The Early Bronze Age Ritual Structures and Necropolis from near the Village of Dubene, Karlovo Region

This paper presents the basic results of the exploration of a necropolis in the locality of Balinov Gorun near the village of Dubene (Karlovo region, Plovdiv district) in the recent few years. It focused on the areas between the mounds, where thirteen archaeological structures were recorded. Thousands of gold items and elements of strings of beads had been cached under a stone cover in nine of these, together with decorated ceramic vessels, a gold dagger, a silver blade, glass beads, etc. The bones found in some of them proved to belong to animals. The character of the material buried there led us to the suggestion that “ritual structures” was a more appropriate name for the subject of the study. The remaining four structures are characterized by stone construction only. One of the five bigger mounds was also studied. It revealed two burials along with ceramic vessels, bronze and gold artefacts. Their stratigraphic position places the two burials in a late stage of the building of the mound. The comparative dating of all studied structures places them in the Early Bronze Age III (in accordance with Bulgarian periodization) – generally speaking, in the second half of the third millennium B.C. This paper also presents some hypotheses concerning the origin and manufacturing of the gold adornments and confirms some relatively old hypotheses concerning the contacts of Thrace with the Aegean and Anatolia.Hristov Martin. The Early Bronze Age Ritual Structures and Necropolis from near the Village of Dubene, Karlovo Region. In: Ancestral Landscape. Burial mounds in the Copper and Bronze Ages (Central and Eastern Europe – Balkans – Adriatic – Aegean, 4th-2nd millennium B.C.) Proceedings of the International Conference held in Udine, May 15th-18th 2008. Lyon : Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean Pouilloux, 2012. pp. 355-365. (Travaux de la Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée. Série recherches archéologiques, 58