VČASNOSTREDOVEKÁ ZÁSOBNÁ JAMA Z MOSTNEJ ULICE V NITRE

During the 2006 rescue archaeological exploration in the Nitra´s Mostná Street, an Early Medieval settlement object no. 14 was excavated – originally a supply ditch, later on a waste disposal ditch, hollowed out into a cultural layer from the Bronze Age and to the loess subsoil. The backfill contained various archaeological materials – a considerable quantity of partly smoked and burnt stones originally making up perhaps a part of a dwelling´s stone oven, animal bones, fragment of the aurochs horn, bronze earring with a couple mouldings, a bronze coiled wire, one Early Medieval ceramic container and ceramic shards from Bronze Age, La Téne Age, and Early Middle Ages. The paper presents results of detailed analyses of the ceramics which proved to be the most suitable in determining the time of the object´s disappearance. The study of fragmentariness indicated that the object contains approx. one tenth of pots specimens, which can be associated with the time of the object’s destruction with higher probability than the small shards. An earring used within a wide range of time is not a contribution to the object´s dating. According to the analysis of ornaments on the ceramics and their comparison with the finds from burial sites and settlements, they fall into the time frame of the turn from the Great Moravian to the post Great Moravian period, probably the first half of the 10th century. The exploration area within the settlement structure of Nitra was situated at the northern edge of an unfortified area, from which a part of medieval town was formed later on, in written sources labelled as “civitas”.