Archaeologists in Poland have recently made the very surprising discovery of a fully intact village that has been hidden in a remote forest and untouched by time for the past 2,000 years.

As the First News has reported, the ancient village found in Poland was detected using Aerial Laser Scanning (ALS) and is believed to be the very first of its kind to have ever been discovered in Europe. The region that was unearthed has still managed to retain its boundary strips, buildings, roads and homesteads even after the passing of thousands of years.

Part of the reason why this settlement of 170 hectares has managed to elude archaeologists for so long is that it is located in the Bory Tucholskie region of northern Poland, which is an area that had not been investigated thoroughly.

As archaeologist Mateusz Sosnowski from the NCU Institute of Archeology (Nicolaus Copernicus University) in Toruń explained, when the 2,000-year-old village was discovered it was found in a completely virgin and forested territory with not just the village itself, but also the entire settlement which still surrounded it.

“When it comes to research, it was virgin territory. It was a great surprise to discover there not only individual elements of a former settlement, but also its surroundings: fields surrounding the hamlet, traces of single homesteads and even tracts connecting them probable with other settlements.”

Many of the remains that have been discovered around the Polish village most likely belong to very early in the modern era, perhaps during the Middle Ages, according to Sosnowski and Jerzy Czerniec, the other archaeologist who helped to discover the site.

Sosnowski has noted that one of the most important and unique things about this ancient site is that when archaeologists stumble upon finds like this, they generally only unearth very small and individual pieces of settlements, rather than discovering settlements as a whole that are still relatively untouched by time.

Most of these discoveries generally also come about through the construction of either new housing developments or roads, which means that the scope of such archaeological discoveries is almost always small. As Sosnowski further explained, the Bory Tucholskie settlement around the 2,000-year-old village in Poland is completely different.

“Here we have an entirely different situation. We have tracked down unknown traces of an ancient Bory Tucholskie settlement. It’s not a matter of one house or a fragment of a settlement. We have an entire estate together with its surrounding farmland in the form of fields and pastures, where all the elements come from the same period. It’s unique!”

With the surprising discovery of the 2,000-year-old Polish village that was found in the forests of Bory Tucholskie, archaeologists will now be studying this ancient settlement to learn more about its timeline and history.