 Thank you very much. So while we're closing gaps in the exploration of heat-tops, which is a very good development because they're still very difficult to explore, we'd like to add another type of site in the mountains to the discussion. A type of site that has not been discussed much for bronze and iron age archaeology, which are the caves of which there are many all over the Balkans. But in this project, too, actually, it started with a German-Albanian cooperation on Paleolithic and Mesolithic archaeology. So Thomas Howe from the University of Cologne and Professor Richter, but also Ludens Ruka, who's also at the Institute of Archaeology in Tirana, which is represented by Iliad Givalli. They wanted actually to explore the Paleolithic in Albania and they have chosen several caves to explore and they will come back to this. So we actually joined in later to study then the overlaying of bronze age and early iron age finds, which clearly show that those caves have been used much later as well, and not just by hunter-gatherers while releasing a Mesolithic period. So the three caves we want to present today, but this is really preliminary results from the pottery studies that have now to be integrated into the further exploration and all the other types of finds are located in the Mati district, a bit further north from Tirana, like a two-hour drive as its mountainous region, near the town of Gurel in northern Albania. Albania in general is a country that, of course, I mean, by force all archaeology in Albania is mountain archaeology, although the projects often do not concentrate on a specific theoretical framework or discussion related to mountain archaeology. But Albania is really dominated by all these western Balkan countries by those north-south mountain ranges, and you can see they really reach to the coast and a good part of the Albanian coast is actually inaccessible completely. So just to give you a few ideas, so this is from the road that leads from the south to Tirana, so you can see how the most part of the country is, and just at the horizon you would see the Adriatic Sea, or then between the mountains some of those inland highland plains, according to the typology of Maria Ivanova from the beginning. So this is in the southeast of Albania. As you can see some highland plains at about 800 meters above sea level connected also to marshy areas and lakes, and actually behind you then see the borders of Greece. But in the north it's a bit more rocked as you can see the lake areas at the borders towards Montenegro and Kosovo. But between all those mountains you have the river valleys which make, of course, the connections and a good fertile land where you would find a lot of occupation, but which are also difficult to explore because of erosion layers from the mountains covering older sites. But these river valleys are, of course, the connections between the different parts of the southwestern Balkans and Albania used from prehistory as we'll see, but also in this region that's now leading from Elbasan down towards Ochrid and the southeast of Albania was used by the Bia Ignatija by the Romans and last also by several nice Ottoman breaches. So leading down towards the region which was actually our point of entry to Albania from Maya and myself at the excavation, the French-Albanian excavation in Sovian, a wetland site. Maya, she already told you about some details so we'll not go more into this. A multi-layered site with a new lithic to early Iron Age layers in this highland plane about 800 meters, as I said, above sea level. A plane that we explored after 2007 when the excavation has been completed or at least stopped for the moment with intensive survey of all the plane which has been, which is actually a drained marshy lake. And in the last years and this will be more interesting than for the mountain archaeology, but I will not yet present the results because this is really ongoing and there was this summer as well, the exploration now of all the hilltop sites and slopes around the plane and there is dozens of hill forts that are known since many decades but that have never been explored in detail and for many there is no dating pottery so far and I think we can now add in the next years dates to many of those sites. So the plane again about 800 meters above sea level, this is really mountain archaeology and actually there is many projects around in this area which is the focus of Albanian prehistoric archaeology. You see at the corner of the three countries and it's not that all is excluded or remote area there is projects working on the very earliest Neolithic cultures like an American-Albanian cooperation in Vashtimi that completed the excavation but also in very diverse environments. All this again high up in the mountains even archaeology of islands which has a Bronze Age occupation explored by a Greek-Albanian team in the Prespa Lake or then now new exploration started by the University of Bern with a near-sea grant in Lake Ohrid in northern Macedonia where we have piled wellings as we know well from Switzerland. But we always should also add northern Greece I think to Balkan archaeology. There is more activity now recently and there is also Bronze Age sites appearing high up in the mountains like in the Samarina area. Again these are more the Paleolithic archaeologists exploring this area but of course they find much more recent finds as well. So like at 1750 meters above sea level which is also one of the highest located villages of modern Greece with a pottery that is very close to what we find in the middle to late Bronze Age layers in Sovian across the borders. And Ilyer Cipali also is one of the co-authors of this paper from the Institute of Archaeology at Irana. He also did recently a lot of exploration of hilltop sites in the region called Haonia on the very southwest of Albania where we have also along the Ionian and Adriatic coast many of the hilltop sites which is not much surprising when you see what's going on a bit further north as we have seen today. But also in the very north of Albania there is a project in the mountain valleys. There was an American Albanian corporation the Shala Valley which has been fully published now which is one of the really remote areas of Albania that were remote actually up to modern days and so there was a lot of ethnological exploration as well together with archaeology and I think it took actually of the bigger part of the project but they did the test excavations on different sites partially also the early Iron Age just to quote one example of the site of Grunas which is also part of the publication of this project. But having arrived now in northern Albania take one step again a bit further south to the Burel region so explored by the German-Albanian Paleolithic project which focused not only on this area but also on other caves in Albania just to show one of the examples the rock shelter which is close to the coast in Canali and there too of course overlaying quite a good amount of bronze age material which compares well to what we know from the settlement sites inland and on the coast and this was the same thing what they then found in the caves so in the Blazin-Azeri and Kaputa caves in this mud district near to Burel just to show one of the examples they're actually quite deep those caves some were probably connected to the really close together actually and so overlaying those layers with the Paleolithic finds and the Mesolithic finds there was also several meters in one of the caves at least of bronze age material as you can see these caves are located a bit more than 300 meters above sea level overlooking again one of those Plateaus or inland river plains that are known well known from archaeology but we actually do not know about other settlements but we know about more than a dozen of tumuli that have been excavated and published in detail tumuli from the bronze age to the Iron Age but what we were focusing on in four study seasons from 2015 to 17 was the pottery now from the new excavation campaign so the uppermost layers in those three caves and comparing it also to the earlier material from the 1950s, late 70s and 80s from the caves that have been already published in preliminary results in Illyria so the early bronze age, just to give you a short overview of what we encountered has been represented mainly in the Blase Cave I thought there is the reference stratigraphy actually for Northern Albania in the Ziri and some early bronze age material too and now we can date that this was one of the more important impacts of the new project now to date on those stratigraphies that have already been excavated in the 80s we can date this layer, this early bronze age layer in the Blase Cave to actually the later part of the early bronze age to about 2300, 2150 BC Interestingly, Maya she identified several of the Setina type shirts which compare well to what we know from, for example, Raflica Petsina in Bosnia Herzegovina a site that is very famous for its nice Setina type pottery so actually this Setina material reached also quite inland and upland again, according to Maria's typology of mountain regions this can be compared, as I said, also to one of the layers in the reference stratigraphy of the Naziri cave and has been linked also to the stratigraphies of Malice close to Sovian in the southeast of Albania but we have some doubts if these synchronisms actually work out I mean the connections as we can see in the material are much more towards the north and towards the south at least for the early bronze age and interestingly there is also one fragment of some kind of figurine which might also indicate some other types of use of the caves I mean we talk about periods when we know much more I mean open settlements are much more common than the use of caves but again this might also be part of the research which didn't at all focus on the caves for the middle bronze age there is also a layer in the Blasi cave and in the Naziri caves but this is a period that's really much less well known in Albania than what we just heard about this beautiful material from Dalmatia and the further north in the Balkans, in Albania this period can almost not be recognized because we still do not really know about typology and how to recognize this material but still we can do some synchronism between the caves and our stratigraphies from Sovian and there is some technological synchronisms that appear at the same period of time I mean in pottery technology like this method of attaching the handles that show that there is clear communication between the north and the south of Albania the Late Bronze Age 10 is much better known it has also been ready published in parts and has very typical material that is almost the same what we then would find in Sovian and Malic in the southeast of Albania and you see here one of the pictures of this very deep stratigraphy inside the cave of Naziri and one of the really great new results of the project is to go like half a meter behind this stratigraphy and take now body-apartment samples to really date what has been done in the late 70s and early 80s but it also shows the problem of the Paleolithic archaeologists because they have to dig through all this in order to reach there a big Gravetian stones the Late Bronze Age is also the period when these tumourly have been created that some of the material is definitely of the Late Bronze Age typology and interestingly there is also some of those I mean so many times quoted the Mycenaean types, the type swords and knives that have been found even up here quite far in the north in land areas which therefore were not that remote one map of the Mycenaean imports especially with the metal finds I mean okay there can be added many more sites since 2002 but it clearly shows how all these finds they reached in land areas of the southwestern Balkans along those river valleys which was also the same case for the mud district so the uppermost layer we found in the caves and you can see it's really the uppermost layers the pottery was on the floor covered by stalagmite material up to one millimeter thick sometimes really hard then to identify pottery was an early Iron Age and it's actually almost only those fragments of these so-called turban dishes which are well known I mean from the south and the western parts and even central parts of the Balkans it's a bit difficult to really understand the interior of the cave because this material has already been collected some in the 50s again in the 70s 80s and then in the 2010 years and they actually joined together and we get the impression it was really a spread of several bowls that have been broken in place several dozen of bones bowls that have been broken inside the caves during some sporadic use some further drawings of this material very typical and there's almost nothing else for the early Iron Age so people were sporadically visiting those caves but certainly not velling inside but we do not know where the settlements themselves should be located in the valley then at some point like 7th maybe 6th century at the very latest that the use of those caves will stop and there's just very sporadic use with some medieval and Ottoman material also found inside and there's actually cast a very badly preserved that was built on the rock on top of the caves while the tumuli as obviously as you can see go on up to at least to the arcade period that's with some very nice assemblages of jewellery now this is not the only cave but I think there has to be done much more systematic work on linking all those caves in Albania but in a larger region as well just to quote two examples one is the Himara cave on the coast that has been used also during almost all of prehistory and the latest the Late Bronze Age and in the early Iron Age and up to the 5th century BC in a period when there was already the Greek colonies the Greek site established just beside the caves it was certainly not a place of dwelling just with a view inside and actually in the Korca region where we were working for many years there is also one of the caves that has a lot of material of the early Iron Age and the site is just located on top of the rock but people are still continuing to use the cave and there is even cooking pots inside the cave that have been used so there is still certainly a lot of work to be done and we have to integrate the study of the pottery with the rest of the material from those caves but it looks like we have maybe in the earlier phase we have a more complete assemblage of pottery but still there are some shapes just to quote one example sticking out for maybe some richer use but at least for the very latest phases in the early Iron Age it looks that we have more special use and not any more settlement and that these caves definitely were linked to further way regions I mean of the caves themselves but the whole area of the Maud district at 300 meters above sea level in the mountains thank you very much