Swiss Radio and Television (Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen) has dedicated a report to the latest archaeological discoveries in Lin near Pogradec, which is nearly 8,000 years old.
Article translated in English
In Lake Ohrid, Albania, members of the University of Bern have uncovered a nearly 8000-year-old lakeside settlement.
Lake Ohrid is Europe’s oldest lake. It is the birthplace of agriculture and animal husbandry in this region, serving as the foundation for “the great cultural transformation in Europe”, as described by Albert Hafner, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Bern.
Over the past two years, his team excavated logs from a prehistoric lakeside settlement in Lake Ohrid, Albania, and determined their age. The result: The logs date back to 5800 to 5900 BC, making them almost 8000 years old, approximately 2000 years older than the oldest lakeside settlements in Switzerland. This discovery is a remarkable archaeological sensation. “This find is not only significant for this region but for the entire southeastern Europe,” says Albert Hafner.
The site is vast, comprising multiple prehistoric lakeside villages with a millennium of settlement history in one location, a stroke of luck for researchers.
The lakeside settlements were found by locals. “In the early 1970s, the water level of Lake Ohrid significantly dropped, making this submerged site visible,” recounts Adrian Anastasi from the Albanian Institute of Archaeology in Tirana. Aware of the approximately 500 well-researched lakeside settlement sites in Switzerland, he advocated for collaboration with the University of Bern.
Underwater excavations are challenging. “We are dealing with a lot of shoreline vegetation here. One must navigate through dense reed beds to reach the dive site,” says archaeologist and research diver Marie-Claire Ries, who coordinates the diving operations on-site. Because digging underwater stirs up sediment and impairs visibility, an artificial underwater current must be created using pipes and compressed air.
Determining the age to the exact year
The newfound certainty that the settlements are almost 8000 years old is not enough for researchers. “These are radiocarbon dates. They are imprecise. We want to determine the age down to the decade or even the exact year using dendrochronology, which involves the study of tree rings,” explains Albert Hafner.
The ultimate goal of the research at Lake Ohrid is to ascertain when and how agriculture and animal husbandry originated in the region, as well as how these practices spread from Southern Europe to Switzerland.
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