A well-preserved wooden cart and the skeletons of two horses found last year in the Thracian grave of a Roman official or rich landowner. A large family tumulus contains at least two more such burials, one of which has been excavated. The work was hampered by heavy rain.

At least three Roman wooden carts, and not just one, as initially believed, have been located in a 2,000-year-old Thracian grave on Greece’s northeastern borders, an archaeologist said yesterday.

Speaking at the opening of a three-day conference in Thessaloniki on last year’s archaeological work in Macedonia and Thrace, Diamantis Triandafyllos said the discovery near the village of Mikri Doxipara, some 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) west of Orestias, was the first of its kind in Greece.

A 6-meter-high and 60-meter-wide tumulus has been found to contain three, and, maybe, four, wooden carts — one of which was preserved almost intact — dating to the first century AD, and two separate human cremations, of a man and a woman.

Along with each of the two carts excavated so far, which had four iron wheels and were decorated with bronze and silver-gilt ornaments, was buried a pair of horses. Triandafyllos, an expert on the archaeology of Thrace, said the carts had been used to carry the dead to their funerals.