Re-evaluating Old Archeological Evidence to Yield Exciting New Potential: the Medieval Castle of Petrus (Central Serbia)

Abstract

Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie have stated, material evidence is a rich scaffolding for (re)interpretation that allows for revision based on novel (digital) tools, ranging from improvements in digital (re)documenting to opening new research questions. From this perspective, a critical re-examination of legacy data needs to be conducted of the Medieval Castle Petrus, a well-known archaeological site, which received repeated small-scale excavations throughout the 1970s to the 2000s to date its structures. Petrus holds a valuable strategic position above the gorge of the river Crnica, which secluded nine churches/monasteries as well as one hesychastic cave. Prior archaeological work has shown the castle to consist of a lower town and an upper town in which there are the remains of a fresco painted palace. The castle was constructed in an area known by historical sources as that assigned primarily as a march to lord Crep Vukosavić (14th c.) and the “hesychastic desert” of the 14th and 15th centuries. The excavations in the 1970s and 80s resulted in simplified technical drawings of the palace’s foundations in the upper town, but were done only preliminarily. Moreover, after the small-scale excavations at the time, the areas excavated of the palace were then covered by soil. A new excavation campaign initiated in 2021 on the palace in Petrus included new documenting standards based on digital technologies such as photogrammetry, drone scanning and GIS, which pointed to great excavation potential. The archaeological record of the castle itself is more precise in its technical aspects. Furthermore, the animal bones that were not previously considered an important source of information were collected and recorded at this time. All these data and new methods to analyze them point to a promising wealth of potential that the site may yield upon further re-evaluation.