Archaeology - ROMANIA Monthly Update - May 2006

Volunteer Archaeological Update - May 2006

Capalna is one of the antique fortifications that were protecting the dacian capital, Sarmizegetusa. It was researched in 50's but was not opened to tourists. When The Sarmizegetusa Group started the ecology program, because we are their partners we decided to help open it up to tourists. We cleaned it up and made a path and camping facilities. It seemed a small program but later on, the Alba Iulia museum, Alba Local Council, the Salvamont formation (the equivalent of mountain rescue) and the City Hall of Capalna decided to join in. So all of this becomes in the end a first full restoration program of a dacian fortification, the first one from Alba County.

Capalnatura was the first project in which Projects Abroad archaeology volunteers participated and who included not only based on archaeology but also on ecology and mountaineering. Friday night we slept in the guest room of Alba Iulia museum, together with a member of Sarmizegetusa Group. Saturday morning we left for the mountains in the cars of Salvamont together with Sarmizegetusa group and archeologists from the local museum.

At the bottom of the mountain we left the cars and started to climb on the path to look for rubbish on the mountain, but.... after making some phone calls we heard that the mayor of Capalna knowing about our plan, came with some students 3 days before and cleaned up all the garbage. His explanation was that he was ashamed that he could not leave people from outside the village to do that. Eventually we managed to leave the mountain with only 3 bags of garbage. We decided that in the future we would just announce our presence and the cleaning would be done without our help.

The path was marked for tourists and we established where will be the camping area for the visitors. Also we cleaned the fortification area of some small trees and we marked the one that will be cut down to stop it growing into the remains of the buildings. A list was done also of the things that will be done in the future: putting garbage bins, panels in Romanian and English in the fortification, benches outside of the fortification, marking of the collapsed rocks which will be put back into the wall in the future.

After Capalnatura we went back to Alba Iulia and we help the archeologist with a Neolithical digging in a part of the city called Lumea Noua (The New World). The culture is also called this because it was the place where it was first found. There are a lot of constructions in the area and the digging was called a salvation dig, a digging an area prior to some development. We were digging in a private area where a person intended to build a house. The whole area of the archaeology site is quite huge, around 45 hectare of land.

In the actual digging we found a house buried in the ground, a deposit hole for food in the ground and a fireplace. Another interesting discovery was a burned big spot. It is too big to be a fireplace, it turned out to be the first single direct discovery of a pottery oven for the culture. Although indirect discovery suggests that they were existed. Outside of this there was a lot of pottery discovered, especially the one representative of this culture, called after the technique called black-pot. The clay was of a very good quality and the technique of burning made the pots to have 2 colors: black, red and the transition color between. The black color was obtained when the pots were burned in the lack of oxygen and it is called "reduction burning". The red one appeared in the presence of the oxygen in the oven and it is called "oxidant burning".

At the beginning of the July we will make the falx, which we couldn't do in May because the blacksmith got sick and we needed to find another one. We could also do some diggings in Alba Iulia. Unfortunately the Hungarian count was not present in May at his castle from Valea Crisului so there was no digging to be done there. The main digging will be done in the North-West of Transylvania at a medieval fortification form Simleul Silvaniei until the middle of July.

George Andrei CIOTLAUSI
Archaeology Assistant for Project Abroad Romania

Projects Abroad Archaeology Centre Romania
1st June 2006

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