Excavation reveals 12th-century houses in Prague's New Town

With a bit of exaggeration we can say that since the fall of communism Prague has become one big building site. The centre of Prague has a 1000-year old history. So every time before the heavy machinery arrives at a building site, every square metre has to be sieved for remnants of past settlements. In today's Czech Science we take you to an excavation site which in a year's time will become one of the largest shopping centres in the city.

Petr Jurina, photo: CTK

The enormous building site just off Prague's Namesti Republiky Square was until recently the largest open space in the city's historic centre. In the 17th and 18th century it was a garden adjacent to a Capuchin monastery, then a training ground when barracks were built here in the 19th century. But many centuries before that houses stood here and even a Romanesque palace - as archaeologists have found during their two-year research.

"This is where the magnificent houses and residences of wealthy merchants were built. They were mostly foreign merchants, Germans, Italians and Jews."

Petr Jurina is the chief archaeologist of Archaia, one of the organisations participating in the excavations.

"Those were not stone houses yet, they had stone foundations and the rest was usually half-timbered, but they were often very large - up to 100 square metres - quite a large living space - and some of them had several floors."

In the 13th century, when the ramparts of the Old Town were raised, the houses found themselves outside the town's limits and their owners had to move out and the houses were demolished. When the New Town of Prague was built there during the reign of Charles IV a century or so later, new houses were erected on top of the old foundations.

"The foundations of one of the 12th-century houses will be displayed in situ, probably under a glass cover. The others have been conserved, cut out from the ground and transported in containers. They will be put back later and displayed in the new shopping centre, too."

As Petr Jurina says, apart from the houses, millions of objects and fragments from eight centuries were found on the site, such as pots, glasses, combs and dice. They are now waiting in 3,000 cardboard boxes to be catalogued. Also, around 1000 coins were found during the excavation works - the largest collection of coins found on one site.