Excavations near the village of Turan in southeastern Albania have revealed one of the biggest ancient cemeteries in Albania - about 1,000 layered burials, several richly furnished - and under that are traces of post holes from the huts of a rare Neolithic settlement.
     More than 20 Neolithic sites have been found in Albania, dating  from around the 7th to the 3rd millennia BCE - some of the earliest farming settlements in Europe.
     Above the Neolithic huts, a team of 50 archaeologists excavating an area of 4,000 square meters found three cemeteries from the Middle Ages, late Roman times, and the Iron Age. No traces of those settlements have yet been located, but lead archaeologist Iris Pojani, a professor at Tirana University, says it's easy to see why people through the ages chose to live there: "Even nowadays this is a prosperous agricultural area."
     Grave goods included rings, bracelets, earrings, amber and glass beads, gold coins, mediaeval wooden caskets, clothes worked with silver thread, spears, daggers, knives, swords, and lots of pottery — including local copies of wine jugs popular in neighboring Greece in the 11th or 10th centuries BCE.
     Turan, 180 kilometers southeast of the capital Tirana, is the most important of about 30 sites already found during laying of the underground Trans Adriatic Pipeline, that will bring natural gas from Azerbaijan through Turkey, Greece, and Albania, and across the Adriatic to southern Italy. In Albania, it crosses 215 kilometers, but officials say digging is almost complete and no more archaeological finds are expected.

Edited from AP News (29 September 2018)