Neolithic Dwellings Museum

Worth a detour

A house from the start of the sixth millennium BC, standing where it was built, with its pots and grain bins and ovens still in place. It survives because it burned: the fire fired the clay walls and sealed everything under the collapse. One room, half an hour, and about as direct a look at early farming life as Europe offers.

Story

Background

The dwellings came to light in 1969 during rescue excavation in Stara Zagora, and rather than lift them the archaeologists built a shelter over the spot and left them in situ. The museum opened around them a decade later. The larger house was two storeys — roughly ten metres by six, and about seven metres to the ridge — built from stakes driven into the ground, woven with rods and plastered with clay and chopped straw. That is ordinary construction for the period. What is not ordinary is that it is still here.

The reason is the fire that destroyed it. A wattle-and-daub house that rots away leaves post holes; one that burns turns its walls into fired ceramic and drops the roof on the contents, which then sit under the debris undisturbed. So the inventory survived with the building: something like sixty pots, hand querns for grinding grain, storage bins, ovens, and three clay columns modelled with bull's horns that were clearly not domestic equipment. Stara Zagora's tell was occupied more or less continuously from the late seventh millennium BC onwards, and this is one moment of it, frozen.

It is a small museum and it makes no attempt to be more than it is. A basement room holds prehistoric pottery, figurines and ornaments from the wider region. Allow half an hour, and treat it as a stop within Stara Zagora rather than a destination in itself.