Czech motorway dig uncovers 1,879 prehistoric features and 36-metre-long houses

Archaeologists working ahead of a new motorway in the Czech Republic have logged 1,879 prehistoric and early medieval features along less than seven kilometres of the future D55, including the remains of timber longhouses stretching up to 36 metres. The Olomouc Archaeological Centre ran the survey between the villages of Kokory and Přerov in Moravia from September 2025 until the fieldwork closed on 29 July 2026. Alongside the settlement features, the team recorded 65 stone-lined and Bronze Age graves and a single human burial set within a settlement rather than a cemetery.

Marek Kalábek, the archaeologist who led the dig for the Olomouc Archaeological Centre, and his team summed up the find plainly: “The discoveries provide a glimpse into the lives of the early farming communities that transformed Central Europe during the Neolithic period.”

The Linear Pottery farmers’ longhouses at Kokory-Podsedky

One location did most of the work. At a site called Kokory-Podsedky, surveyors recorded 974 individual features on their own, more than half the entire project’s total packed into one settlement footprint. The oldest structures there belong to the Linear Pottery culture, the farming tradition that spread across Central Europe roughly 7,000 years ago and is usually identified by its incised ceramic decoration rather than by architecture. Here it is the architecture that stands out: postholes marking longhouses up to 36 metres in length, timber-framed buildings large enough to have sheltered extended families, livestock, and stored grain under one roof. Excavators say the density of overlapping postholes points to a settlement rebuilt on the same ground across multiple generations, a pattern archaeologists elsewhere in the Elbe and Danube basins have linked to Linear Pottery communities favoring the same fertile loess soils their predecessors had already cleared.

The graves tell a different, later chapter. The 65 stone and Bronze Age burials span a period well after the Linear Pottery farmers had gone, showing the same corridor of land pulled successive cultures back to it. Přerovský deník reported that Nikola Jandová, a spokesperson for the Olomouc Archaeological Centre, said the results will be presented to the public on 17 October at Olomouc’s Archaeology Days event, once the material has been cleaned, conserved, and documented.

A thirteenth site the road builders did not expect

Before construction began, planners had already flagged 12 archaeological sites along the route based on aerial photography and earlier prospection. Fieldwork turned up a thirteenth, a previously unrecorded settlement in the Dluhonice area that surfaced only once machinery started stripping topsoil for the road. ČeskéNoviny.cz, the Czech News Agency’s public wire service, reported that the Dluhonice find included Corded Ware-style pottery, copper ornaments and stone tools, material distinct from the Linear Pottery layers found elsewhere on the route.

That an entirely new site turned up this late in a project already budgeted and mapped is itself a small embarrassment for infrastructure planning, and a reminder of how incomplete aerial survey can be over farmland that has been ploughed for centuries. Czech law requires a rescue excavation ahead of any development that disturbs known or suspected archaeological deposits, which is why a road project ended up funding one of the larger open-area excavations in Moravia this decade.

Millennia of continuous settlement in under seven kilometres

What makes the Kokory–Přerov stretch unusual is not any single find but the span it covers. Hanácká Drbna summarized the sequence as running from the Stone Age through the medieval period within the same narrow corridor, meaning Neolithic farmers, Bronze Age communities burying their dead, and later inhabitants all left traces on ground that will soon carry motorway traffic. Fewer than seven kilometres separate the two endpoints of the survey area, a footprint small enough to walk in under two hours yet dense enough to have produced nearly two thousand catalogued features.

Kalábek’s team is not alone in facing this kind of density. Large linear infrastructure projects across Central Europe, from German autobahns to Polish and Czech motorway extensions, have repeatedly forced exactly this kind of full-corridor excavation, because a road, unlike a single building site, cannot simply be moved a few hundred metres to avoid a known cemetery or settlement. The D55 survey adds one more data point to a pattern archaeologists already recognized: the Moravian Gate and the river terraces around Přerov have been attractive to settlement since farming first arrived in the region.

Conservation, then a museum in Olomouc

Everything recovered is now headed for conservation before transfer to what HeritageDaily’s report and Czech coverage both describe as the regional museum archaeology center in Olomouc, where the objects will eventually enter public collections. Týden.cz noted that the scale of the assemblage means full analysis, including radiocarbon dating of material from the newly found Dluhonice site, will continue well after the October public presentation.

The motorway itself will eventually run over ground that a Neolithic family once measured out in 36-metre timber frames, and the researchers who spent nearly a year documenting it say the record they compiled is now the only version of that landscape that will survive construction.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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