Andreea Medar & Malina Ionescu

For Marin Șeclăman (20.XII.1938 – 17.III.2019), who would have wanted the Melinești area to be researched.

A first premise of the project is the desire of the geologist Marin Șeclăman, uncle of Andreea Medar, brother of her grandmother, to see the Melinești area, which he considered of geological interest, investigated. A second premise is the series of stories from the people of the village and members of the extended family, about fossils discovered in the area, about tools and traces of settlement, about mammoth tusks but especially about the shells that appear in the most unexpected places, often confusing local gardening or digging wells. One of the villagers has the only outcrop in that part of the village in her garden, where it gets very messy, and where for many decades she has been in the habit of breaking up all the fossils with a hoe to make way for vegetable beds.

The local community is generally aware that these fossils exist, but associates them more with the Amaradia River than with the Paratethys Sea, from whose basin they come. The largest outcrop, with fossils that in local legend are much larger than those in the gardens or on the banks of the Amaradia River, is inaccessible, being occupied by a sheepfold. It is thus not possible to confirm whether these shells are species other than those collected.

The project proposes first of all a geological mapping of the area. A first research together with a specialist, geologist Vlad Iorgoni, from the Geopark of Hațeg County, meant collecting rocks and fossils, identifying them and dating them approximately, and in a later stage a series of maps, drawings, a reconstruction, a stratigraphy and a research of rocks and limestone formations in the area, together with a team.

The clams in Mrs Mili’s garden in Melinești are identified as Phylum Mollusca, Class Bivalvia, which are a class of both marine and freshwater molluscs (limnobios). Their bodies consist of two articulated parts called “valves” (hence the name bivalves) and the dentition has a ligamentous role. The bivalves found in the Melinești area are very similar to those of the “unio” species (the genus has yet to be precisely identified), a species characterized by an oval, elongated, relatively thick or medium-thick shell with an important layer of pearl, concentric stripes, a prosogir umbo and a heterodont dentition; they also prefer flowing waters. The species has a long history, dating from the Triassic to the present day, and is still extant.

*  A nod to Terry Pratchett, who wrote of the chalk

In collaboration with :

Team – Simultan festival

Diane Pricop – Obsolete Studio

Vlad Iorgoni – Geoparc Hateg

Mihai Medar – photo / video

Irina Elena Medar – photo video assistant