Project

Main goals

The aims of our project are the detection, detailed study and protection of historical landscape features using modern interdisciplinary methods (spatial and landscape archaeology, GIS, LiDAR and geophysics), and to present it primarily through interactive web application.

The core of our interest is the area around the Great Moravian stronghold of Mikulčice-Valy and the Church of St Margaret of Antioch in Kopčany, which are dated to the 9th century. A developed network of settlements and burial grounds existed around these centres in the Early Middle Ages. Several dozen 6th-9th-century settlements and burial grounds were found within a 10 km radius from Mikulčice and Kopčany while between these two sites was the crossroads of two important routes in the first millennium CE – the north-south Amber Road and the east-west trail connecting the Carpathian Basin with modern Moravia and Bohemia. This area thus represented a living communication corridor, where – in addition to various trade commodities – the transfer of ideas, technologies and the movement of populations took place.

Systematic archaeological research has been carried out to date in Mikulčice and Kopčany. However, to understand the development of the cultural landscape in the middle-Morava area, where we can better understand the cultural and ethnic roots of this region, it is essential to extend the focus to the under-researched areas around there. This concerns the river terraces of the Morava, which have been continually settled from Prehistoric times until now. Selected parts of the river terraces are among the best-preserved parts of the landscape element, free from modern intervention, and these micro-regions are thus the centre of the focus of this project. For the reasons given above, the research and cultural protection of this area are strongly socially desirable.