Archaeologists Find 6,500-Year-Old Skeleton in Chalcolithic Settlement near Bulgaria’s Suvorovo
The excavations of the Suvorovo Chalcolithic Settlement in Northeast Bulgaria. Photo: TV grab from BNT
A 6,500-year-old skeleton has been discovered in a burned home from a Chalcolithic (Aeneolithic, Copper Age) settlement dating to the 5th millennium BC near the town of Suvorovo in Northeast Bulgaria.
The prehistoric settlement in question is located in an area known as Koriyata near Suvorovo, some 35 kilometers (22 miles) northwest of the Black Sea city of Varna.
The Suvorovo Chalcolithic Settlement was first discovered back in 1983 during the construction of a road between Suvorovo and the town of Drandar.
The 2011 archaeological season marks the resumption of the excavations in the prehistoric site (which were terminated in the 1980s), after it was explored through geophysical surveying in 2010.
The 2011 digs have been carried out in one of the prehistoric homes detected the previous year.
They are led by archaeologists Vladimir Slavchev from the Varna Museum of Archaeology, and have been funded by Suvorovo Municipality.
The home where the 6,500-year-old skeleton has been discovered dates back to the 5th millennium BC. It is known that the home was burned down.
The person, whose skeleton has been found, is known to have died prematurely but for the time being the cause of death remains unknown, and so does the person’s gender.
Slavchev points out that the stone architecture of the Suvorovo Chalcolithic Settlement makes it similar to other prehistoric settlements in Northeast Bulgaria from the same period, such as the ones in Durankulak on the Black Sea coast, Draganovo in Dobrich District, and the Provadiya – Solnitsata (“The Salt Pit”) Settlement Mound, near the town of Provadiya, Varna District.
It is also very close to the Varna Chalcolithic Necropolis near Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast where the world’s oldest gold treasure, the Varna Gold Treasure, has been discovered.
Suvorovo Municipality decided to restore the site’s excavations in 2010, and invited a team from New Bulgarian University in Sofia led by Petar Zidarov.
The researchers measured the geomagnetic anomalies on the site, and thus detected a number of previously unexplored Chalcolithic homes which had been burned down as well as the fortification wall of the settlement.
The archaeological excavations which began a year later have started with one of the detected prehistoric homes.
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