I had a lovely Friday the 13th out in the country. Picked a bunch of butternut squash, probably the last two zucchini— in fact, the whole garden pretty much seems to be done. I started clearing an overgrown corner of the yard. It's back where my woodfire ceramics kiln is and I've been thinking that I may try to do a short firing of the kiln before the really cold weather rolls in. Cut up a pile of old willow branches that had been laying there and got a start at chopping out all the tiny plum trees popping up from a nearby plum tree's root system.
Today on dKos though, I'm still diarying my way through my summer vacation. When we were running around northern Moravia and Silesia for a week, we managed to catch the last tour of the day at an archeological park set up at the site of an old hillfort.
So come on in, enjoy wandering around behind the palisades and set a spell in the comments. Share a bit of your day, a thought, a worry. Share a link, promote a cause, pitch a rock-crusher— it's all good. This is, after all, another fuzzy open thread.
Archeopark Chotěbuz - Podobora
In the Těšín area of Silesia, on a bluff overlooking the Olza river, a hillfort was built at the end of the 10th century BC to guard a ford on an important north/south European trade route through Moravia.
I seem to remember our guide telling us that this is the most explored archaeological site in the entire Czech Republic. If not, a glimpse at the map below might make you wonder what could have possibly been more thoroughly excavated.
The earliest signs of occupation on this site date back to the late Bronze Age, about two centuries later, in the 8th century BC, the settlement was captured and then rebuilt and properly fortified.
In the 5th century BC, the fortified town built at the end of the bluff met a violent end and the site was left unoccupied for nearly 1200 years. The site was reoccupied in the early Middle Ages, the 8th century, and expanded in stages into the 9th century to include two outer baileys with moats and earthworks separating them. There followed a period when the hillfort was captured and occupied by Great Moravia, but the next wave of invaders at the beginning of the 10th century burnt the place down. Before the end of that century the site was again occupied although only the innermost acropolis area and some time in the 11th century the site began to lose its importance and population, probably the administrative and defensive heart of the region had shifted to a nearby town with its own bureaucrats and fortifications and gradually the site of “Old Těšín” was abandoned.
These days, the only area that the general public can access is the acropolis, the innermost part of the fortifications, where a guide can show you around a little village built in a collection of the architectural styles that represent the early centuries of the site's occupation.
Thanks for stopping by.
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