6500 Years Old Village Found
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a 6500 years old farming settlement in an antiquities-rich area of central Greece. The finds include remains of houses built of wood and unbaked clay, together with pottery vases, ovens and stone tools, the culture ministry announced on November 20. The Neolithic-era finds were discovered during work to lay a gas pipe near the village of Vassili in Thessaly, 280 kms north of Athens.
Thessaly’s fertile plains attracted some of Greece’s first farmers, and the ruins of more than 300 settlements - including what at the time would have been major towns - have been located in the area.
“Thessaly had a very dense pattern of settlement during Neolithic times”
said archaeologist Giorgos Toufexis, who headed the excavation at Vassili. He said the settlement was destroyed by fire, which baked and hardened the clay parts of the houses and preserved imprints of their wooden sections, which included sawed planks.
The buildings had walls made of branches covered with clay, supported by strong wooden posts, and clay-covered roofs. Among the ruins, archaeologists found large quantities of pottery, including painted vases, stone axes and scrapers, bone tools and a small number of terracotta figurines.
“The economy was based on agriculture and animal farming, ” Mr. Toufexis said.
“We can’t provide an estimate yet on the settlement’s size, but it doesn’t seem to be very big. These settlements usually have a diameter of around 150 meters.”