Balint Csanad

* Košice, September 24, 1943 – / archaeologist, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2010) ; ; His father, Bálint Alajos, was also an archaeologist: he was a museologist in Košice from 1939 to 1945. He graduated in Budapest in 1961 and was then admitted to the archaeology-history department of the Faculty of Humanities of ELTE, where he obtained his archaeologist and secondary school teacher diploma in 1966. His teachers included Gyula László, István Bóna and Károly Czeglédy. After obtaining his diploma, he was a scholarship holder at the Higher Study Center of Medieval Civilization in Poitiers. In 1967, he was appointed assistant museologist at the Móra Ferenc Museum in Szeged, and then completed his postgraduate studies at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest between 1971 and 1974. In 1974, he became a scientific associate, later a senior associate, and then a group leader at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1994, he was the director of the institute. His main research area is the archaeology of the early medieval steppe peoples, including the peoples of the Eurasian steppes. In addition, he also deals with the early medieval archaeology of the Carpathian Basin (primarily the origin of the Nagyszentmiklós treasure). He examines the relationship of the material culture of the steppe peoples to the great Eastern (Mongolia, China, India) and contemporary European civilizations. He has processed the archaeology of the early medieval steppe peoples and the finds from southern Hungary during the period of the Hungarian Conquest in monographs. He was the first to analyze the Late Avar settlement ceramics and managed to process the early medieval archaeological and numismatic finds of the Transcaucasus (Transcaucasia) from the perspective of the Eurasian steppes of the 6th–7th centuries. His most significant scientific achievement is his role in the systematization and processing of the finds of the Nagyszentmiklós treasure (twenty-three early medieval gold vessels found near Nagyszentmiklós in present-day Romania). Here he deals with the origin of the treasure, the analogies related to it, and other archaeological issues. As director, he modernized the thematics of the institute and ensured the financial conditions for research, as well as introducing the application of interdisciplinary research methods. The genetic method of answering historical questions has attracted international interest. He is the author or co-author of more than one hundred and seventy scientific and popular science publications. In 2001, he became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 2010, a full member. ; ; His main works: ; Medieval archaeology of Eastern Europe and the Carpathian Basin, archaeology of the time of the conquest, Hungarian prehistory and the time of the conquest ; History of money (In: Introduction to the sources of research on Hungarian prehistory), 1976, ; The Archaeology of the Steppe. Peoples between the Volga and the Danube in the 6th–10th century, 1989, ; The Early Avars, East and Byzantium, 1994, ; The archaeology of the early medieval Eastern European steppe and the 9th–10th century Hungarians, 1996, ; Analogies on the Nagyszentmiklós treasure “inside” and “outside” (academic chair holder), 2002.