ABSTRACT
Trial excavations at Suchohrad, on the northwestern edge of the Carpathian Basin have recently brought to light an open-air clay oven. The associated finds consist of animal bones and remains of handmade pottery, out of which an entire pot was reconstructed. Those finds were published as “early Slavic” under the assumption that the handmade pottery was typically Slavic. Irrespective of the date of the earliest assemblages (rightly or wrongly) attributed to the Slavs, which have been discovered in the northern parts of Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, the Slavs must have crossed the mountains before reaching the southernmost region of the Carpathian Basin. Following Kazimierz Godlowski, some insist on the fact that Prague-type culture appears in the territories that had been evacuated by the late antique population; however, this can only apply to peripheral areas of the Carpathian Basin, such as Transcarpathian Ukraine and eastern Slovakia, or northwestern Romania.
