3rd season of archaeological excavations of the PREHISTRIA project
This year’s archaeological excavation was primarily directed at further exploring the Abri Kontija 002 site in the Lim channel. During the 6-week long fieldwork, project team members Ivor Janković, Lia Vidas, Rory Becker and James Ahern have work intensely on finishing the excavations in squares that were started in the previous seasons. Also, two new squares have been opened and so the new dimensons of the trench are 1,5×4,5 meters. As before, Abri Kontija did not let us down. Among the discovered material, numerous bones of big mammals were found in the upper layers, whereas more fragmented material, frequent traces of burning and exceptionally high number of lithic finds have been unearthed in the lower portion of the sequence. In this fieldwork season, more than 12 thousand fragments of bone and more than 7 thousand lithic finds have been discovered. During the excavation, flotation and sediment DNA samples as well as samples for radiocarbon dating and other analyses have been taken. Even though a lot has been done, the most important part of the work lies ahead. Further analyses of these assemblages will be crucial in planning future PREHISTRIA activities as well as other projects. Furthermore, the analyses should help us reconstruct the patterns of environment exploitation during the Late Pleistocene and comparisons with the assemblages from Ljubićeva pećina should give us a deeper insight into the everyday lives of hunter-gatherers of Istria.
