Classical Archaeology in Bulgaria during 1980-2000

The present paper has no ambitions to be exhaustive. We will try to present some of the main trends, respectively problems in the development, in the last fifteen years, of the archaeology of the Thracian lands from the end of the Prehistoric period up to the Late Antiquity. Due to objective reasons, the text has some essayistic elements, at the expense of listing facts and statistics. The latter could be found in the bibliographic references of our professional editions. Many of the trends and phenomena considered below are largely the same as those regarding the archaeological investigations of prehistoric and medieval sites, as in many cases the investigations of complex multilayered sites and the respective publications are interconnected and inseparable in terms of general history and modern institutions. While the Prehistory would consider 15 years only a twinkling, in Classical times such a period is longer than it took Alexander the Great to defeat and conquer Persia, to create an empire that comprised half of the Old World, and to lay the foundations of a new political and cultural era, the Hellenistic Period. Standing at the limits of this period – the last 15 years – we lack the distance that is necessary for to make an adequate evaluation. However, as we know the importance of what we, being professionals (at least we hope we are), are going to do in the coming decisive and crucial years, we decided it was worth it to answer several fundamental (groups of) questions: I. What did the transition predefine and change in Bulgarian archaeologists' mentality and research conduct? II. What was left behind, what was preserved, and what new appeared in the conditions of work? III. Which approaches and methods should we preserve and what should we change, regarding the modern development and the realization of the professional community, as well as the sites that should be investigated and socialized? The answers of these groups of questions are intertwined with prognoses about future perspectives. In various ways and at various levels they pertain to several problems: the attitude to the subject of study; the educational level and the intellectual conditions that exist for the work and development of the professional community; the organization (institutional) and self-organization of the Bulgarian archaeologists; the ways the process of research is financed – from investigations on the terrain to final publications; the financing and the

Internet Archaeology 51, 2019

A new Law of Heritage of Culture was introduced in Bulgaria in 2009. This short article examines the juridical and practical effects of its implementation regarding preventive archaeology in the country.

2018

Annual of Natural Sciences Department, 2021

The aim of the work is to present the interdisciplinary projects developed and funded by the Bulgarian Science Research Found. These projects are created in Departments of Archaeology, and Natural Sciences, New Bulgarian University in the period 2014–2019.

HUNGARIAN ARCHAEOLOGY e-online, 2019

Cultural heritage protection in various countries is often cited as an example in the discussion about Hungarian regulation and practice. However, countries on the Balkans are rarely mentioned. This paper focuses on the archaeological monument protection in Bulgaria and summarizes the key points in its history