THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF THE PROJECT IS TO BUILD A LONG-TERM STRATEGY FOR RESEARCHING THE SETTLEMENT STRUCTURE DURING THE BRONZE AND IRON AGE IN THE MICRO-REGION
This year, Razgrad archaeologists Dilen Dilov and Silvia Anastasova, for the second time, joined the team for a field trip on the archaeological map of the territories of Kubrat and Razgrad municipalities. The scientific leader of the expedition was Assoc. Prof. Hristo Popov PhD, director of NAIM at BAS.
The tour was in the lands of the city of Kubrat and the villages of Kamenovo, Pobit Kamak, Ravno, Topchii, Medovene, Brestovene, Sushevo, Sevar and Savin.
The joint program between NAIM – BAS and RHM – Razgrad for field searches and registration of objects there started before 2021. The goal of the project is to create an information base for the rich cultural-historical and archaeological heritage in the area with the help of field registration methods. And on the basis of the achieved results, to build a long-term strategy for the study of the settlement structure during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the microdistrict, which emerged as one of the most important for that time on the territory not only of modern Bulgaria, but also in South-Eastern Europe .
Already in 2021, the campaign collected extremely rich information and showed the presence of a very dense network of archaeological sites.
The expedition in 2022 again documented many objects proving the intensive habitation of the area during different historical eras: Chalcolithic, Bronze, Iron, Ancient and Medieval. Some of the sites registered last year have now been geophysically surveyed to detect archaeological structures.
The tour showed that the sites are most numerous and the density of habitation is greatest for the Stone-Copper, Late and Iron Age periods. It is assumed that this regularity is related to the increase during different historical periods of the rich flint deposits in the area, which provided an important raw material for the economy not only in the settlement.
The team plans to continue its work in the coming years with new searches, geological surveys, geophysics and archaeological excavations.
In the last decades, some of the most significant finds from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages for the territory of North-Eastern Bulgaria have been found in the region under investigation. Despite these indications, until the beginning of the joint program of NAIM-BAN and RHM-Razgrad, no systematic attempts were made to identify and register the archaeological sites from which these finds originated.
