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,,Panayot Volov”�Primary School

Varna Bulgaria

����Project�“Shall We All Eat Together “

���We study Palaeolith

Varna has thousand years old history. The earliest traces of human life in thaJt land are of the Middle Paleolith(100000 – 40000 BC). Near the town, the archaeologists have researched temporJary dwellings of the Age of Mesolith (middle-stone age 10000 – 70000 BC)

After the changes of the climate the people passed from nomadic to settled way of life. To the Balkan peninsula that was connected with the Neolith(7000 – 5000 BC) and the advent of the agriculture.

It put a new face on the human life. The archaeologists have researched remains of huts with firesides, millstones, tools of stones and bones, figures of people and animals, made of bones and clay, a lot of ceramics with varied shapes.

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The research work carried out till present points to the fact that life around Varna and the lakes strongly activated only in the period of the Stone – Copper age.

This becomes obvious mainly from the findings from the studied early Eneolithic villages by the town of Souvorovo /about 30 km to the Northest of Varna/ and by the villages of Sava and Goljamo Delchevo /now under the waters of the Tsonevo dam lake/.

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All these interesting facts were learned by the members of Klio`s friends (It`s a club of students from 5th grade in our school).They attended thТe Educational museum which is a part of the Archaeological Museum in Varna. That time their lesson was “How has the agriculture changed the human life”. It was very exciting to touch a knife and a sickle, made of flint; an adze of stone, a mattock of horn, a spear, a bow, a harpoon.

Some of them are thousand years old. The curator Mrs Lipcheva was a fascinating speaker. She told them how those tools had been created and they showed us how the people had fed themselves. They had practiced not only hunting and fishing, they had been farmers and stock-breeders too.

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The discovery of the fire gave rise to revolution in the life of our remote ancestors. It gave them not only warmth and light but made their food tastier. Is it easy to get fire? – Not a bit. Our students understood that when they tried an ancient method to do it.

It was a stirring experience when the students went into a restored prehistoric home.

They tried to imagine the women who had weaved on an upright looms. As they used a time-machine they were round the fireside in a Slavianian dug-out sat on the hides in a proto-Bulgarian tent, stirred the dish into the earthen ware pot.

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The next visit in the Educational museum had another aim – to trace back to human life in Stone-copper Age (5000 – 4000 BC), the Halcolith. The students from Klio`s friends club saw a very interesting film. The methods of the experimental archaeology presented how the ancients had produced copper and had made golden articles.

THE GOLD OF VARNA PREHISTORIC NECROPOLIS �THE BEGINNING OF SOCIAL DIVISION OF SOCIETY

There is no doubt we are not dealing with a treasure of a trivial kind. ItsJ nature is outstanding. A happy coincidence in 1972 provided science with invaluable data. Digging a trench for an electric cable in the western industrial part of the city of Varna the man working with the excavator discovered in the soil discarded by the machine several gold objects, pieces of ceramics and other items. Hearing about this, archeologists from the Varna Archeological Museum started excavations on the spot. This gave world culture a unique monument of the culture of the oldest inhabitants of Europe.��

During that age, characteristic for the Varna Lakes are the 'pile dwellings' remnants of which such as pottery, bone, flint and stone tools, small idol figures, etc. are to be found in 2,5 m. to 8 m. under the present water level. Most probably the dwellings were situated along the coast of a deeply cut into the land sea bay and have been submerged by the rising of the sea water level.

The living conditions in the 'pile dwellings' were equal to those in the inner part of the region but obviously along the sea coast was concentrated a metallurgical center processing copper and gold. The artifacts from these dwellings do not defer to those from the land dwellings. Remarkable is the clay head representing probably some local deity. 

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All graves of these two types contain rich burial inventory of objects - things that had to serve the dead person in the other world. These were vessels of clay with rich decoration of cut lines, often painted with white paste, as well as the vessels decorated with graphite, so characteristic of the Eneolithic period.

They also contained instruments of copper, stone, flint and bone (knives, axes, and cutting blades), jewelry made of metal, sea-shells (in one of the graves they are about 2200), a rare kind of quartz and china clay. There are also a large number of idols made of flat bones in the form of stylized human figures. Each of the graves contains between 2 and 5 vessels, while the instruments are placed in the hands of the dead person.��

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Excavations established that the gold finds were placed exactly where they belonged: the bracelets of thick wire - on the wrists and above the elbows; the earrings, made of thin gold wire - on both sides of the head; the cylindrical gold beads - on the chest, between the ribs, as well as the gold figures of people and animals which obviously had a ritual function. It is interesting that in some of the symbolic graves there were human faces made of clay surrounded by rich decorations of round and rectangular gold plates. �

The forehead was decorated with a gold diadem. Where the arms were supposed to be stood beautiful ritual axes of stone with gold handles. This must have been a way to indicate the high social position of the person buried.�

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At that time, the communities dwelling along the Western Black Sea coast and around the Varna Lakes have reached the summit of their development. The variety and perfection of the earthenware and the idol plastics make it possible to discuss real achievements in the fields of art and religious life of the prehistoric man. �Interesting objects discovered in the necropolises by the town of Devnja reveal the notions of the then people about the after life. �  

The necropolis shows that there was a cultural and an economic community called “Cultural Varna” and it was of the beginning of the Metal Age in Europe. The farmers, lived there, had already produced a sufficiency of food so some people used to be craftsmen. It was a high-developed society and had trade and cultural contacts with the other coasts of the Black Sea, the Easten Mediterranean lands and with the synchronous civilizations in Egypt, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. The students could see stone tools of foreign kinds of stone and graphite of Mediterranean mussel shells.й

Our educational trip �We visit places with archaeological excavations – the old capital of Bulgaria – Veliko Tarnovo and “The valley of the Thacian kings”, near Kazanlak

���Students work out clay vessels and idols` �plastics ,� using the ancient potters` technologies

��������We continue to study� and to work …�It`s very interesting and �exciting !

ОУ”Панайот Волов”