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Prehistory of Thrace
Since the Dawn of Humankind
It is well known that people had settled in Thrace as early as the Neolithic Age.
About 10 000 years ago, chased away by the climate changes,
the first settlers from the Middle East
arrived on the Balkan Peninsula.
Appearing on these huge forested spaces,
abundant in rivers,
they found the ideal place for agriculture and stock-breeding.
People of that age had already been feeding with plants and animals,
which they had been growing on their own,
they were processing clay by a potter's wheel
and had lived in a settled way of life in primitive lodgings, grouped in small settlements.
The museum called "Neolithic Lodgings" in Stara Zagora describes in details about this.
Two lodgings of the late stone age have been presented inside it,
as well as their complete inventory.
Some of the preserved articles are bread ovens, manual grain mills,
multiple ceramic vessels,
some of which speak of religious cults.
The lodgings are the best preserved and contain the richest inventory in Europe,
and the museum is included in the 100 National Tourist Sites.
During the 5th millennium BC
the ancient people learned how to process metals, copper and gold.
By weapons made of metal men were protected their families from invaders,
and the copper labor tools were perfect for processing the land.
The oldest copper mines in Europe were also found by Stara Zagora.
Owing to them the continent entered the Chalcholytic Age.
Articles, made of the metal, extracted in the Stara Zagora mines,
were spreading throughout entire Europe.
The settlement by the present village of Karanovo had been populated for more than 10 centuries.
It is the European stratigraphic model.
The Karanovo mound was a large prehistoric settlement
from the middle of the 6th to the 2nd millennium BC.
Seven stratigraphic layers have been differentiated,
and the ceramic vessels and coins found there
had made archaeologists suppose,
that a villa belonging to an aristocrat or a road station had existed at this place.
The largest house in Europe had also situated here,
belonging to the early Bronze Age.
It consisted of three premises with total area of 216 square meters.
A permanent exposition entitled "Prehistory" is presented
in the Regional Historical Museum in Stara Zagora.
The style of life of prehistoric people
is presented by multiple peculiar articles –
ceramics, bone figures, jewels, ritual pots and restoration of paintings.
A ceramic vessel - tulip, painted in white paint.
A marble anthropomorphous figure.
A unique art of an ancient civilization.
Thousands of years were needed, spent in development of skills,
farming and spirituality,
in order to form a civilization in the valley of the Thracian Lowlands.
The creation of the potter's wheel,
copper and gold were enormous leaps in the development of ancient people.
And we need just one day
to discover this wealth, preserved in museums.