The Dispilio Lakeside Neolithic Settlement Archaeological Collection is a museum in Dispilio, Greece. It was the first Neolithic settlement by the side of a lake excavated in the country. Many important artifacts were found, the most notable being the Dispilio Tablet.
The village is 8km from Kastoria. In 1932, Professor Keramopoullos of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki located traces of a prehistoric lake settlement there. Thirty years later Professor Moutsopoulos conducted surface investigations and confirmed the existence of the settlement.
In 1992, Professor Nikos Hourmouziadis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki began systematic excavations, which are still going on. A settlement has been uncovered which dates to the mid-Neolithic period, i.e. the middle of the 6th millennium BCE. The strategic aim of the excavations is to study the settlement as a specific cultural system.
The finds include tools (stone, bone, and flint) and quantities of animal bones, a discovery which shows that the inhabitants engaged in agriculture, hunting, and fishing; materials with which the huts were built (wooden piles and floors, post-holes); large clay storage jars; baskets woven in the manner of that period; cooking utensils (many of them boat-shaped); and bone and stone jewellery. The most important find is a bone flute, one of the oldest musical instruments ever found in Europe. There is also a model in the exhibition area illustrating the form of the huts and how they were constructed.
A short distance from the exhibition area, lake, lakeside and land dwellings have been built by the lake, all exact reconstructions of the huts of the prehistoric settlement. Inside the huts are all the utensils which the people used for their everyday needs. An earthen cover in the middle of the settlement served to protect the fire, and there is a kind of pirogue moored at the lakeside, which the inhabitants would have used for fishing.
A crannog is typically a partially or entirely artificial island, usually built in lakes and estuarine waters of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Unlike the prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps, which were built on the shores and not inundated until later, crannogs were built in the water, thus forming artificial islands.
Skara Brae is a stone-built Neolithic settlement, located on the Bay of Skaill on the west coast of Mainland, the largest island in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland. It consisted of ten clustered houses, made of flagstones, in earthen dams that provided support for the walls; the houses included stone hearths, beds, and cupboards. A primitive sewer system, with "toilets" and drains in each house, included water used to flush waste into a drain and out to the ocean.
Jiahu was the site of a Neolithic settlement based in the central plain of ancient China, near the Yellow River. It is located between the floodplains of the Ni River to the north, and the Sha River to the south, 22 km (14 mi) north of modern Wuyang in Henan. Most archaeologists consider the site to be one of the earliest examples of the Peiligang culture. Settled c. 7000 BC, the site was later flooded and abandoned around 5700 BC. The settlement was surrounded by a moat and covered a relatively large area of 55,000 square metres (5.5 ha). At one time, it was "a complex, highly organized Chinese Neolithic society", with a population of between 250 and 800 people.
The Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki is a museum in Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia, Greece. It holds and interprets artifacts from the Prehistoric, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods, mostly from the city of Thessaloniki but also from the region of Macedonia in general.
Sesklo is a village in Greece that is located near Volos, a city located within the municipality of Aisonia. The municipality is located within the regional unit of Magnesia that is located within the administrative region of Thessaly. During the prehistory of Southeastern Europe, Sesklo was a significant settlement of Neolithic Greece, before the advent of the Bronze Age and millennia before the Mycenaean period.
The Dispilio tablet is a wooden tablet bearing inscribed markings, unearthed during George Hourmouziadis's excavations of Dispilio in Greece, and carbon 14-dated to 5202 BC. It was discovered in 1993 in a Neolithic lakeshore settlement that occupied an artificial island near the modern village of Dispilio on Lake Kastoria in Kastoria, Western Macedonia, Greece.
Proto-writing consists of visible marks communicating limited information. Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium BC in China and southeastern Europe. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols or both to represent a limited number of concepts, in contrast to true writing systems, which record the language of the writer.
George Hourmouziadis was a Greek archaeologist and Professor Emeritus of prehistoric archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He led excavations in many prehistoric settlements in Thessaly and Macedonia and in 1992 he started the excavation of the neolithic lakeside settlement of Dispilio in Kastoria, Northwestern Greece. A myriad of items were discovered, which included ceramics, structural elements, seeds, bones, figurines, personal ornaments, three flutes and the Dispilio Tablet. He died on 16 October 2013 in Thessaloniki.
Vinča-Belo Brdo is an archaeological site in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade, Serbia. The tell of Belo Brdo is almost entirely made up of the remains of human settlement, and was occupied several times from the Early Neolithic through to the Middle Ages. The most substantial archaeological deposits are from the Neolithic-Chalcolithic Vinča culture, of which Vinča-Belo Brdo is the type site.
The Laténium is an archeology museum located in Hauterive, a suburb of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Its name refers to the famous nearby site of La Tène which gave its name to the Second European Iron age. The Laténium is composed of a 2,500 m2 (27,000 sq ft) park and a museum building which also harbours the archaeological section of the Heritage Offices of the State of Neuchâtel, as well as the chair of prehistory of the University of Neuchâtel. The museum and its park are built on what used to be three archaeological sites that were excavated during the construction of the A5 motorway. Theses sites date from the Upper Paleolithic, Bronze Age and Neolithic. The park features dolmens and glacial erratics, reconstitutions of prehistoric and antique devices, and modern works of art. The museum displays the Bevaix boat, a 20 m (66 ft) Gallo-Roman ship found in Bevaix. Items from periods comprised between the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages are on display, including the remains of a Magdalenian hunting camp.
Dispilio is a village near Lake Orestiada, in the Kastoria regional unit of Western Macedonia, Greece. Near the village is an archaeological site containing remains of a Neolithic lakeshore settlement that occupied an artificial island.
Stannon stone circle is a stone circle located near St. Breward on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, England.
Prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps are a series of prehistoric pile dwelling settlements in and around the Alps built from about 5000 to 500 BC on the edges of lakes, rivers or wetlands. In 2011, 111 sites located variously in Switzerland (56), Italy (19), Germany (18), France (11), Austria (5) and Slovenia (2) were added to the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. In Slovenia, these were the first World Heritage Sites to be listed for their cultural value.
Kleiner Hafner is one of the 111 serial sites of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps, of which are 56 located in Switzerland.
Prehistoric pile dwellings around Lake Zurich are pile dwelling sites located around Lake Zurich in the cantons of Schwyz, St. Gallen and Zürich.
The Burzahom archaeological site is located in the Srinagar district of the Kashmir Valley of Jammu and Kashmir, India. Archaeological excavations have revealed four phases of cultural significance between 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE. Periods I and II represent the Neolithic era; Period III the Megalithic era ; and Period IV relates to the early Historical Period. The findings, recorded in stratified cultural deposits representing prehistoric human activity in Kashmir, are based on detailed investigations that cover all aspects of the physical evidence of the site, including the ancient flora and fauna.
Jakob Messikommer was a Swiss archaeologist who among others discovered and researched the UNESCO serial site Wetzikon–Robenhausen.
H3 is an archaeological site in the Subiya Region (Kuwait) that was occupied during the second half of the sixth millennium BC. It was a cultural borderland between Mesopotamian and the Arabian Neolithic. Finds at the site include small pieces of bitumen believed to have been used to waterproof boats, providing some of the earliest direct evidence for sea faring. A boat model similar to those in Mesopotamia was also discovered at the site.
The Pirogues de Bercy are a group of dugout canoes dating from the Neolithic period that were discovered in 1989 during construction work in the 12th arrondissement, a neighbourhood located in southeastern Paris. The excavations of 1991–1992 unearthed two lodgings from the middle Neolithic period and one from the Late Neolithic period or the early Bronze Age. The dugouts were found at the base of these lodgings, along with other Neolithic artifacts such as pottery, stone and bone tools and arrow heads.
La Draga is an Early Neolithic lakeshore site located in Banyoles and it is the only prehistoric lacustrine site of the Iberian Peninsula. Excavations allowed the identification of two different Early Neolithic phases of occupation, though no change in the technical tradition has been recorded between the two phases.
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A view from a distance
Lake dwelling
A kind of pirogue moored at the lakeside
An earthen cover to protect the fire
Interior of a hut
