Adventures in Archaeology: Cacev Kamen #2

I'll start this out with a video I took from the very top of Cacev Kamen, with a lovely view of the surrounding countryside:




But for now I'll work my way up from where I left off. That rock-cut cross was in a sort of entry way, with visible foundations cut into the rock. Following a rebuild road between two remaining rock door posts, you wrap around the the rock, head up an old stairway, and end up in this:


It's a giant shallow cavern, partly natural, partly man-made. Sashka is sitting in the middle, and above her you can see a horizontal line of post holes that held platforms. Behind her are three rectangular pits cut into the rock, bathtub-size, with drain channels leading down the rock. The Lonely Planet writer stands above one:
This is on the far left of the cave looking in; the far right is flat, with post holes in the ground that reminded me of some Mycenean 'throne rooms' I had seen in Greece:



Moving on (and up), I followed the good professor and scrambled up this rock face, using neolithic post holes as hand holds:


Above the large chamber, there was a man-made basin for water. it was huge, double-chambered, and there were dozens of holes for the pulleys and ropes and buckets that would have been used to fill it up. The Professor had some story about water pouring down and people dancing and all that. I really have no clue. But it was really cool:



The water pit is obviously on the right, and this semi-circular channel would have held wooden retaining wall, like the end of a barrel. It's a sheer drop straight down on the left side; behind me is another one of these water-pits.

And that was Cacev Kamen, or at least according to the pictures. I wasn't able to take a lot of my own photographs. My writer friend (the Lonely Planet Guy) dubbed me Indiana Jones for the day, which meant I had to scramble to all the places he couldn't climb and take pictures for him. Ah well.

Adventures in Archaeology: Cacev Kamen #1

Macedonia is a small country, so if you make a few phone calls and meet the right people, you can see some pretty interesting things. I contacted an American writer living in Macedonia, and after introductions over coffee, he invited me to visit a neolithic observatory in the Macedonian countryside with the archaeologist who had discovered it.

It took us several hours to get to the site - first a bus to Kumanovo, where Professor Dusko Aleksovski of the World Rock Art Institute and his lovely translator, Sashka, met us in his car. We then drove for another hour on sign-less back road, parked the car in a field, and hiked for another half hour through a beautiful valley towards what appeared to be a giant rock. Professor Aleksovski in is the lead, with Sashka and her velvet jumpsuit following:


Cacev Kamen, as the good Professor explained, a giant neolithic observatory. It looks like a big rock outcropping from far away, but up close, the whole thing has been hacked and dug and shaped by a prehistoric civilization predating the ancient Greeks and Macedonians. It is riddled with postholes, which once supported platforms, and stairways carved directly into the rock.


The post holes run horizontally across the middle of the rock:


These holes made convenient hand holds as I daringly scrambled across the rock face to view some painted symbols from 6,000 BC that hadn't quite been destroyed peasants seeking Turkish gold. They didn't quite show up on my camera, unfortunately. Numerous markings, which represent or reference who-knows-what, are all over the rock as well:


And as interesting as all these little carvings might be, there is a giant man-made theater, some sort of water-tank contraption on top of the rock, and creepy stairways all over the thing. There's also the 'magic basin' and the 'throne' . . . . but I'm running out of internet cafe time, so that will have wait. Stay tuned.