You could almost say that Prague keeps getting older. Not long ago, archaeologists found evidence of the oldest ploughed field here, tended five and a half thousand years ago. Now the imprints of structures have been found in the same location, dating back even further, some 7,500 years.
The dates of the earliest settlements in the area of Prague are continuously being pushed back – just about anytime someone puts a shovel to the northern district of Bubeneč. The spot in the bend of the Vltava river apparently offered an unparalleled living space, a river terrace with fresh water in plenty, defence on three sides and fertile land. The site makes headlines again and again as the ground yields up fascinating finds from the mysterious peoples who inhabited Central Europe before the Europeans. Read more.
Mesolithic artefacts from a lost settlement are coming to light after 6 millennia after currents scoured sand from the seabed just of the coast of Denmark in Horsens Fjord.
Science Nordic reports on a chance return to a stretch of coast where Peter Alstrup, now an archaeology PhD student at Aarhus Universit, had spent his childhood.
Alstrup dived on the site (which had been known since the 70s) and noticed how the overlying sediments had been lost and there lying on the seabed he discovered beautifully carved pieces of wood.
He reported this immediately to the local museum, where they soon realised that a unique and perfectly preserved Mesolithic site was now exposed. Archaeologists were soon assembled for urgent excavations. Read more.
Using a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometer, surveys have revealed the settlement in Sandefjord in Gokstadhaugen, eastern Norway, has 15 buildings, an 80-metre long street and a port.
Archaeologists from Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History and the Norwegian Institute for Cultural heritage Research (NIKU) were among those that made the discovery, in cooperation with Vestfold County.
Work in Gokstadhaugen began in 2011 with drilling there, as well as experts making geophysical surveys from the sea a northwards in what is called Gokstad Valley (Gokstaddalen).
NIKU’s Knut Paashe told Aftenposten, “There is no doubt that we have encountered a market town-like structure from the Viking age with houses and streets.” Read more.
Work on an 8,000-year-old Stone Age settlement under the surface of the Solent in Hampshire is throwing up evidence of clear parallels of the modern “high street”, archaeologists say.
After 30 years of excavating the area around Bouldnor Cliff, a boatyard was uncovered last summer, which teams have been working on ever since.
Since The Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology spotted a swamped prehistoric forest in the 1980s, the Stone Age village was found by chance at the end of the last century.
Divers taking part in a routine survey spotted a lobster cleaning out its burrow on the seabed and to their surprise the animal was throwing out dozens of pieces of worked flint - which turned out to be the first sign of the village.
The discoveries, after analysing a mile-long stretch of seabed, are of “international importance” the trust says, because it sheds new light on how people lived in the Mesolithic period. Read more.
Between the Missouri National Guard’s Ike Skelton Training Center and Algoa Correctional Center, out in a field on Guard property and about a meter beneath the surface of the earth lie the possible remnants of a Native American settlement.
The site is believed to have been occupied off-and-on as early as about 800 A.D. until about 1200 A.D. according to Regina Meyer, Cultural Resource Manager for the Guard. Meyer has a background in archaeology and has been doing unfunded work there on a volunteer basis.
She says the village was what archaeologists call a “multi-component site: It was used and abandoned, used and abandoned and over the years…I’m talking many years…people would pick up the habitation again. The layers would deposit on top of each other, and you’d have some flooding because it is right on the (Missouri) River in the bottomland.” Read more.
A bulldozer has destroyed a prehistoric settlement and a medieval church near the town of Momchilgrad in southern Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian National Television, BNT, reports that the case is under police investigation with the most likely culprit being a construction company building the new road to Greece through the Makaza mountain pass. A special commission from the Culture Ministry is checking the premises.
8 000 years ago, at the same location, there had been a prehistoric settlementwith unique for Europe architecture – it was a craftsman center for making various tools.
“We still don’t know what happened, but the bulldozer had flattened the entire settlement mount and the west wall of the church,” archeologist Milen Kamarev is quoted saying. Read more.
Archaeologists working on a Scottish island previously thought to be home only to sea-birds and feral sheep, have found the remains of a permanent settlement which could date back to prehistoric times.
Less than a square kilometre in size, the remote St Kildan island of Boreray is situated over 65km west of the Outer Hebrides, in the Atlantic Ocean. St Kilda is one of only 27 locations in the world to have been awarded dual World Heritage Status by UNESCO in recognition of both its natural and cultural heritage.
Cared for by the National Trust for Scotland, it is best known for its giant cliffs and sea stacks – home to tens of thousands of sea-birds, including over 45,000 gannets – and a few hundred feral sheep. Read more.
The debate continues in Iceland on new evidence found in archeological research that there may have been people in Iceland before the “official” date of 874. In Hafnir remains of dwellings have been found, that may built earlier than that date.
This is not the first research of this type. Physicist Páll Theodórsson has written about a number of findings where C14 research has indicated burned wood that may be from the seventh century, hence placing men in Iceland 200 years before the “first” settler.
Professor Gunnar Karlsson, a historian, writes an article about these theories in the latest volume of Skírnir, a journal of literature, culture and history. Karlsson first says that one must realize that even if the results are correct, evidence of individuals coming to the country do not mean that it was settled earlier than indicated. Read more.
