TRACES OF PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION FOUND NEAR BULGARIA’S MURSALEVO

Archaeological evidence from the excavations of the 8,000-year-old Early Neolithic city near Mursalevo in Southwest Bulgaria suggest that the prehistoric people who had lived in Bulgarian lands used to build two-storey houses, were very knowledgeable and burying their homes was a common practice.

60 houses of a Neolithic settlement were discovered by Bulgarian archaeologists. The buildings were 7-8 meters tall with streets between them, which according to archeologists suggests strong social organization and very good knowledge in “urban” planning.

The prehistoric city was set on the bank Struma river. The inhabitants came from Anatolia, (Asia Minor). They chose a place which reminded them of their home land. No one had given them a name, but they had left traces of civilization.

Professor Vassil Nikolov, the lead archaeologist of the excavations says that the Early Neolithic homes at Mursalevo were made of wattle and clay, with two-sloped roofs and had wooden construction. The city has perfect urban planning. It has three parallel main streets and several more narrow streets perpendicular to them, he explained.

The red and baked pieces of clay are from the upper floors. They have turned out to be of help for modern-day archaeologists because the clay making up the house walls was “additionally baked”. For the first time they give accurate and detailed information about the construction of the houses.

One of the most interesting discoveries of the Bulgarian archaeologists is the evidence for the deliberate burning down of some of the houses in the prehistoric settlement. They have discovered that the inhabitants burnt down their homes.

Associated Professor Krum Buchvarov said that the fact of walls having been exposed to very high temperatures had enabled the team to “reconstruct” the ancient constructions.

The foundations are very stable, wooden columns supported the two-sloped roofs. Furnaces, flour mills and decorated clay vessels were found in the rooms. Back then people thought that houses had souls. They would bury parts of the house in small burial pits and then set the house on fire.

Professor Vassil Nikolov says it can be assumed that there was a string of problems connected with the corresponding cycle of life and perhaps they wanted to break this cycle, to complete it and start a new cycle of life, and therefore burnt the settlement.

Archaeologists also had found shells, which probably had been strung into a necklace. This was one of the few objects that could say anything about the prestige of its owner. There was nothing else to indicate some hierarchy.

“They were pastoralists and hunters and so were people who had a very rich culture, they were people of the first European civilisation. This civilisation which actually gave life to Europe in the sixth millennium,” prof. Vassil Nikolov said.

This settlement presents the archaeologists with many new mysteries, such as the ritual pits which are four metres deep – why were they so deep and why were they arranged in a line? But it is also giving academics a unique opportunity to study a big prehistoric village.

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