The wooden pavement can be dated to the 13th or the 14th centuries, according to Sergei Troyanovsky, the man leading the excavations in the Novgorod Kremlin.
Fragments of a fence have been found at this same site, as well; it may have been built to detach the pavement from a homestead, Troyanovsky said.
The logs, cut in half, were slightly scorched in a fire. "After that blaze, the street pavement must have been covered with sand to disappear from view for many subsequent centuries," the archeologist explained.
Archeologists may well come across other interesting finds at what they consider to be one of the "most mysterious and least explored" of sites. Thus, for instance, they expect to uncover a moat or a ravine that divided the Kremlin into the south and the north, and also the foundation of a 16th-century building. The cultural layer at the site goes 4.5 meters deep, and excavations are be done in an area of 130 square meters.
Archeological excavations are quite rare in the Novgorod Kremlin, which is why just two percent of its territory has been explored thus far, Troyanovsky said. Most of earlier excavations were done here for restoration or construction purposes, and excavation sites covered ten to twenty square meters, on the average. "Such small excavations could be described as keyholes through which specialists tried to see the millennium-long history of the Kremlin," noted the archeologist.
