The Ripa Pannonica in Hungary [antikvár]

PREFACE To the memory of András Graf The research of the frontier defence of Pannónia, the profound study of its monuments and history, has been in the limelight of Hungarian archaeology for generations. At the turn of the century, enthusiasm aroused by foreign example was followed by debate rather than action. The situation did not improve later, but there have always been archaeologists who regarded the results of frontier defence research as the measure of Roman archaeological research in Hungary. The old and great dream of exploring and publishing results on a regular basis similar to that of the German, or at least the Austrian research, has never come true. Since the international /;nie5-congresses have been organised on a regular basis and especially since the 1976 Budapest conference research has gathered new impetus. Efforts were also advanced accidentally by large-scale rescue-excavations of museums, brought forth by construction works of modem towns built over settlements of the former Pannonian frontier, and by the plans of hydro-electric power-plants to be built on the Danube. As a result of these, both the number of finds and the quantity of information have grown by leaps and bounds. The complete publication of these works will modify our knowledge in even more aspects. Nevertheless, there are areas even nowadays where exploration has barely begun. This is especially true concerning the /i'mei-section south of Paks, but there are several other gaps appearing frequently in the chain of known military stations of the limes - the ripa Pannonica. The above described shortcomings were the primary motive that started my 20 years of research resulting in this book. It was my assumption that the fastest and most comprehensive aid in the mapping of the Roman frontier defence system would be aerial archaeological photography and even if financial and security reasons (and my air-sickness) would often prevent me from frequently taking part in real aerial archaeological surveys carried out under ideal circumstances I would have to examine thousands of photographs not originally made for archaeological purposes. I could achieve this despite the tight restrictions on classified materials in the second half of the 70s and first half of the 80s. 1 carried out my investigation in the Map Library of the Military Historical Institute and the Air Photo Library of the Land-Survey Institute. While the former chiefly yielded positive copies taken for military mapping, in the latter I could study different series of negatives taken regularly for civil purposes, but always only the material of the years immediately preceding my work were available. The older pictures were sealed up and gradually transferred to the Military Historical Institute where they were very difficult to access due to technical reasons. The usefijlness and often even the quality of the photographs were limited by these circumstances. In the Military Historical Institute for example, it was impossible to get enlargements of the negatives but I had to settle for copies of the contact prints I studied. It happened to me quite often that the features I took notes on were barely or not at all visible on the resulting copies. The scale of the prints was so small in most cases (1:5000-1:25000) that it caused another similar, but technical problem: archaeological features of smaller size, such as traces of walls were impossible to investigate. On the other hand, in many cases old aerial photographs had advantages over recent ones for two reasons. The increasing agricultural activities of the last decades and particularly the deep-ploughing have caused extensive damage to archaeological monuments lying beneath the soil: by stirring and levelling the ground h makes the discovery of remains more and more difficult from the air. In the case of photographs taken earlier, this problem is not so acute. The other advantage of using old photographs derives from the fact that decades ago many archaeological sites were in open or near-open areas. In many cases, the situation is different these days because extensive construction has taken place on a number of sites. The many years of research resulted in several hundreds of photographs that show possible archaeological sites. I have utilised in this book only the