Raport preliminar asupra cercetărilor desfăşurate la Reci-Doboika, jud. Covasna, un sit cu depuneri în gropi din epoca fierului/Preliminary report on the researches in Reci-Doboika (Covasna county) a 1st millennium BC site with deposits in pits

Abstract

The article reports on recent geophysical investigations undertaken in the central part of Brașov Depression, in south-eastern Transylvania, at Reci (Covasna County), and offers preliminary information about a rescue excavation which was previously done in the vicinity of the newly prospected areas. A gradiometric survey and a series of magnetic susceptibility measurements were completed on a river terrace, nearby the site of Doboika, where 109 pits dating from various moments of the Iron Age and one from Eneolithic were researched in 2015 by the National Museum of Eastern Carpathians in Sfântu Gheorghe. Some of these pits had as content a certain selection of items’ categories which, despite changes in styling and manufacturing techniques due to time passing, could be recognized as a common model employed in three different stages of the Iron Age: 11th-10th c. BC (Gáva circle), 5th-4th c. BC and 1st c. BC – 1st c. AD (so-called Dacian period). Entire or almost entire vessels, grinding stones, weight looms, portable fireplaces or fragments of regular fireplaces, clay figurines, miniature vessels, flints and clay-disks were the commonest found functional classes of items. They allude to an intentional depositional practice with a longue-durée appeal and a strong location valorisation, a phenomenon well documented for other sites in the territory of ancient Thrace, too. Other pits contained only pottery fragments and remain harder to interpret. One of the pits delivered the skeleton of an entire dog. The non-invasive investigations showed the space occupied by pits is actually larger and very crowded, exhibiting also certain patterns in their spatial distribution, a tendency for intentional arrangement already noticed for the Late Iron Age features excavated in 2015. The results of the geophysical investigations corroborated with those of the archaeological dig from 2015 in Doboika can place.