The settlement in Raven locality, village of Brezhani
The first information about this Neolithic settlement can be found in the catalogue compiled by Tsvetana Dremsizova-Nelchinova “Archaeological Monuments in Blagoevgrad District”, Sofia 1987, p. 50. The site was repeatedly visited by archaeologists from RHM-Blagoevgrad who collected interesting material from the ploughed field surface. The white painted pottery clearly indicated the chronology of the settlement – Early Neolithic (the first half of the 6th millennium BC), and the large fragments of burnt clay plaster testified to the presence of an intensive conflagration that destroyed the settlement. These two components of the observations promised interesting results. In 2009, the settlement was explored by means of two trenches, as part of the “Neolithization in the Struma River Valley” project under the “Rila” program for bilateral cooperation between Bulgaria and France. The funding from the Bulgarian side was provided by the “Scientific Research” Fund under the Ministry of Education and Science. In 2010, Petar Zidarov carried out a geomagnetic survey in the framework of the project of TK-SKIN-3/2007 “Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlements: new archaeometric studies” of the New Bulgarian University, which was funded by the “Scientific Research” Fund of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Science (MOES).
The settlements in the localities of Ploshteko and Garleshki Nivi near the village of Drenkovo
Another two Neolithic sites — Drenkovo I and Drenkovo II – are situated some 40 km as the crow flies north-westwards in the valley of the Drenkovska River, a right tributary of the Struma River. Both settlements were registered during the field surveys made by Dimka Stoyanova-Serafimova, the first archaeologist in the Regional History Museum – Blagoevgrad in 1967. The results are presented in her article “Prehistoric settlements near Blagoevgrad” published in Journal Archeologia (Sofia) 11 (2), 1970, 69-81. There, Serafimova published mainly materials from Drenkovo II (Garleshki Nivi), without mentioning the other settlement of Drenkovo I, which is located on the other side of the Drenkovska River. It was the latter settlement that attracted our attention because of the Early Neolithic pottery found on the surface. In 2003 it was explored by means of four trenches, with the financial support of the VIR Association and “Bulgartabac” Blagoevgrad. A pilot geomagnetic survey carried in 2010 in the framework of the project TK-SKIN-3/2007 “Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlements: new archaeometric studies”, financed by the “Scientific Research” fund at the MOES revealed its great potential. The survey was extended two years later, in 2012, within the framework of project NTS 02/54/2010, “Cultural contacts along the valley of Middle Struma and Eastern Macedonia in the second half of the 6th millennium BC (Archaeological studies of the prehistoric settlement of Drenkovo, Garleshki Nivi, Blagoevgrad Municipality)” under the program for bilateral cooperation between the Republic of Bulgaria (Scientific Research Fund at MOMN) and the Republic of North Macedonia (Ministry of Education), and it was complemented through the implementation of auger sampling for confirmation of the boundaries of the inhabited area, the planigraphic organization of the archaeological features and the thickness of the cultural layer.
