Story of a junk room

Subjected to a meticulous excavation, the loess which constitutes the Hârsova tell certainly reveals the history of the site and its evolution, but it also reveals many stories which detail the practices and manners of its inhabitants.
In this way, one of the houses, excavated in 1998 (designated SL 48) informs us of construction and architectural methods, but also of many of the habits of those that lived there.

At the beginning, the walls of the two-roomed house were probably built on ground reinforced by a framework of stakes. Each room of beaten-ground floor was equipped with an oven. Like all the earthen homes, it was subjected to many repairs and transformations. Towards the end of its existence, it had become one large room while the small western room served only as the entrance and a junk room. Its stove was undoubtedly closed down and the earthen walls replaced by clayonnage.

The part of this room, at the left of the entrance, served as a junk room where one might throw worn tools and other objects probably with hopes of later finding some use for them. Among fragments of ceramics, there were unfinished baskets, one apparently still in good condition, the bottom of a vase with a collection of small objects inside, and a wooden tub, the bottom of which consisted of four planks of wood joined along their edges. This collection of objects evokes the handyman who kept them. We find fragments of flint tools, polishing stones, yellow or red ochre sticks, as well as metapodes of sheep, frequently used to manufacture handles for copper punches.

A mystery remains, however, which undoubtedly will never be fully solved : why were such treasures not recovered at the time when the house was abandoned ? And how did it happen that they were buried under the rubble from the slow decomposition of a house ?