The Neolithic Settlement at Rast [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Publication of the excavations carried out in the Neolithic settlement on the bank of the Gfrla Jifarului at Rast in 1943 and 1950 has been delayed by circumstances, many of which were beyond the control of the excavators. Over 90% of the manuscript was ready for printing 6-7 years ago, but the large number of plans, sections, drawings and photographs which were necessary to illustrate the text led to delay. Only now have we been able to place the finds in their cultural and chronological framework. The excavations carried out in the area of the commune of Rast, in the southern part of Dolj district in the south-west of Romania, can now be published thanks to the kindness of the direction of the Scientific and Encyclopedic Publishing House, Bucharest, who paid for the preparation of the numerous illustrations and the invitation of the editors of BAR, Oxford. Rodica Vincenz, who was a member of the archaeological team who excavated in 1950, drew almost all the plans and sections of the excavations carried out in that year. On the basis of my own sketches drawn during the excavations, she also worked on the plans and the sections dating from 1943; the rest of the plans and sections together with all the other drawings were produced by Elena Beke§ of the Historical Museum of the R.S. Romania. tftifortunately, one important chapter has had to be omitted from the present work and another limited to a very brief discussion. We refer firstly to pollen analysis which is missing because these techniques were not yet used in Romanian excavations when the excavations were carried out at Rast. The local environment has since been completely changed by numerous floods, afforestation and other human intervention. The second relates to the osteo-logical material which was found very abundantly in the excavations. The material found in 1943 were lost during the war and those discovered in 1950 were mixed with other similar material so cannot be used to arrive at firm conclusions. We have there confined ourselves to a resume (Appendix II) of the preliminary observations of the faunal remains made by our late colleague C. S. Nicolaescu-Plop^or during the excavations in 1950 and afterwards. Although he was not a specialist in this field he was sufficiently skUled in the study of animal bones to identify the respective species securely. It was not possible at the time to estuuate frequencies of occurrence of species and still less the age and other characteristics, so we have confined ourselves to reproducing the aforementioned observations. Although the documentary material published by us is very extensive, photographs of the excavations are absent. Those taken in 1943 were lost during the war and the photographs taken in 1950 have become unusable. An anthropological study of the skeletons found in two tumuli dug by us near Rast in 1950 (Appendix IH) cannot be included for the same reasons, since various removals and rearrangements of museum collections and stores have