AP reports from Turan that in a rich agricultural basin near the town of Korca in southeastern Albania, gas pipeline construction work is offering archaeologists a unique insight into 5,000 years of history in a country that was off most experts’ radar during decades of isolationist Communist rule.
The excavations near the village of Turan, which ended Friday after 18 months, have unearthed one of the largest ancient cemeteries in Albania, with about 1,000 layered burials, several of them richly furnished.
Under the bottom layer are traces of a rare Neolithic settlement demarcated by holes in the ground that supported the now-rotted wooden skeletons of small huts.
More than 20 Neolithic sites have been discoevredin Albania, dating roughly from the 7th to the 3rd millennia B.C., which are some of the earliest farming settlements in Europe. But according to Turan lead archaeologist Iris Pojani, the pipeline work provided the opportunity — and the funding — to excavate an unusually large inhabited area from that era.
Above the millennia-old huts, a team of 50 archaeologists excavating an area of 4,000 square meters (43,000 square feet) found three cemeteries from the Iron Age, late Roman times and the Middle Ages. No traces of the settlements these cemeteries served have yet been located, but Pojani said it’s easy to see why people through the ages chose to live there.
Grave goods included rings, bracelets, earrings, amber and glass beads, gold coins, lots of pottery — including local copies of 11th or 10th century B.C. wine jugs popular in neighboring Greece — mediaeval wooden caskets and clothes worked with silver thread, as well as spears, daggers, knives and swords.
Read more at thenationalherald.com
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