27 Mar 2020 They were building a garage, they found 6000-year-old skeletons

While digging an assembly pit in the garage, the owners found a 6,000-year-old skeleton. Archaeologists were called to the site and found that there were two graves. The discovery came from the Slovak village of Šelpice near Trnava.

According to the archaeologists, this is a very unique discovery of two graves. When the owners of the site came across the first bones, they called the police instead. It turned out to be a case that belongs to the archaeologists. Two people buried at the site 6,000 years ago.

"We examined the site with the archaeologist of the West Bohemian Museum, Andrei Sanova. In the first grave, an individual was buried in a crouched position with his head to the west and his feet to the east. We also found a stone object, probably a raw material for making tools, and several shards," said Matúš Sládok, an archaeologist at the Regional Heritage Office.

The second grave contained a very young child and two snail shells. However, almost nothing of the skeleton was preserved. In contrast, the bones from the first grave are exceptionally well preserved. According to archaeologists, they give the impression that they are only a few hundred years old.

The burials belong to the so-called Lengyel culture, an archaeological culture from the turn of the Neolithic and Eneolithic. It was widespread in central and north-eastern Bohemia. It belongs to a large complex of cultures that spread into Central Europe (Slovakia, Moravia, Austria, Bohemia) from the Balkans at the end of the Neolithic. The name was derived from a fortified settlement near Lengyel in southern Hungary.

A burial site has been found in the past in the place where the garage is located. This was sometime in 1992. "At that time, two graves were also discovered during the digging of the cellar," Sládok added.

So far, graves from the Lengyel culture have been found in only two places in the Trnava region. "Finders often report the discovery of human remains to the police because they think it might be a victim of a crime or a missing person. Often, however, the finds are of an archaeological nature," Sládok added.

Together with his colleagues from the Trnava KPO, the Archaeology Department of the Slovak Heritage Institute and the police, he launched an initiative to get more people to report archaeological finds. "We learn about completely new sites this way, because just during the construction during construction activities they notice human bones as the only archaeological finds," Sládek concluded.

Sources: www.sme.sk, www.cas.sk