Along the Rivers and into the Plain: Early Crop Diversity in the Central and Western Balkans and Its Relationship with Environmental and Cultural Variables

Agriculture is a complex and dynamic socio-ecological system shaped by environmental, economic, and social factors. The crop resource pool is its key component and one that best reflects environmental limitations and socio-economic concerns of the farmers. This pertains in particular to small-scale subsistence production, as was practised by Neolithic farmers. We investigated if and how the environment and cultural complexes shaped the spectrum and diversity of crops cultivated by Neolithic farmers in the central-western Balkans and on the Hungarian Plain. We did so by exploring patterns in crop diversity between biogeographical regions and cultural complexes using multivariate statistical analyses. We also examined the spectrum of wild-gathered plant resources in the same way. We found that the number of species in Neolithic plant assemblages is correlated with sampling intensity (the number and volume of samples), but that this applies to all archaeological cultures. Late Neolithic communities of the central and western Balkans exploited a large pool of plant resources, whose spectrum was somewhat different between archaeological cultures. By comparison, the earliest Neolithic tradition in the region, the Starčevo-Körös-Criş phenomenon, seems to have used a comparatively narrower range of crops and wild plants, as did the Linearbandkeramik culture on the Hungarian Plain.

The Brigade of the Great Hungarian Plain The crimes of the most notorious military detachment during the wave of paramilitary violence called the Hungarian White Terror in 1919–1921, and the further life of a radical right-wing paramilitary commander

In 1919–1920s, paramilitary violence was an almost natural phenomenon in Hungary, like in many other countries of Central Europe. After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the new right-wing government, establishing its power with the help of the Entente powers, could difficulty rule the quasi anarchistic conditions. In 1919–1921, Hungary was terrorized by irregular military formations that were formally part of the National Army, and radical right-wing soldiers committed serious crimes frequently by anti-Semitic motivations. One of the most notorious military detachment was organised by young first lieutenant of the Air Force Iván Héjjas, who, with the help of his armed militiamen, abusing the anarchistic conditions due to civil war, build up his own quasi private state in the town of Kecskemét and in its neighbourhood, the Great Hungarian Plain. His rule lasted for two years, his subordinates murdered and/or robbed hundreds of people, mainly of Jewish origin, but later they were given amnesty. Héjjas later became an influential radical right-wing politician of the Hungarian political scene in the period between the two world wars. The present research article makes an attempt to reconstruct the wave of paramilitary violence of Iván Héjjas’s detachment, and also examines of the further life of a used-to-be radical right-wing paramilitary commander and politician who gradually became member of the Hungarian political elite, despite his notorious past.

Methodological and interpretational problems in the dating of 6–7th centuries AD on the Great Hungarian Plain•

A Makó-Mikócsa-halom kora avar kori temető keltezéséről írt tanulmányukban Gulyás et al. 2018 alapvetően tévesen alkalmazzák a radiokarbon dátumok Bayes-féle modellezését. Vitacikkünkben a módszertani tévedések mellett az általuk használt terminológiai hibákat is tárgyaljuk.

The Economic and Ecological Contexts of Urbanization in the Great Hungarian Plain during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

There is abundant research on the history of urbanization in the Carpathian Basin with a special focus on the history of urbanization in the Great Hungarian Plain. Over the past years, there have been investigations concerning climate and historical ecology issues, as well as economic and social history, the results of which enable us to obtain an overview of the complex processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.It has been confirmed that prior to the Industrial Age (1850), climate change had made a profound impact on the conversion of the settlement network in the terrain and on the expansion of livestock farming. The climate in the seventeenth century seems to have been cooler and more humid, thus in the Great Hungarian Plain there were large areas covered with water. This significantly restricted the possibilities of crop cultivation as well as population growth. The warming-up period in the eighteenth century resulted in the shrinking of areas covered in water, the transition to flood plain farming and the extension of plough land crop cultivation, ultimately leading to population growth. There is evidence that by the turn of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, grain trade in the Carpathian Basin had been integrated into the Central European continental crop trading system, however, livestock farming was unique to the Great Hungarian Plain. From the mid-nineteenth century, due to the construction of the railway system in the Great Hungarian Plain, which revolutionized cargo transport, plus due to river regulations and drainage works, the economic structure of the area saw profound changes. In the meanwhile, the population and labor force supply were also increasing at a rapid rate. Marshlands and meadows were replaced by arable land and an increasingly growing crop production, which provided the foundations for the grain trade. Thus, new market centers emerged in the Great Hungarian Plain. Between 1828 and 1925, the number of market centers went up by 293, which represents an elevenfold rise. The growing density of the market center system significantly defined not only various aspects of urbanization, but also the general modernization of the Great Hungarian Plain.The purpose of my research is to analyze how changes in the climate influenced the settlement network, and the social and economic profile of the Great Hungarian Plain in the period concerned. Why was the favorable picture of a dynamically improving and modernizing Great Hungarian Plain at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries conceptualized by the public as an underdeveloped area characterized by a series of economic and social tensions? How do all these factors contribute to the revision of the emerging historiographic picture of the economic and social consequences of the Trianon Peace Treaty?

Present tendencies in landscape planning and recognition of the opinion of local citizens on the example of the Tiszazug

A survey based on online and face-to face interviews with 104 persons who live in the Tiszazug in the central part of the Great Hungarian Plain. According to the answers the character of the landscape here would change dramatically by disappearance of oxbow lakes, floodplain forests and vineries. The decreasing population and aging of the citizens result in decreasing intensity of landuse, increasing number of abandoned buildings and the attractiveness of the landscape is spoiled by illegal waste disposals and weedy water banks.

Soil salinity mapping using Landsat 8 OLI data and regression modeling in the Great Hungarian Plain

Salt's deposition in the subsoil is known as salinization. It is caused by natural processes such as mineral weathering or human-made activities such as irrigation with saline water. This environmental issue has grown more critical and is frequently occurring in the Hungarian Great Plain, adversely influencing agricultural productivity. This study aims to predict soil salinity in the Great Hungarian Plain, located in the east of Hungary, using Landsat 8 OLI data combined with four state-of-the-art regression models, i.e., Multiple Linear Regression, Partial Least Squares Regression, Ridge Regression, and Feedforward Artificial Neural Network. For this purpose, seventy-six soil samples were collected during a field survey conducted by the Research Institute for Soil Sciences and Agricultural Chemistry between the 15 of September and the 15 of October, 2016. We used the min–max accuracy, the root-mean-square error (RMSE), and the mean squared error (MSE) to evaluate and compare the four models' performance. The results showed that the ridge regression model performed the best in terms of prediction (MSEtraining = 0.006, MSEtest = 0.0007, RMSE = 0.081), with a min–max accuracy equal to 0.75. Hence, the application of regression modeling on spectral indices, principal component analysis, and land surface temperature derived from multispectral data is an efficient method for soil salinity assessment at local scales. The resulting map can provide an overview of salinity levels and evaluate the efficiency of land management strategies in irrigated areas. An increase in sampling density will be recommended to validate this approach on the regional scale.

A (Needle) Case in Point: Transformations in the Carpathian Basin During the Early Middle Ages (Late Avar Period, 8th–9th century ad)

In the late Avar period (eighth to ninth century ad), vast quantities of utilitarian artefacts were produced in series in the Carpathian Basin, a phenomenon not seen since the end of the Roman period. The distribution of these articles reflects not only the region's settlement pattern, but also how these artefacts were disseminated. The communication network in the Carpathian Basin underwent a significant transformation between the early and late Avar period: its major nodes, equated with population centres but not necessarily with elite centres, contributed to moulding a social and cultural milieu that included specialized craftsmen. An early single hub in southern Transdanubia was replaced by multiple centres by the late Avar period. Around ad 700, a bipolar settlement pattern emerges in the southern part of the Carpathian Basin. It seems that the Great Hungarian Plain began to play an equal, if not dominant, role in the communication network of the Carpathian Basin at this time.