May/June 2026 Issue

Slideshow: The Bulgaria Phenomenon

A Turkic chieftain named Asparuh (reigned a.d. ca. 681–700) announced himself in present-day eastern Bulgaria in the late seventh century a.d., backed by tens of thousands of followers. The clan had traveled from the steppe between the Black and Caspian Seas and founded a capital called Pliska on the Danubian Plain. At nearly nine square miles, it was among the most expansive cities in Europe at the time, nearly twice the size of the Byzantine Empire’s capital of Constantinople, the rival power that would exasperate the Bulgarians for centuries. The khans of what scholars call the First Bulgarian Empire (ca. a.d. 681–1018) quickly established dominance over the eastern Balkans and amassed wealth at Pliska. They built citadels from stone blocks weighing more than a ton, a network of underground passageways, technologically advanced baths and plumbing systems, and a few more outlandish structures. These include palaces whose plans nearly matched those of huge desert strongholds in Syria, and a mysterious “arena” that may have hosted solemn ceremonies and dangerous games. In the past two decades, archaeologists have discovered more and more evidence that Pliska was unlike any other city in early medieval Europe. This has led them to call the city “the phenomenon.”

As the Bulgarian Empire reached its apex, its rulers relocated the apparatus of the state, military, and church to a different capital 23 miles away, called Veliki Preslav. There, Tsar Simeon I (reigned a.d. 893–927) patronized artisans, such as the ceramicists who would bedeck his city in painted tiles crafted from brilliant white clay. Simeon also spurred the dissemination of literature written using the Cyrillic alphabet, which had been compiled for Slavic speakers in ninth-century a.d. Bulgaria and is still used across Eastern Europe. During his reign, the tsar marched on Constantinople and its environs five times. Archaeologists have only excavated a tiny fraction of Pliska and Veliki Preslav over the past 130 years, but twenty-first-century research has continued to lead to breakthroughs in their knowledge of the strange and singular phenomenon of the Bulgarian Empire. To read our full article about the First Bulgarian Empire and its capitals, click here.

Slideshow: Stilt Houses of the Alps

For thousands of years in the Neolithic period (5500–2200 B.C.) and the Late Bronze Age (2200–750 B.C.), many people across northern Europe built their houses on stilts. Archaeologists have excavated villages featuring this style of house, known as pile dwellings, on lakes and in moors in Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Germany, France, and Slovenia. In some locations, replicas of the houses have been built. When the houses were first discovered more than a century ago, Swiss and German scholars—who had previously relied on graves and grave goods for their understanding of the region’s prehistory—believed that the pile dwellings provided evidence of a sophisticated European civilization that had flourished before those of the ancient Mediterranean. Because the lakes and marshes where the pile dwellings and their contents were found are cold and very low in oxygen many unusual artifacts have survived for more than 5,000 years, including one of the world’s oldest wheels. To read our full article on pile dwellings, click here.

Slideshow: Saving an Ancestral Canadian Village

On an archipelago off the Pacific Coast of British Columbia called Haida Gwaii, the Haida people and their ancestors have lived amid lush Pacific rainforest for more than 10,000 years. The Haida Gwaii village of SG̱ang Gwaay Llnagaay was evacuated in the 1880s after epidemics claimed many of its inhabitants. But the remnants of cedar-plank longhouses, orchards, canoe launches, and ceremonial poles for the remembrance of the dead—some more than 50 feet tall—survive as a testament to a hub of Haida artisanship, worship, and trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a violent storm ripped through SG̱ang Gwaay Llnagaay in 2018, the Haida decided to incorporate archaeology into the restoration and conservation work of the village and its environs. To read our full article about SG̱ang Gwaay Llnagaay, click here.