Dragan Božič

• PhD
• Research Advisor in retirement at Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

The English Abstract of the exhibition catalog T. Fabec, B. Laharnar, M. Mlinar, T. Nanut and D. Božič, Na dvorišču železnodobnih prednikov. Arheološko najdišče Berjač pri Podbeli / In the courtyard of the Iron Age ancestors. Archaeological site Berjač near Podbela (Tolmin 2024). The links to the online available literature and to the files of the...

The unusually rich cremation grave 1 of Berjač near Podbela in western Slovenia was excavated in 2021 by a metal detector searcher. The finds came to the Narodni muzej Slovenije in Ljubljana. The grave, in which because of two swords and two three-knobbed-torcs, characteristic for the female costume of the Idrija cultural group in the Soča region,...

V brezno Mušje jame pri Škocjanu na Krasu so v okviru kultnih obredov metali najmanj štiri stoletja bronasto orožje, zaščitno bojno opremo, posode in drugo. Ob prenehanju teh obredov na območju Škocjana so se v zaledju Caput Adriae pojavili posebni depoji vrste Tržišče-Porpetto z železnim orožjem, med katerim prevladujejo sulične osti. Razlikovati...

Leta 2015 je bila v Vrtači pod vrhom hriba Kovk nad Hrastnikom naključno odkrita skupina kovinskih predmetov, ki vključuje negovsko čelado, kavljasto pasno spono in druge dele pasne oprave ter tulasto sekiro. Predmete je pridobil Pokrajinski muzej Celje, ki je avgusta 2016 izvedel kontrolno izkopavanje. Odkrit je bil skeletni grob bojevnika z dodat...

The contribution discusses the burial of a woman (Grave 20) in Tumulus IV at the Znančeve njive cemetery in Novo mesto, SE Slovenia. It was excavated in 1968 and found to contain a pair of simple gold wire earrings, a necklace of amber beads, fragments of glass beads, two decorated hollow spiral bracelets of thick sheet bronze, two ribbed bronze an...

Presentation at the international conference.

In 1818 near Lyon the so called Verna wagon grave (la tombe à char de Verna) was found in a barrow. It contained many weapons, imported bronze vessels, three curb bits and parts of a four-wheeled wagon. The iron curb bits, found in LT D1 warrior and horse graves in France, Italy and Slovenia, have in common a mouthpiece, which is U-shaped at its ce...

In the presentation that I held on April 12, 2017 at the Intermunicipial Museum of Kamnik (Medobčinski muzej Kamnik - https://www.facebook.com/muzej.kamnik/posts/777850122382116), two sites in the Gorenjska region where Late Roman mosaics have been found were discussed: Lesce in the vicinity of Bled, and Rosove groblje near Šmartno v Tuhinju in the...

Raffaele De Marinis suddivise il tardo La Tène in Lombardia in due fasi LT D1 e LT D2, già nel 1984 (Studi etruschi 50, 1982, 522) e più esaustivamente nel 1986 (Atti del 2o Convegno Archeologico Regionale). La sua divisone è stata assunta da Patrizia Frontini nel suo libro sulla ceramica a vernice nera in Lombardia (Frontini 1985, 30) e negli anni...

In his study on the Hallstatt barrows from Stična published in the monograph Stična II/2 (Ljubljana 2010), Stane Gabrovec presented in Figure 21 a table and in Figure 23 a ground plan with typical graves from four chronological phases in barrow 48. He assigned only twelve graves, all but one female, to the fourth phase, which should correspond to t...

On the meteoritical gold from Kobilnik near Tolmin Kobilnik is a 688 m high hill situated above the confluence of the Tolminka and Zadlaščica Rivers near Tolmin in the Soča region. In a paper on meteorite falls in the territory of Slovenia, written by geologists M. Jeršek and U. Herlec and published in the book Mineralna bogastva Slovenije (Mineral...

The Slovenian abstract of the presentation on the Bronze Age Day 2016.

The truth about some supposed Etruscan elements in the south-eastern Alpine area: the grave of a prince from Vetulonia in Tuscany in the center of barrow 48 from Stična, a side piece of a Middle Italic bronze horse bit, excavated around 1853 in a female grave near Stična, and a decorative application of an Etruscan bronze footed cup from the Dvoriš...

A presentation of a new book, devoted to the bronze vessels in Slovenia dated to the Urnfield and Hallstatt periods. It was written by Mojca Jereb and published in April 2016 by Franz Steiner Verlag in Stuttgart as volume 19 of department II (Vessels) of the publication Prähistorische Bronzefunde. The majority was found in graves of the Hallstatt p...

Among the small finds from the Malovecko hill top settlement near Treničanske Bohuslavice in western Slovakia, presented in several publications by Igor Bazovský from Bratislava and Karol Pieta from Nitra, appear two fragments of the Lochgürtelhaken belt hooks, which show a wide distribution mostly in Northern Europe, and several bronze fibulae, im...

The relative chronology of the Dolenjska group of Hallstatt culture has a long history of research. It was created in 1965 by Professor Stane Gabrovec from Ljubljana. At that tame he divided it into four phases: the Podzemelj phase, the Stična-Novo mesto phase (later only the Stična phase), the phase of Scythian influences (later the Certosa phase)...

Published in: S. Djura Jelenko (ed.), Sokličeva zbirka. »Tu mam pa ilirskega poglavarja«. Arheologija in numizmatika / The Soklič collection. »Here's the Illyrian chief.« Archaeology and numismatics (Slovenj Gradec 2015) pp. 18–41, 138–139, 143.

Published in: M. Karwowski, P. C. Ramsl (eds.), Boii – Taurisci, Mitteilungen der Prähistorischen Kommission 85, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Wien 2016) pp. 55–65. The author of this contribution suggests combining two groups of bronze fibulae of Middle La Tène construction under the name “fibulae of the Zvonimirovo typ...

The Vače Situla was discovered in March 1882 by a peasant boy Janez Grilc from Klenik near Vače. It was found in the fallow Reber. According to the data in the study of the curator of the Regional Museum of Carniola in Ljubljana, Dragotin Dežman, printed in 1883, next to it a fragmented bronze spiral hollow bracelet was discovered. Several unpublis...

The excavator Jernej Pečnik excavated hundreds of graves from the Iron Age and the Roman period for the Regional Museum for Carniola in Ljubljana at the end of the 19th century at numerous sites in Dolenjska and Bela krajina. He excavated at the important Iron Age site of Vače near Litija mostly in 1889. This site produced extremely well preserved...

In 1992 the Narodni muzej Slovenije (National Museum of Slovenia) in Ljubljana acquired a collection of 25 archaeological finds from Matej Magajna in Ljubljana, which he claimed to have inherited from his relatives. The nicest object is an iron socketed axe with a facetted socket, decorated with ten vertical inlaid bronze strips and two zoomorphic...

Neither the archaeologists who dealt with the Iapodic cemeteries in the Una Valley in Bosnia and Herzegovina nor those who studied Certosa fibulae have until now paid attention to the fact that almost all bronze Certosa fibulae of variant VII f from Jezerine in Pritoka and from Ribić lack the spring and pin. These are not preserved because they wer...

The author assigns ten fibulae, distributed only in Friuli and in the Soča region, to a new type of Middle La Tène construction fibulae, named by him the “San Floriano type.” Until now different authors have ascribed them to various types, e.g. the Kastav and Picugi types of fibulae. Four of them are of silver, the rest are bronze. The reverted foo...

Three double-crested helmets were discovered in the Hallstatt period cemeteries around Vače. All three were lying in rich warrior graves. The first of these, discovered in August 1881, also contained the Vače Situla, found later. The excavator Jernej Pečnik succeeded in finding the third grave in August 1889. In this paper we present the second gr...

Odkri­tje portreta Antona Tomaž­a Li­nharta i­n zastopanost Li­nharta i­n Prešerna v Macu­novem i­n Mi­kloši­čevi­h beri­li­h. Li­nharta so zamolčevali­, Prešerna so cenzuri­rali­, pa vendar je njuno leposlovno delo preži­velo vse te udarce zgodovi­ne i­n je še zdaj ži­vo i­n polno aktualni­h sporoči­l.

Odkritje Linhartovega portreta (po več kot dvesto letih) v slikovni zbirki na Dunaju in pozno pojavljanje Linhartovih komedij v slovenskih srednješolskih berilih.

The results of recent research carried out on the finds from the excavations of the Duchess of Mecklenburg in Slovenia show that many of the grave groups from the Hallstatt period tumuli on Magdalenska gora and at Stična as presented in the books of H. Hencken and P. S. Wells are incorrect. The changeable history of this collection has led to some...

The excavations at the settlement in Virovitica revealed fibulae which, along with many ceramic forms, allow us to place the settlement in the Late La Tène period. Similarities with the ceramic finds from contemporaneous settlements in the Slovenian part of Podravina and Prekmurje are particularly numerous. Fibula cast in lead bronze belongs to the...

The burial deposits from the grave with a cuirass from tumulus 52 or IV at Sticna, excavated by the Duchess of Mecklenburg in 1913, have already been published four times and have been differently presented each time. None of the four versions completely corresponds with the data in the notes of the Duchess's secretary, Gustav Goldberg. Of the find...

The book contains a presentation of all preserved archaeological finds discovered in 1890 in Novo mesto on part of a road that until 1993 was the initial part of Ljubljanska cesta (Ljubljana road) and from then on the beginning of Seidlova cesta (Seidl's road), and of finds excavated in 1902 in the area of Okrajno glavarstvo (District board). The m...

Monografska publikacija o meteoritih nasploh in o meteoritu, ki je padel v bližini Avč v Soški dolini 31. marca leta 1908.

Prispevek o prvem najdenem slovenskem meteoritu, ki je 31. marca leta 1908 kot meteor (velika žareča in grmeča krogla) v jutranjih urah preletel Gorenjsko, v zraku eksplodiral in kot dobro kilo težak kos kovine priletel v jablano v bližini vasi Avče. Pristal je v Naravoslovnem muzeju na Dunaju, kjer je še danes. Najditelj in lastnik parcele sta sku...

In the late Roman hill-top fortification on the Gora above Polhov Gradec to the west of Ljubljana three hoards were discovered in the years 1868, 1883 and 1935, composed of objects datable to the second half of the 4th or the beginning of the 5th centuries AD. The first hoard contained seven bronze bells, two iron saw blades and five iron axes. Apa...

During 1886, the first excavation year of the large Early Iron Age cremation cemetery V logu at Kobarid in the Upper Soča Valley (western Slovenia), where until now more than 1400 graves have been uncovered, Carlo Marchesetti from Trieste found a horse skeleton above a Hallstatt period cremation grave, covered with a stone slab. Associated with it...

Michel Feugère was the first who collected small tear-shaped objects and explained them in the year 2000 as the feet of Roman bronze vessels, soldered in threes to the bottoms of bronze vessels, in his opinion perhaps big bronze situlae. One foot from Köln and maybe two others in the form of a lunula from Baden in Switzerland and the Augustan camp...

The study of writing equipment gained a recent development due to the identification of artefacts connected to writing practice including the two complementary methods, using wax and ink during the Antiquity. The presence of these items in archaeological digs, the analysis of their occurrence and of their evolution can give indications on the diffu...

Izvleček Leta 1818 je v gomili, ki je ležala jugozahodno od opiduma Larina v bližini Lyona, grof Verna izkopal enega najbogatejših poznolatenskih grobov, kar jih poznamo. V njem odkrite najdbe so se hranile v privatni zbirki do leta 1995, ko so bile odkupljene za Hišo dediščine v kraju Hières-sur-Amby. Grob javnosti ni bil znan do leta 2002, ko sta...

In 1818 in a tumulus lying to the south-west of the oppidum of Larina, not far from Lyon, one of the richest Late La Tène graves ever found was excavated by the Count of Verna. The grave inventory belonged to the Verna private collection until 1995 when it was purchased by Hières-sur-Amby Maison du Patrimoine. It remained unpublished until 2002, wh...

In 1980 Ljudmila Plesničar published a Roman grave, discovered to the south-east of the colony of Emona (modern Ljubljana) along the road leading towards the municipium Neviodunum (modern Drnovo near Krško). The grave inventory included among other items a marble casket, two iron and four bone objects, explained by the author as an iron chopping-kn...

Among the numerous small finds from the excavations carried out in the years 1978/79 on the Münsterhügel in Basel (Switzerland), was an exceptionally well-made phallic bone pendant with a longitudinally-perforated crossbar. Phallic pendants of this type belong to a Late Republican group, most of which have come from Spain and Italy, while in Centr...

Among the small finds from the early Roman workshop of militaria, excavated at Gornji trg 3 in Ljubljana (Slovenia), there is a fragmented small bronze rectangular plate with indentations at the upper edge and two semi-circular cuttings at the lower edge. It can be identified as a plate, which connected two vessels (for the black and red ink) of th...

Longitudinal bone plates with an ear or a head at the upper end were interpreted as labels, weaving tools or polishers of wax or parchment. The body is rectangular or trapezoidal, the circular ears are small and have a small hole in the centre, but the heads are mostly oval or round and as wide as the body. On the basis of a scene on one of the si...

For writing on papyrus, parchment, and even wooden tablets in antiquity the writers needed next to a black or red ink a pen (calamus). The use of feathers (quill pens) for writing with ink was first mentioned in the 7th century AD. In the Roman period the most frequent pens were made out of reed stems. They have been only very rarely preserved. Me...

One of the almost 400 graves of the Roman cemetery of Windisch-Dägerli to the south of the legionary camp of Vindonissa in Switzerland was ascribed to a female doctor on the basis of two scalpels. A small cylindrical bronze vessel with a missing cover could also be a pyxis for some unguent or medicament according to D. Hintermann. It is, however,...

A small circular bronze plate, found in a pit of the early Roman military camp at Zurzach on the Rhine river in Switzerland, represents the small cover of the Biebrich type of Roman bronze inkwells, dated to the first half of the 1st century AD. It has an eccentrically placed thick rivet, and bears a bird-like handle at its upper end and a pointed...

Two fragmented small finds from Augst (Augusta Raurica) in Switzerland were interpreted by Emilie Riha as double scalpels, maybe tools of wandering surgeons. They consist of two tapering arms with perforated upper terminals. The axis inserted through the holes has in one case a flat and in the other case a vase-shaped head. The opposite part of the...

In Instrumentum 7, 1998, p. 28 an unidentified bronze object found on the surface of a Gallo-Roman settlement at Château-Porcien (Ardennes) was published by Bernard Lambot. He knew of an identical item from the Marne region. Already in 1989, however, an object of exactly the same form from Petronell in Austria was interpreted as a possible chariot-...

Three very similar fragments of Roman objects were interpreted as mirror or knife handles, the first from the Saalburg fortress in Germany in 1897, the second from grave 1 at Monte do Farrobo in Portugal in 1974 and the third from Milano in Italy in 1991. The fourth similar item from Porolissum in Roumania was explained as a handle of a medical ins...

Pierre Abauzit from Béziers (France) presented in 2000 six square or rectangular plates from Southern France, made of bronze sheet and decorated mostly with figural motifs and open-work borders. The open-work decoration consists of alternating triangles and crescents. Previous suggestions of their function in the preceding publications include deco...

In 1975 Jochen Garbsch from Munich collected, dated and interpreted a special type of Roman small knives. They mostly have a copper-alloy, rarely bone handle with a typical fish bladder-shaped cutting. The rarely preserved iron blade has parallel neck and cutting edge and oblique terminal edge. Garbsch defined this type of knives, which mostly appe...

From the large cemetery of Dobřichov-Pičhora in Bohemia, which is mostly dated to the early Roman Imperial period, originates a bronze fragment, interpreted by Eduard Droberjar as an upper part of a Roman seal box. It has a vertical cast ear with a small ring in the hole and below the ear the upper part of an oval plate with two horizontally placed...

During the excavations of the eastern suburb of the ancient town Heraclea (modern Bitola) in the Republic of Macedonia, which was destroyed in fire in the first half of the 5th century AD, a rare copper-alloy object was found and interpreted as a pair of tweezers. The handle is in the form of a column and has at the top a circular loop and each of...

Among the finds discovered in the Middle Augustan workshop of militaria, in room OR/17 of the settlement on Magdalensberg in Carinthia (Austria), there are three perforated bronze buttons, interpreted as possible top decorations of Roman standards. Two of these buttons are cubic and have two opposing ears with a hanging ring. The third button has a...

In 1996 Eckhard Deschler-Erb published an iron find from Augusta Raurica, which in his opinion might be a catapult bolt or an awl. It bears four rectangular stamps. Since we know several stamped Roman awls of different types, excavated in the limes fortresses Zugmantel and Saalburg in Germany and in the Kupa river near Sisak in Croatia, we think th...

According to Günter Ulbert, among the finds from the Late Republican military camp of Cáceres el Viejo in Spain are four miniature bronze vessels. One of them should be turned 180 degrees. It is a fact a decorated upper knob of an Etrusco-Italic helmet. It is the only helmet fragment from this camp, which presumably existed until around 80 BC. The...

The article discusses the accidental discovery of the exact location of Emperor Zeno's tremissis near Smarjeta in Dolenjska, Slovenia, which led to the uncovering of a significant late Roman fortification at Gradec near Velika Strmica in 1993. This site, known for over a hundred years but previously assumed to be medieval, features well-preserved r...