Szeleta Cave

Szeleta Cave is one of the sites of the first cave excavations carried out in Hungary. It provided a reliable and fundamental archaeological find complex, and is one of the four caves located in Hungary. The other three are the Diósgyőrtapolcai Cave, the Istállós-kői Cave and the Pes-kő Cave. It is the namesake of the Szeleta culture. It was inhabited for more than 100 000 years from the beginning of the last interglacial. It is one of Hungary’s specially protected caves.

Description

The cave entrance is in Bükki National Park, 98 metres above the Szinva valley, on the edge of Lillafüred, on the southern side of the Szeleta summit, at an altitude of 347 m above sea level. The entrance is located opposite the Hámor cemetery.

The cave formed in Triassic rock. Descending the slope after the entrance, a depression is found in the entrance hall, which remains at the site of the former excavation that reached a depth of 12 m. On the side wall, a black line visible several metres high indicates the original level of the fill before the excavation began. From the entrance hall, the shorter branch can be reached to the left and the longer cave branch straight ahead. The inactive spring cave is 115 m long, 3.5 m deep, 13 m high, with a vertical extent of 16.5 m and a horizontal extent of 63 m.

In the literature the cave also appears under the names Szeleta barlang (Kadić, 1907), Szeletabarlang (Kadić, 1907), Szeleta Cave (Ringer, 1989) and Szeletaoldali barlang.

Archaeology

In the 1907 volume of Földtani Közlöny, in a study written by Ottokár Kadić, it is mentioned that Ottokár Kadić explored the limestone area belonging to the Szinva valley system and visited Szeleta Cave at the border of Lower Hámor. Of the 17 caves examined, 6 caves, such as Szeleta Cave, were found most suitable for palaeontological and archaeological research. From November 14 to November 20 he carried out trial excavations in the cave and discovered traces of Upper Pleistocene prehistoric humans.

In the entrance hall of the cave a 12×2 metre and 6.5 metre deep research trench cut into the Pleistocene layers revealed, alongside numerous cave bear bones, traces of a hearth. The break marks and wear marks on the bones were attributed by Ottokár Kadić to human activity, but he abandoned this theory after consulting with specialists of the Imperial Court Museum during his spring 1907 study trip to Vienna. However, the presented charcoal traces made the presence of early humans at Szeleta clear.

At the request of Ottokár Kadić, the Hungarian Royal Institute of Geology ordered the continuation of the excavation with a cost of 1000 crowns. The work continued in the cave from 15 May 1907 to 30 June. He considered it extremely important to record the stratigraphic context of the finds in order to prove their age, and therefore proceeded very carefully during the excavation. The area to be excavated in the entrance hall was divided into 2×2 metre squares, and the position of each find was carefully recorded layer by layer. In the Holocene layers pottery sherds and polished stone tools were found. The sought Paleolithic stone tools came from the Pleistocene layers, a total of 40 pieces.

The discovered finds justified the continuation of the excavation, which was carried out from 18 October to 3 December. In addition to the numerous stone tools, the most important discovery was a Pleistocene cultural layer found in the rear part of the main passage.

Since there was no material in Hungary with which a comparison could be made, in February 1908 Kadić Ottokár traveled to Vienna with the collected material, but there he encountered an unpleasant surprise. Hugo Obermaier doubted the authenticity of the particularly finely worked, bay leaf‑shaped peaks, because the stone tools lacked the patina found on artifacts that had emerged from elsewhere, appearing as if they had been made recently. However, regarding the majority of the finds, he unequivocally acknowledged that they were genuine.

The excavations were continued until the spring of 1909 at the expense of the geological institute, which until then had been 4000 crowns, and at that point the institute considered the research completed. However, during the previous work mainly the upper layers had been examined, and therefore the leadership of the Miskolc Museum won the financial support for the excavation. Because of the geological institute’s official duties he could not stay at the site continuously and therefore in the spring of 1909 he invited Hillebrand Jenő as a collaborator, who accepted this and even participated in the excavations that same year. During the excavation they reached the bottom of the cave at a depth of 12.5 metres, thus the complete stratigraphic series of the cave sediment was now available to them.

Because of the continuously developing bábony and szeleta type assemblage from 130 000 years to 20 000 years, as well as the presence of other Paleolithic cultures, it is one of the most significant prehistoric monuments of Europe.

Research History

The 1926 edition of Esztergom Évlap already mentioned that systematic Hungarian cave research only looked back 20 years. The first considered cave research was carried out by Kadić Ottokár at the initiative of Herman Ottó in the Szeleta Cave near Miskolc. In the Jankovich Cave it was possible to demonstrate a new phase in the development of the Hungarian Solutrean culture, bridging the classic Solutrean forms found in the uppermost layer of the Szeleta Cave proto‑Solutrean and those from the Szeleta Cave itself. In the 1931 issue of Turisták Lapja, in the study titled “A lillafüredi barlangok idegenforgalmi jelentőségéről,” it was written that the caves of the Bükk Mountains became famous mainly from a scientific point of view. However, there are also caves in the Bükk Mountains that are important from tourism and economic perspectives. These are: the Szeleta Cave, the Herman Ottó Cave, the Kecske‑lyuk, the Büdös‑pest, the Anna Cave and the Saint Stephen Cave.