Arriving at Casa Victoria and Excavations

 13/08/24

Today Monica picked me up from Teius train station. She gave me a lift out of the town and up to the mountains, we picked up Martin, the GRAMPUS heritage director, on the way and continued to the farmstead where we would be staying. The drive was spectacular yet slightly nerve wracking because as we gained altitude we saw some amazing views of the mountains but at the same time the roads became narrower until you would struggle to describe them as roads. A dirt track took us into the farmstead where we would stay. This was Casa Victoria, a group of old farm buildings situated on the side of a mountain in the Truscan Mountains, Transylvania. Monica had bought this farm off Victoria, the old owner, but it had become run down and the buildings derelict, over the past few years her and GRAMPUS had taken students and volunteers to help renovate this site and keep alive the heritage that it holds. Our job would be to survey these buildings to help in this survival of heritage and culture. My bed was in the old horse and oxen barn, to my surprise there was electricity and WIFI! 

Our purpose for being here was the surveying of the farmstead but for the first few days we were invited to help excavate a copper age site very close by with an American team. This was the most amazing archaeological site I had seen in terms of environment, it was on the very edge of a hill that extended off a mountain. The backdrop from one side had the near mountain ridge of the Truscan mountains, I had never seen anything like it! Plus, we were doing archaeology here. I'll now explain a little about the site and the situation of the American team. We arrived on their site with only 2 days left of their project, they had already been excavating for 5 weeks and hadn't been particularly successful for the majority of the time. However, in the days before we arrived they uncovered 5 Coţofeni burials, this was really good news for them but it meant they were frantically digging the last pits that they thought would have already been done. The Coţofeni people were a group that lived in the Eastern European Copper Age, around 3000 BC, they settled and lived on hill slopes, river terraces and caves. What the American team had uncovered was a burial site left by the occupants that lived in the area now known as Rimet. There has not been many sites like this found as the archaeological work in Romania for this time period is still quite limited, Colin Quinn, the project leader has worked with a Romanian archaeologist, who's name I have forgotten unfortunately, found many sites over the past 10 years and has been excavating them since his PhD. Unfortunately I did not get to see any of the actual burials in situ as they had already removed them but we helped excavate the final pits and clean the rest of the site for photogrammetry. The next day was the 14th of August, the American team's final day of the project, so all we had to help with was backfill, this means putting all the dirt and soil that was removed back in the trench that had been made. It was a swealtering day, reaching 35 degrees at its peak, so it was nit the most ideal day for this quite back breaking work. I must have drunk 4 litres of water and not gone to the toilet once, it was a serious workout! 

After the day was done we got the contacts of Colin and the rest of the team, they were very appreciative as they would not have finished in time to catch their flight without us. We then headed back to Casa Victoria for the evening. I considered it a successful day as I was slumped. We prepared to travel to Sibiu the next day, where Monica had booked us into the hotel for a few nights as there was a crafts festival that she wanted us to attend.