Rsum of the lecture and power-point presentation Pliska and Continental Europe in the later 9th to 10th c.

AD: Invasions, state formation and stronghold building, offered at the 22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Sofia (the pictorial presentation is attached below). The complete article will be published in: Questiones Medii Aevi Novae 17, 2012 under the following title:

Pliska, early medieval Bulgaria and the Hungarian raids at the Balkans: Some archaeological considerations

Joachim Henning (Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main)

In the area of the palace center of Pliska (Inner Town) below the massive stone pavements, which are roughly datable no later than the 10th century, earlier excavations uncovered a destruction layer that delivered among other finds an iron arrowhead with a rhombic-shaped blade and with tang mounting (type I-4, A+B after Jotov 2004). Such special forms of arrowheads are known in considerable quantities from early medieval sites in Bulgaria but also have come to light in even larger numbers in Central Europe. Many such arrowheads have emerged from excavations of Great Moravian ringforts in the Middle Danube region, for example. A joint German-Slovakian research project (University of Frankfurt and Archaeological Institute in Nitra) on new dendrodata from a series of such strongholds have now demonstrated that ringforts with numerous finds of rhombic arrowheads must be dated up to 100 years later than formerly believed. Thus the construction of these strongholds falls into the period of the first appearance of the Magyars in the middle Danube basin between the very late 9th century and the first decades of the 10th century. These new results definitively confirm the opinion of Schulze-Drrlamm who once postulated a close connection between the rhombic arrowheads of this type and the Magyar incursions into Central Europe. This view was hotly debated still a few years ago. Since Great Moravian warriors (and their Frankish counterparts as well) used completely different types of arrowheads, the unprecedented, sudden and numerous appearance of the rhombic forms and their clear connection to the period around 900 AD and to strongholds that were attacked and destroyed around that date turns out to be an impressive testimony for at least one of the reasons that caused the fall of the Great Moravian principality - one of the earliest Slavic state formations and the site of Cyril and Methods first activities. Rhombic arrowheads from the lower Danube potentially can and should be connected also with the Pechnegs, since such items have been often found in their burials of the Eastern European steppe zone. For chronological and stratigraphical reasons, however, the Pliska find cannot be attributed to that people, which crossed the Danube for the first time only at the beginning of the second millennium. And there are more such rhombic arrowheads from Pliska. Interestingly, they originate exclusively from areas

inside the stone fortification (Inner Town). Not a single item of that sort is reported from the huge territory of the Outer Town of Pliska and the German-Bulgarian expedition, which worked intensively in this area between 1997 and 2003, confirmed that picture. From that find situation as well as from our archaeological field observations in Pliska I would develop the hypothesis that the first unexpected and sudden incursion of the Magyars into Bulgaria in 895 AD found only the palace compound of Pliska protected by the stone wall of the Inner Town; the outer earthen rampart was constructed only later. Since Pliska is not mentioned among the fortresses that resisted the attacks of the Magyars in that year, a sack of Pliska cannot be excluded. Probably the huge rectangular earthen rampart of Pliska, like many similar, smaller ones that were built then all over the country (Starmen etc.), offered much better protection against the next waves of the Magyar invasion that followed some decades later (935-965 AD). They thus not only helped to protect Bulgaria from the fate that befell the unfortunate Great Moravia in that turbulent epoch but assured Bulgarias Golden Age in the 10th century, in particular under Simeon I (893-927 AD). The primitive construction method of the huge earthen Pliska rampart is in itself not compelling evidence for an early (e.g. 7th c. Proto-Bulgar) dating, since similar defensive earthworks of huge dimensions occur all over early medieval Europe, for example, Offas dyke in England or the Danevirke in the Jutland Peninsula (the latter with earthwork construction activities that continued until the late 10th c. AD).