Fragments of Silver-Gilt Saddle Plates and Horse Bones Buried in a Late Roman Ditch at Göd (Pest County, Hungary) : Contributions to the Funerary Sacrifice Deposits and “Horse Skin” Rituals of the Hun Period

Mráv, Zsolt and Mozgai, Viktória and Bárány, Annamária (2021) Fragments of Silver-Gilt Saddle Plates and Horse Bones Buried in a Late Roman Ditch at Göd (Pest County, Hungary) : Contributions to the Funerary Sacrifice Deposits and “Horse Skin” Rituals of the Hun Period. In: Attila's Europe? : Structural Transformation and Strategies of Success in the European Hun Period. Hungarian National Museum; Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, pp. 449-475.

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Abstract

This paper presents a new Hun period deposit that was discovered in a clear and closed context during the archaeological excavation of the never-completed fortress from the Late Roman period at Göd, Hungary. The find assemblage consists of a horse cranium and horse leg bones as well as small fragments of silver-gilt saddle mounts with traces of pre-depositional destruction. These finds were buried in a Late Roman-period drainage ditch and carefully covered with mostly intact Roman bricks. The topsoil yielded further teeth and leg bones of horses. The fact that the ensemble contains only a horse skull, teeth and leg bones and that some of them come from the upper soil layers together indicates that the ritual originally included a horse skin (with skull and leg bones) exposed at the site for some time. According to the most recent interpretation, this is a typical steppe deposition ritual which can be interpreted as a funerary sacrifice with unique features.

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