Telish-Lîga, North Bulgaria . The Late Copper Age Site

Initial investigations of the Lîga site were undertaken in the year 2000. The primary aim was to establish the immediate borders of the settlement and to delineate the complexity of the cultural deposits, as well as to determine the actual level of preservation.

In the course of research, mainly in 2000 and 2001, it became clear that the site is a complex one, with continuous but changing meaning in the cultural landscape. The site was first occupied for habitation around the middle of the 5 th millennium BC: a well-organized settlement, Lîga 1, with neat street pavements, fine ceramic vessels with shiny black surfaces, skilfully made flint and bone implements. Why the settlement was abandoned is not known, but the cultural deposits slowly got covered by dissolving unburned wattle-and-daub walls.

High precision of registration would not have been possible without Total Station, here operated by Søren Albek, arising some suspicion at the neighbouring military unit.

The next stage of occupation is better comprehended; indeed, the research was mainly focused on the understanding of this, the Lîga 2 settlement. Lîga 1 is in a slightly skewed position in relation to Lîga 2, which also occupied the edges of the plateau. Thus, during the excavations only a minor part of the lower Lîga 1 settlement was acknowledged and investigated.

What was evident, however, is that, when people came to re-settle the site, they must have seen some partly standing walls from the previous occupation. They did level the terrain but maintained the exact orientation of the houses and the grid of the streets and areas in between the houses. Three houses were totally investigated. Their good state of conservation is due to a fire, that one late summer-day in the 5 th millennium BC spread from the heart of the settlement and surprised everybody. It was not a ritual act, and it was probably not an accident either. At any rate, the fire terminated a long and active occupation but also caught that particular day and preserved it through times. Two of the houses were lying in the central part of the settlement. Remains of walls, intact vessels, and ovens were uncovered in some places just 15-20 cm below the surface. Apparently, everything that was in the house was left behind. This enabled a complete reconstruction of the internal architecture and lay-out of the houses, even allowing the conclusion that plates hanging on the wall had also been popular at the end of Eneolithic.

This is not a staged situation. The spoon was indeed lying inside the vessel at the moment of discovery.

The third fully excavated house, laying at the edge of the settlement, was probably partly evacuated. It had indeed been a special house - smaller than the others, but with a totally different set of finds. Almost all anthropomorphic figurines, as well as all metal finds were discovered in that house. One copper awl was brought to the National Museum of Copenhagen and checked by Birthe Gottlieb with spectrometric microscope to determine if it might be bronze. Actually, the results showed that copper from two different sources was used to produce the awl. The third house also contained special types of ceramic vessels, but lacked "typical" kitchen-like installations with dug-in grain-pithoi, enclosed areas for grinding, grinding stones, etc., which were discovered in the other houses.

A so-called sitting goddess can be used as a "trade mark" for Telish region, since it had produced the greatest amount of these remarkable anthropomorphic statues.

Generally, the settlement shows great uniformity in the way it is structured. Nothing was accidental. All three fully excavated houses were orientated the same way, S-N. Except for a house at the edge of the plateau, the entrance was from the southern end. The ovens were installed at the northern side, and dug-in pithoi on the eastern side of the oven. The dimensions of the houses were also similar. Obviously, such internal and external arrangements of the space indicate that people have seen themselves as related, with individuality dispersed within the group. But individuality was not totally suppressed or neglected. It was displayed through the artefacts, reflecting particular skills and even distant relations. In fact, perhaps the greatest achievement of the project is the demonstration - through a strictly context-orientated research strategy - of the co-existence of artefact types, which previously were thought to belong to, even define separate temporal phases. As a result, the standard typological charts of this important European region in the Copper Age need serious re-adjustments.

Endless bands of ceramics had to be sorted each day. This task was also the most time consuming during the post-excavation processing phase. Maya Dimitrova from the museum of Lovech had been the most patient and dedicated investigator of the ceramics.

Western and eastern slopes of the site also underwent a trench investigation. Two trenches 0.5 m broad were dug from the top of the site till the foot of the plateau. As expected, some disposed material, mainly ceramic shards and animal bones were discovered at the foot. A surprising discovery was that at the time of second occupation (Lîga 2) the slopes were made steeper at the top by removing soil and even forming a shallow trench.

In terms of culture, the material from the site has affiliation with the so-called Krivodol-Salkuca-Bubanj Hum culture in southern Romania , Northern Bulgaria and Eastern Serbia .

By-conical cups are characteristic for the Copper Age .

After the fire the Lîga site was abandoned for some 400 years. About 4000 BC the site was used as a burial site (Lîga 3). Seven burials were uncovered in the course of excavation. One was even carried in its entirety to Sofia and exhibited at the National Museum .

Petar Zidarov is checking the stability of the metal frame. The skeletal remains will have to be transported for 160 km.

It actually appears that the burial site of Lîga 3 is the first one discovered within the Krivodol-Salkuca-Bubanj Hum complex. Till now, only three separate skeletal finds from as many localities are known. The first grave at Lîga, Grave 1, was excavated already in 2000. It was a burial of a child 6-7 years old, exceptional due to its artificial deformation of the skull (as reported by Prof. Y.Yordanov, Bulgarian Academy of Science). In the chest area several spiral copper beads were discovered. Around the pelvis bones was one perforated shell. Besides that, there were also two flint blades and one zoomorphic bone idol. The child was laid in hocker, with the head orientated towards south.

Zoomorphic bone idol discovered in Grave 1.

Another six burials were discovered in 2001. All of these had a remarkably uniform orientation towards north with a small deviation of five degrees. In that sense, they were in opposition to Grave 1. It was even more striking to discover that the new burials apparently were placed in a chest, organized in rows, and keeping a mutual distance of 2.3 m. Two of the marginal graves were marked with posts. The remaining burials did not have any evident surface markings. The graves were discovered because their pits were intersecting the external wall of one of the houses under investigation.

A double burial of a man and a child. The man was holding the child in his right hand.

Around 3000 BC the Lîga site was again in use, with an Early Bronze Age settlement being established (Lîga 4). This settlement was hardly investigated since it was placed a little higher up on the plateau than both the Eneolithic settlements (Lîga 1 and 2, with 3). In the area of the above investigated houses only two pits with Cotsofeni ceramics were discovered. The Bronze Age settlement was only properly discovered after a series of drillings and minor trenches made in order to determine the size and the layout of the second and main Eneolithic settlement (Lîga 2).

Field surveys around the Lîga site together with registration of looters' trenches have confirmed that the area has been actively populated since the end of the Neolithic. The surveys have clearly demonstrated that certain localities were preferred for habitation and that settlements (and/or burial sites) of all periods were concentrating there, creating a big contrast to the surrounding areas, which did not produce any archaeological remains whatsoever. It appears though that during the Neolithic, as well as after the end of the Bronze Age, lower places, closer to the stream, were favoured.

Two Early Iron Age vessels from a ritual pit dug through a Copper Age house.

Later activities include a surprising find. In the middle of the 9 th century BC a strange ritual was taking place at Lîga. Five beautifully decorated but already burned vessels (of the so-called Besarabi culture) were brought to the site. A 1.2 m deep pit was dug, and all the vessels were placed at the bottom of the pit. Then a big lime-stone was thrown into the pit, smashing the vessels. Afterwards the pit was filled up with soil.

The last archaeological traces from Lîga stem from two big but shallow pits containing waste brought from a settlement of the 5-6 th centuries AD. The settlement itself was lying at the stream, some 200 m N-NW of the site. This settlement was actually excavated by local looters, who even copied our trenching strategy!

Survey trench cut across western slopes of the site.