Archaeology - ROMANIA Monthly Update - January 2006

Volunteer Archaeological Update - January 2006

The ones who don't know a lot about archaeology usually had the idea that his science is all about digging in a historical site. This is not true at all. If in the summer there is a lot of digging to be done in the winter the time is good for some other things to do.

In the winter and a part of the autumn and spring there are done preparings for the next diggings there will be done. The materials from the last diggings have to be classified and the archeologists have to finish the folders of the archaeology site.

The main work for January was the gathering of information for the program whit the dacian falx. It is a part of what the archeologist is calling experimental archaeology. It employs a number of different methods, techniques, analyses, and approaches in order to generate ancient structures or artifacts.

We succeeded to find a blacksmith, after 2 mouth of searching, where we can do the falx around May 2006. He lives in the Apuseni Mountains and he has 78 years old. We looked especially for an old one who has a lot of experiences in working with the iron. He will probably give us advice and stay with us when we'll do the weapon because he is not feeble.

The gathering of information continued as we started to analyze information from two books about Dacian technology. Another source is the Trajan Column, which is the chronicle, form images, of the wars between the Dacians and the Romans. The third one is the ancient antique writings.

The main problem is the lack of information about the weapon. The Dacian civilization is a big unknown because a lot of the information about them have been lost in the Ancient and Medieval Times.

It was also discussed the structure of the DVD with information about the Dacian weapon. It will include historical information about the Dacian weapon: the way to use the weapon, units who were using it, images of it from the Trajan Column and museums, where it was discovered by the archeologists and information about the technique used for make it. There will be text, images, drawings, animations and movies. The movie will be about the making of the Dacian weapon in the mountains. Another activity was the working with the pottery from The Cultural Association Hieronymus.

The volunteers needed to scan the pottery, to label it, to draw it and after that to try to reconstruct it. The pottery comes from an archaeology site from Brasov from 2004.

The Cultural Association Sarmizegetusa started working on a new web site and we had to do some translation from them. One of the text was with information about the association: why it exist, from when, what are the objectives, what are their activities. The second one was about the dacian music and we had a little bit of a problem with it because it had a lot o specialty terms that we need to use and also a lot of names of ancient goods, authors and tribes.

It is true that in the winter archaeology in Romania means work in the office. But except this we did some visits to the museums from Brasov and we went to Sighisoara. It is the only medieval fortress from southeastern Europe inhabited until present. It is also one of the places in which the famous Vlad Tepes, the impeller, lived for a short period of his life. Unfortunately he is well known more because of the Bram Stoker's character.

George Andrei CIOTLAUSI
Archaeology Assistant for Project Abroad Romania

Projects Abroad Archaeology Centre Romania
February 05th 2006

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