The fifth season of excavations at Akdepe settlement in Chandybil district of the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, has come to an end. Deputy Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan Professor Ovez Gundogdiev led the first national expedition.
According to the Neitralny Turkmenistan newspaper, during the excavations the age of the settlement was defined. Until recently, Akdepe was dated to V-IV century BC, i.e. the Eneolithic age. However, the archeologists of the national expedition found pottery belonging to the Neolithic period (VI millennium BC), which corresponds to the Jeitun culture.
"Our white-marble capital has sprung up on the place that people used to live on as early as eight thousand years ago. In the outskirts of the city there is an archeological monument as old as the most ancient proto-urban civilizations of the Near East", the newspaper article says.
In addition, the theory that the life in Akdepe ceased to exist in the late Bronze Age (end of II century BC - early I century AD) has been disproved during the excavations. The Turkmen archeologists received material evidence of the continuity of life at Akdepe having found ceramic fragments of all missing epochs including medieval ages and the time of Mongol invasion.
"We know no other monument that would have existed for so long (with small breaks) from VI century BC to early XIX century", said Ovez Gundogdiev, who led the expedition, in the interview for the newspaper.
Source: Turkmenistan.ru