In Lake Ohrid, Albania, members of the University of Bern have found a stilt-dwelling settlement that is almost 8,000 years old.

Lake Ohrid is Europe’s oldest lake. Considering the findings, it is believed that the settlement is the birthplace of agriculture and animal husbandry in this region, serving as the foundation for “the great cultural transformation in Europe”, as explained 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. It is a remarkable archaeological sensation. “This finding is not only significant for the region but also for the entire southeastern Europe,” elaborates Albert Hafner.

The site is considerably large and it comprises multiple pre-historic lakeside villages with millennia of settlement history in one location, making the finding a stroke of luck for the researchers.

At first, locals identified the lakeside settlements nearby their homes. “In the early 1970s, the water level of Lake Ohrid significantly dropped so this submerged site became easily visible,” cited 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.

While research was taking place, the underwater excavations seemed quite 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. This is because digging underwater stirs up sediment and impairs visibility, an artificial underwater current must be created using pipes and compressed air.

Determine the age to the exact year

However, the newfound certainty that the settlements are almost 8,000 years old is not enough for the researchers. “These are radiocarbon dates. They seem imprecise. We want to determine the age down to the decade or even the exact year through dendrochronology, i.e. with the help of the annual rings of trees,” says 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.

/m.ll/