Court of Skalkov

Hi, everybody.

Last summer I helped uncover the history of a place near where I live. A pond near an old farmhouse was being dredged. The first written record of the site is from 1546.Thanks to me, the history has moved back to the 14th century.
I went there to see if it was worth going there to look, or to try the field where they take the material. It was fresh from a big rain, so everything was pretty cleanly dusted. As I looked around, my eyes were struck by a lot of obviously medieval pottery, battered logs, stakes, remnants of stone
I called an archaeologist I knew, and she arrived the next day... And things happened:)

The accidental find turned out to be several days of on-site action and almost a year's work by restorers and other... I went through the site and the surrounding area with a detector, the archaeologists dug up brick and wooden objects. A dendrologist arrived to take wood samples. Everything was recorded, documented, located...

Fortunately, the owner of the building who was doing the dewatering had a digger collapse a few minutes before the find, so we destroyed it.At first he was quite shocked, but as time went on, he also became enthusiastic about the cause.

Fortunately, the excavator was just taking mud and replicating the original terrain, the historical layer remained. The finds were 10-30 cm deep. With the detector I found medieval horseshoes, knives, a crossbow arrow and more. Also a gold button with glass from the 19th century.

The archaeologists collected a lot of pottery, unearthed the foundations of several buildings. They found the foundations of a log dam, a stone wall of either a ford or a place where horses swam-according to the finds of horseshoes and horseshoe pins, the remains of a fish ladder-according to the
It took almost a year to examine everything, to date it, to put the information into context... Maybe I didn't know that from an old trunk you can find out when it grew and in which year it was slaughtered! It is also interesting that the vast majority of the trees used are firs, which are now practically non-existent in our area, which also tells us about the earlier state of afforestation.

It was another interesting collaboration, and I am glad to have been part of it.

Video from the event

Michal (Sir Maik)