealth of the individual. Some mounts were rosette-shaped pressblech (mould-pressed) pieces from the 7th century AD, some pressblech with gryphon pattern and sheet metal variants from the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries AD, but cast ones, typical to the Late Avar Period, also appear amongst them. However, only one burial, Grave 3127, contained a complete belt set.
The animal bones, pottery vessels, eggs, and, in one grave, the wooden bucket with iron hoops are the remains of the food and drinks offered to the deceased for their afterlife journey.
Based on the relative positions of the cemetery and the identified settlement clusters, it has remained a question whether the former was used by only one or more of the latter; however, it most likely belonged to the nearest settlement.
The bioarchaeological analyses did not reveal a genetic connection between the humans whose remains were found in pits on the settlement and the ones interred in the cemetery, leaving the question open for now.

Archaeogenetic investigations of the humans from the Avar Period graves in the area of the Mercedes Factory
Genetic analysis was performed on samples from 24 individuals, 20 from the graves of the cemetery and four from settlement pits. The sampled individuals included both men and women with a genetic composition akin to European populations. There is no significant genetic difference between the people buried in the cemetery and those thrown into pits in the settlement, but close kinship relationships could not be detected either.
Most of the twenty people in the cemetery were biologically unrelated – likely because they only represent a small part of the mortuary population. However, two families could be outlined, whose members (all of them adults) were laid to rest close to each other in the southeastern zone of the cemetery. The first family fragment comprises two brothers, while the other is represented by a man and his son and daughter.

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Genetic connections between individuals in the Avar Period cemetery at Kecskemét