8,000 year old site destroyed by bulldozers
An archaeological site in Bulgaria, including remnants of a village said to date back 8000 years, has been destroyed by bulldozers, allegedly the work of a construction company building part of a new road from Bulgaria to Greece.
The destruction means that archaeologists have lost thousands of years of history, Bulgarian National Television reported.
A special commission from the Ministry of Culture is inspecting the damage to the site, near Momchilgrad, and police are investigating.
Zharin Velichkov, chief inspector at the Ministry of Culture’s national institute for immovable cultural heritage, said that the site had individual layers dating back thousands of years, believed to reach back as far as 6000 BCE.
He told Bulgarian National Television that he could not say who had committed the destruction but it was most likely the company that had been carrying out work in the area.
The construction company had been given accurate maps of the area, with archaeological sites marked. The mound of the site, which also included a medieval church, were a few hundred metres from the future road to Greece.
Archaeologists were doing what they could to rescue anything remaining after the bulldozing, the report said.
Source: The Sofia Echo [November 16, 2011]
The destruction means that archaeologists have lost thousands of years of history, Bulgarian National Television reported.
A special commission from the Ministry of Culture is inspecting the damage to the site, near Momchilgrad, and police are investigating.
Zharin Velichkov, chief inspector at the Ministry of Culture’s national institute for immovable cultural heritage, said that the site had individual layers dating back thousands of years, believed to reach back as far as 6000 BCE.
He told Bulgarian National Television that he could not say who had committed the destruction but it was most likely the company that had been carrying out work in the area.
The construction company had been given accurate maps of the area, with archaeological sites marked. The mound of the site, which also included a medieval church, were a few hundred metres from the future road to Greece.
Archaeologists were doing what they could to rescue anything remaining after the bulldozing, the report said.
Source: The Sofia Echo [November 16, 2011]
