The stone quarry from Măgura Călanului, initiated with great probability during the reign of Burebista, functioned for several generations, until the Roman conquest, at the beginning of the the 2nd century AD.
The ruins of the fortresses from the Șureanu Mountains were known to the locals for centuries, and the treasure hunters ravaged them from an early age.
Only the discovery of large treasures near the fortress from Grădiștii Hill at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries alerted the authorities and led to investigations in the area. There were official excavation campaigns followed in 1803-1804 at Grădiștea Muncelului, in order to find gold, action which attracted the attention of several scholars of the time.
From this moment on, the news of the existence of strange ancient cities in the mountains will attract a number of scientists, which throughout the nineteenth century and until the First World War will climb on the difficult mountain paths to get to see with their own eyes and explore the ruins.
The first remarks will inevitably be related to the huge amount of shaped stone used in these fortresses. The stone itself proved, at the most superficial analysis, that it came from somewhere other than the area where the fortresses were built. The source from which the limestone from these fortresses was mined is correctly identified as early as 1805, and the first observations made by professional geologists will be made at the beginning of the XXth century
(paper)
Mine Supervisor Bernhard Aigler, in charge of conducting the excavations organized by the Austrian tax authorities at Grădiștea Muncelului, writes in August 1803 in one of the first reports that the walls of the fortress there are made of stone blocks of sand with a large grain (Jakó, 1968, p. 440).
In 1805, in another tax report, Bögözi admires the skill of the stonemasons who made those stone blocks and the fact that they were provided with grooves for joining (photo), and notice that they are made of fine-grained limestone. It indicates as a source of the stone used at Grădiște the Totier area, located one day away, identifiable as the village of Totia north of the Măgura Călanului hill.
Téglás Gábor, who visited the Grădiștea in 1884, clearly states in his writings that the limestone blocks come from Sântămăria de Piatră and from this moment the identification of the area of origin is no longer questioned. At the beginning of the 20th century, Finály Gábor quoted the Hungarian geologist Antal Koch, which indicates as a source for the blocks from the Dacian fortresses Piatra Roșie and Grădiștea Muncelului the (oolithic an fossiliferous) limestones around the baths from Călan and Măgura Călanului.
In the second half of the 21st century, field informative research made by archaeologists, sometimes accompanied by geologists, has been supplemented by mineralogical-petrographic analyzes who proved that the source of limestone blocks for the Dacian fortresses from the Orăștie Mountains is undoubted the area of carbonate deposits of Volchynian age from Măgura hill (Mârza, 1995 – the only available paper related to the mineralogy of some limestone blocks from fortresses and from Magura).
Mapping and field observations at Măgura Călanului hill were made also by the team of the independent projects PETRODAC and THE STONE QUARRIES OF THE DACIANS, throughout the period 2011-2018, followed by some presentations and informative papers. From 2019, the geological research continues as work phase in RoQ-STONE project, with budget founds. A first observation following corroboration of field data and office processing is a larger/different development of the limestone quarry (more than “an area in the shape of the letter L in the mirror, with sides of 400 x 600 m”)
The southern area of the hill is still marked today by the areas arranged for storage for transport and by the mounds with fragments resulting from the secondary processing.
