Bulgarian dig finds 8000-year-old ‘double-storey’ houses
Bulgarian archaeologists say that they have found 60 houses from a Neolithic settlement, estimated to date back 8000 years, that were seven to eight metres high and that had streets between them.
The find was made near the village of Mursalevo, about 67km from Bulgarian capital Sofia, in the Kyustendil region in south-western Bulgaria by archaeologists working along the route of the Struma motorway being built to link Sofia to the Greek border.
According to archaeologists, the people who developed the settlement had a high level of culture, considering that it would have required strong social organisation to pre-plan the settlement.
Those who lived here are believed to have come from Anatolia (Asia Minor).
The archaeologist in charge of the dig, Professor Vassil Nikolov, said that they had built two-storey houses, with wooden frames and clay. The dig had found three parallel, wide streets.
A report by Bulgarian National Television said that at the site, evidence had been found of a “strange prehistoric custom”, that people apparently had set strong fires inside their houses, which in turn had roasted and preserved the walls, enabling the modern-day find – and that the people who lived their had “buried” their houses symbolically.
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.
Inside the remainders of rooms at the site, researchers found furnaces, stones for grinding flour and painted clay vessels.
Researchers said that people at the site had believed that their houses had souls, and therefore they had “buried them symbolically” – burying various pieces of the house in small burial pits.
http://sofiaglobe.com/2015/05/19/archaeology-bulgarian-dig-finds-8000-year-old-double-storey-houses/
= new reply since forum marked as read
