Albania - Sovjan

The scientific issues at stake are manifold and lie at different analytical scales:

1) The Sovjan dig provides a sound foundation for establishing a precise chrono-cultural sequence covering all of Albania’s protohistory, from the start of the Neolithic Age to the Iron Age. For the occupation of the Sovjan site occurred at least two millennia prior to that of the neighbouring settlement of Maliq, which was, until now, the only site with long stratigraphic sequences in all of southern Albania, but the first occupation of which did not pre-date the Recent Neolithic.

2) The presence of vestiges of wood structures in the Bronze Age has made it possible, thanks to a cross-section dig that breaks with a long tradition of stratigraphic probing, to secure, for the first time, information about the construction layout at the time, their dimensions and the spatial organisation of the settlements.

3) The outstanding state of preservation of the wooden architectural components offers the ability to carry out a technological study in a field where our knowledge was, until now, quite limited. After several years of digging, we have exact information about the essences chosen (oak came in first), the scraping methods (using stone or metal tools), the assembly methods (ligature, tenon, mortice), ground isolation techniques (using branch litter, bark beds), covering, etc.

4) This material provides, in addition, the foundation for a dendrochronological standard reference that had been lacking in Albania until now and, more generally, in the Balkans. The standard, which is being designed thanks to analysis of more than one thousand samples of wood taken on the site, has not yet yielded any absolute dating. However, it has made it possible to establish a relative sequence of nearly four hundred years, two hundred and ten of which, assignable to the Middle Bronze Age, are interspersed with a series of ten construction periods, each for a different generation.

5) Fostered by the humid environment, the preservation of organic material makes Sovjan a choice site for the study of the paleoenvironment. For instance, one of the main challenges for the research programme run by the Korçë Basin Archaeological Mission lies in combining archaeological data from the dig at the Sovjan site with the local and regional paleoenvironmental data. Carried out in close connection with the Physical Geography Laboratory of Meudon (UMR 8591) and the Laboratory of Climate Sciences and the Environment (UMR 1572), this programme includes several components: geomorphology, sedimentology, micromorphology, palynology, paleoethnobotany and archaeozoology. As early as 1996, a core drilling in the middle of the ancient lake made it possible to continuously sample peat over 9 m deep. This was used to produce a pollen diagram covering the entire Holocene Age that now serves as a reference for all of the Balkan regions. The diagram shows, in particular, that the Korçë Basin acted, during the final glacial period, as a refuge for certain plant species, such as oak, which later recolonised temperate Europe; and the existence of these primary forests has been confirmed by dendrochronological analysis of the woods used in Sovjan settlement. Several other core sections produced between 2002 and 2005 in the same sector, as well as at the bottom of Lake Ohrid, will provide - yet non-existent - information about the evolution of the environment during the Pleistocene Era in the Korçë Plain.