SETTLEMENT FORMS IN THE TERRITORY OF MEDIEVAL BÁCS AND BODROG COUNTY
SETTLEMENT FORMS IN THE TERRITORY OF MEDIEVAL BÁCS AND BODROG COUNTY

Summary/Abstract: This study presents the settlement forms of the medieval Bács and Bodrog Counties. According to historians, the ‘street/row settlement’ (Hungarian szalagtelekes falu) was the most common form of settlement in the Kingdom of Hungary during the Middle Ages, however, it must be noted that it is just an overgeneralized assumption based on the examination of the existing settlements in the Western, Northern, and Eastern areas of the Carpathian Basin which were less or not at all exposed to the destructions of the Turkish Era during the 16-17th centuries. The Great Plain areas, however, were more devastated by the 16th Ottoman campaigns, therefore, only a few fragmentary data are available from the archaeological excavations which may support the opinion of historians. The complex research of Bács and Bodrog Counties based on GIS enabled the qualitative and quantitative increase of the database about the settlement structure in the given region. Studying the area of the deserted medieval settlements en masse and the analysis of their structure and key features was carried out with the help of the free Google Earth application.By examining the satellite images visually, it was possible to collect nearly 1,000 images from about 115 deserted medieval settlements.The results prove that in the southern, densely populated counties of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, the majority of the settlements belonged to the ones with strip plots (English toft and croft, Hungarian szalagtelek), and within that, the most common types were mainly the row settlements with a spindle structure. As the findings of this paper have already shown, the cost-effective method of Google Earth is likely to yield significant results in future research of the areas like the Southern Great Plain that were heavily destroyed by the Turkish occupation (Temes, Arad, Békés, Csongrád, Torontál, Krassó and Szörény Counties).

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