On Friday, April 5, at 7 p.m., in the Regional Museum of Jagodina, the exhibition “From Dawn to Dusk”, authored by Sonja Perić, senior curator – archaeologist of this museum, will be opened. The exhibition is the product of the first two campaigns (2022-2023) of the Systematic Archaeological Prospection of the Jagodina Region project, which is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, and implemented by experts from the Regional Museum of Jagodina and the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade.
In a poetic way, through a selection of field photographs, the authors of which are members of the expert team of the project: Sonja Perić, Petar Milojević, Smiljana Dodić, Dajana Matović and Nevena Cvetković, the results of the archaeological survey are presented, with a focus on the beauty of the landscape and the beauty of field research.
Twenty-five days in the field resulted in a tour of 20 rural atars in the Belica basin and the region of Crni Vrh, recording and mapping, with chronological and typological determination of 76 archaeological sites from all periods of the past from the early Neolithic to the late Middle Ages. Using a non-destructive method, 4928 movable finds were collected from the surface of the earth, most of them ceramic fragments, then wall tiles, stone objects, lumps of slag, metal objects and fragments of animal bones. The material is kept in the Regional Museum of Jagodina and will be the subject of further professional processing and comparative analysis with the material of old research. In order to determine the economic potential of the area in the past, samples were also collected from five mapped quarries, in search of metallic rocks and raw materials for the stone industry of the prehistoric and early historical periods, as well as 14 clay sites, from which the soil could be used for the production of ceramic objects from Neolithic, some of which have been exploited to this day.
From several thousand photos, a selection was made, which represents the landscape surrounded by archaeological sites, places where it was “comfortable” to live in the past, places that had suitable natural, but also strategic conditions for the establishment of settlements from 8000 years ago to the Middle Ages and so on. The beauty of the land, water, sky, sun, forest and country roads reminds the observer that we are surrounded by beauty that should be preserved and inspired, and within that beauty are hidden the secrets of the past, which should be discovered, but not destroyed.
DURATION OF THE EXHIBITION: April 5 – May 7, 2024
