Archaeological Village of Sovjan
The Korçë Basin is a small inland plain located in the south-east region of Albania, south of Lakes Ohrid and Prespa, at an average altitude of 810 metres. The archaeological site of Sovjan, located northeast of the basin, at some fifteen kilometres north of the City of Korçë, was discovered in 1988 when a drainage canal was dug. It is near the Maliq Site - dug by Albanian archaeologists in the 1960s, fostered by the first agricultural betterment work - which provides the chrono-stratigraphic reference sequence for the protohistory of southern Albania.
Also established on the Western bank of the ancient Lake Maliq, now dried up, it appears as a very depressed-centre tell of around 2.5 hectares in surface area.
The digs have revealed human occupation, the first vestiges of which go back to the Ancient and Middle Neolithic (7th-6th millennia). The site was later inhabited uninterrupted from the end of the Ancient Bronze Age (end of 3rd millennium) until the Iron Age (around 700 BC), at which time it was covered over by the lake’s waters and definitively abandoned.
Sovjan is the only site in Albania that offers a series of levels of dwellings from the Bronze Age, clearly dated and rich both in archaeological furnishings, organic remains and architectural vestiges.
The absolute chronology of the Recent Bronze Age (Maliq IIId phase, 2nd half of 2nd millennium) and the Middle Bronze Age (Maliq IIIc phase, 1st half of 2nd millennium) and was further refined thanks to a series of Carbon-14 datings, and understanding of the material culture of the said periods has been enhanced considerably. For in addition to the ceramics, these levels of habitat have produced, first, a large number of tools (in stone, bone, terra cotta and wood) and, secondly, abundant paleoenvironmental material (fauna, plant macroremains and coproliths) that has yielded new information about the natural environment and how it was put to use by man.
One of the site’s main sources of value lies in the presence of the vestiges of very-well preserved wood structures, especially in the Middle Bronze layers (Maliq IIIc phase). One of them, an absidal home measuring over 15 metres in length, known as the Canal House, with around 0.5 m-high walls in wattle and, a few metres from this, a 2-metre wide log path.
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