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The discovery is the result of excavations, which are being carried out from September 1 to 15 within the project “Donja Branjevina – the beginnings of life of prehistoric farmers in the Serbian Danube region”.
– The building that we stumbled upon exceeds previous knowledge of the early Neolithic, in which houses were built on plots of 15, 20 and 25 square meters, and now we have cleared the foundations of 60 square meters, and the end has not yet Is in sight. The floor of the house and the space around it are paved with an extremely solid load of soil, which does not drip water, project director Andrej Starović, chief curator of the National Museum in Belgrade, told “Novosti”.
He adds that the extraordinary discovery resonated “in another ash”, although the “prehistory” was expected to appear in greater depth.
– The site is near the defensive embankment, built on the Danube in 1965. Then, people removed 40 to 50 centimeters of humus to make a wall, which now made excavation easier, Starović explained.
The early Neolithic settlement of Donja Branjevina was discovered just at the time of the floods on the Danube by amateur archaeologists from Odžaci, led by Master Sergej Karmanski. His most significant invention was a figurine made of fired clay, called the Red-haired Goddess, which Karmanski wrote was a symbol of the fertility of the first farmers in the Vojvodina territory. Starovic points out that Donja Branjevina, “one of the first, if not the first agricultural settlement in Serbia”, was founded by immigrants who came from Anatolia, taking sheep and goats with them and carrying grain seeds in jars.
The current research is a continuation of the excavations that were carried out at Donja Branjevina from 1965 to 1996.
– As part of a residential building, we discovered a stove, similar to a peasant oven, and the skeleton of a person next to the house. A beautifully decorated object was found next to the skeleton, which was probably a funeral gift. We also excavated many animal bones, ceramic pots, altars, oil lamps and various practical things, which says a lot about the intense life of the first Neolithic peoples: Starović pointed out the part of the wealth that the unique locality hides among the Danube and the DTD channel.
INTERNATIONAL PROJECT
The works this September in Donja Branjevina were financed by the Ministry of Culture, and the project owner was the Museum of the City of Sombor (GMS), in cooperation with the National Museum of Belgrade and the Odzaci Museum Unit .
– Applying the methods of other sciences, in the fall we will conduct geophysical surveys of the terrain to determine the limits of the Early Neolithic settlement. The plan is for the research to be more extensive next year and to be an international project, said GMS senior curator Andjelka Putica.
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