Danica Pinterović – the founder of systematic archaeological research alongside the limes in Croatia

(…) to start the archaeological examination on our Limes with the aim of identifying the character of military objects; whether they are fortresses, forts or late antique strongholds, or their accompanying facilities such as baths, temples, fora, canabae etc. Other sites, known only for the finds, should be examined; whether they were towers and watchtowers, or whether they were stations on the Limes road, village farms, i.e. vici or villae, which were used for supplying the army and maintaining the traffic at the border. Those were the words of Danica Pinterović about what should be done at the Croatian part of the Danube limes. With her extraordinary work in that area, she indebted the national archaeological experts, but also the public with interest in archaeology, by leaving the legacy of a significant number of notions that are the basis of numerous research papers today. However, the creative reach of this scientist was not bounded by the remains of Roman Mursa, or even by the part of the Danube limes on the Croatian soil; it was focused on a thorough examination of the whole, aforementioned, background. Taking into account that Danica Pinterović wrote a certain number of review, professional, and original scientific papers on those topics, establishing herself as an inevitable resource for researchers of that territory, the value of her papers does not lie only in the number of published papers on archaeological excavations, but also in creating the historical image about the Croatian Danube region. She conducted the first systematic archaeological excavation, which lasted several years, alongside the limes on the Croatian side directly building on field survey of the area that had been done a decade or two before, while she worked as a curator of the Museum of Slavonia in Osijek. The said excavations in the period of 1970 – 1972 were conducted in Batina and discovered traces of a Roman fort Ad Militare. Underneath, a partially Hallstatt, possibly La Tène, cultural layer was discovered. However, we do not know why she placed a larger number of narrow and long trenches, and not a smaller number of bigger trenches. But, we do know it was a land covered partially by vineyards. Even though in neither of her papers, written after the ending of the third season of Ad Militare fort excavation, she did not specifically mention the size of the military camp, we can deduct from one of her field diaries what she thought since they tried to measure the length of the walls in 1971. However, the only sketch about the research of the fort published to this day implies that the surface was almost three times smaller than it actually is (approximately 0.7 ha, instead of 2 ha). Taking into account that not all the trenches were charted on the sketch (the trenches VI/2, VII/2, VIII/3, IX/3, X/3, XI/3, XII/3, XVI/3 are missing), this article contributes with an original drawing with their positions marked