A student and disciple of Vasile Pârvan at the University of Bucharest, he had a youthful activity collecting and publishing Oltenian songs and poetry, being the first to document Romanian folklore as produced during the peasants' revolt of 1907, and committing to writing the regional variants of Miorița ballad.

He set as his personal ambition an archaeological scrutiny of the entire region, in order to uncover "the traces of the most ancient people to have inhabited Oltenia", a population he initially believed had originated in Asia.

[8] Around 1923, Nicolăescu-Plopșor had begun digging on elevated sites known locally as măguri, uncovering crouched skeletons with residues of ochre, before turning his attention to other locations, where he discovered the remains of prehistoric dwellings.

Graur also criticized Plopșor's written Romani: entirely modeled on the Romanian alphabet, it "could only render exact pronunciation with some approximation"; it also used the word variants most popular with the Ursari tribes, but not consistently so.

[41] By his own account, Plopșor was also disappointed with the two-party system, which also included the National Peasants' Party; when one of the latter's least cultured politicians asked him to ghostwrite his speech, he purposefully infused it with ridiculous phrasing and self-mockery.

[45] Nicolăescu-Plopșor helped organize an International Numismatic Congress, held at Craiova in 1934; on this occasion, he discovered the 15-year-old Octavian Iliescu, a future researcher in the field, whom he tasked with carrying out an inventory of available coins.

[7] Plopșor was also putting out a regional-themed book collection, under the name of Pământ și Suflet Oltenesc ("Oltenian Land and Spirit"), noted for its publication of Ilariu Dobridor's verse[48] and his own set of memoirs (as Amintiri).

[51] By then, Plopșor was editing a new cultural magazine, Gând și Slovă Oltenească ("Oltenian Thinking and Writing"), listed by literary historian George Călinescu as one of the main interwar periodicals in the region (alongside Ramuri, Mihail Gușiță's Datina, and Eugen Constant's Condeiul).

[54] In 1940, during a dictatorial regime established by King Carol II, he joined the state political party, called National Renaissance Front, and its Dolj organization, headed by Emanuel Tătărescu.

[15] As noted in 1994 by literary columnist C. D. Zeletin, as early as 1945 he had become aware that the Romanian Communist Party would generate a new land reform, and liquidated his own interests as a landowner (this allowed him to serve as chairman of the expropriation board).

[3] Following the post-1950 discoveries of Paleolithic human remains and choppers at the Bugiulești and Valea lui Grăunceanu locations in Tetoiu, as well as in other areas of northern Oltenia and Muntenia, he had become one of the main participants in uncovering and analyzing the newly opened sites.

[8] A feature-length cartoon version was considered by Animafilm in 1966, and Nicolăescu-Plopșor wrote the screenplay;[71] also that year, Frăsina Vlad, the award-winning naive artist, exhibited a cycle of paintings directly inspired by Tivisoc și Tivismoc.

[74] With fellow intellectuals such as Petre Pandrea, Vasile Georgescu Paleolog and Stelian Cincă, he took part in literary sessions organized by the Oltenian magazine, Ramuri,[75] having been a contributor from its first issue of this new edition, appearing in August 1964.

[17] He also concluded that the region almost completely lacked human presence during the Paleolithic (a matter which he tentatively attributed to the harsh Pleistocene climate) and debated such assessments with fellow archaeologist Márton Roska.

[85] In his initial verdicts on the Upper Paleolithic, Plopșor followed a tendency common among scholars of his day, believing the Szeletian to be a manifestation of the Solutrean in Hungary and Transylvania, and saw both industries as related to the Aurignacian.

[86] The research into măguri prompted Nicolăescu-Plopșor to draw a comparison with the Mesolithic køkkenmødding sites of Northern Europe, which he linked with the practice of hunting and fishing, whereas the Oltenian locations evidenced a lifestyle related to agriculture and herding.

Starting from the observation that Iron-Age Dacian communities displayed a lifestyle similar to Neolithic patterns, and reducing protohistory to a sharp divide between archaeological evidence and the first written records, he concluded that, in Oltenia's case, "prehistory" extended throughout the Roman administration and down to a period conventionally included in the Early Middle Ages.

At the time, he came to argue that the Romanian Paleolithic began with a "pebble culture" (cultura de prund), or Eopaleolithic, which preceded Archeopaleolithic (between Chellean and Clactonian), Mesopaleolithic (Levalloisian and Upper Mousterian), Acropaleolithic (Aurignacian and Kostenkian), Epipaleolithic (Azilian and Swiderian), and Preneolithic.

[95] During the final two decades of Nicolăescu-Plopșor's activity, he adopted a controversial approach to naming and classifying local cultures, prioritizing Soviet and Eastern-Bloc scholarship in accordance with the communist regime's ideological requirements.

[8] The usage of real-life peasant expressions, regional or pan-Romanian, extends to elaborate catchphrases (își bagă nasul unde nu-i fierbe oala, "he puts his nose where his pot's not boiling", as in: "he does not mind his own business"; chip-nechip, "face or no face"—"by hook or by crook"), self-contradicting augmentative diminutives (cât îi ziulica de lungă, "the full length of a little day", expressly intended to mean "the longer part of the day"), and interjections appearing as verbs (iacătă și ursul, "hop!

[105] In the Ceaùr cycle, Morariu detects numerous terms only found in Oltenian and Istro-Romanian: arâmbașa / harambașa for a hajduk commander, amânat used for "belated", besedie for "nonsense talk", the prefix ză- used for verbs, and the preservation of quaint grammatical tenses.

[106] The main product of Nicolăescu-Plopșor's creative storytelling is Tivisoc și Tivismoc, but the category also includes a version of the Iovan Iorgovan stories and a fairy tale titled Cotoșman împărat ("Emperor Tomcat").

[21] As argued by Morariu, the latter is in fact a fable, with none of the narratives in Ceaùr actually fitting the descriptor as "tales" or "stories"; as he notes, Plopșor's contribution as an author is "evidently manifest" in his scholarly commentary, scene descriptions and modern expressions (including at least one borrowing from Alecu Donici), all of which were added over the source material.

Cerna-Rădulescu describes the book as an "ambitious attempt to complete a folk novel", as well as an idirect proof that absurdist fiction, as embodied in modern times by Urmuz and Eugène Ionesco, "has its roots planted in Romanian folklore".

[113] The main part of the story, in which the focus is on Tivisoc and Tivismoc, sees the unborn boys accompanying their future father on a quest to find a suitable mother, and later their trip to the mill, where they seem prone to do all things backwards and manage to literally lose their own heads (having to recover them from hungry dogs).

[114] The real adventure starts when birds transport them to Scaunu dreptății ("The Seat of Justice"), a mock version of the Last Judgment, which provides the setting for anticlerical jokes and satire of Christian mythology: God is depicted as aging and incompetent, Jesus as a young man "dozing off and scratching his thin beard", Mary as "a middle-aged woman with blue, terrified eyes".

[116] Saint Peter allows the two boys to bribe their way into Heaven, whose human population has been driven to disgust by the endless supply of milk and mămăligă—while in there, they repeat the story of Adam and Eve and taste unpalatable fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

[118] Once in charge of Hell, Tivisoc and Tivismoc free all categories of folk heroes who are also sinners, primarily hajduks and other celebrated brigands, but, Popescu notes, display Păcală's mix of "intelligence and stupidity" in planning their getaway: the entire group follows the two boys up a rope of sand.

[127] Following the December 1989 Revolution and the end of communism, as part of a larger trend to provide communes with individual coats of arms, Sălcuța chose to be represented by a golden quill and ink bottle, in honor of its native son.

[131] The Museum of Oltenia holds a special Nicolăescu-Plopșor collection, which includes his book manuscripts and published works, as well as his correspondence with fellow intellectuals such as Dumitru Berciu, Constantin Daicoviciu and Ion Nestor.