Vinča culture
Culture | Defunct
5500 BCE to 4500 BCE
The Vinča culture is a Neolithic archaeological culture of southeastern Europe, dated to the period 5500–4500 BCE.
Named for its type site, Vinča-Belo Brdo, a large tell settlement discovered by Serbian archaeologist Miloje Vasić in 1908, it is thought to represent the material remains of a prehistoric tribal society chiefly characterized by their settlement pattern and ritual behavior.
The Vinča culture further adapted the Neolithic package of farming technology, imported into the region during the First Temperate Neolithic, to the local climate, fueling a population boom that made Vinča settlements among the largest in prehistoric Europe.
While there is no indication the network of Vinča settlements were politically unified, they maintained a high degree of cultural uniformity through the long-distance exchange of ritual items.
Various styles of zoomorphic and anthromorphic figurines are associated with the culture, as are the Vinča symbols, which are conjectured to be an early form of proto-writing.
Though not conventionally considered part of the Chalcolithic or "Copper Age", the Vinča culture provides the earliest known example of copper metallurgy.
Related Events
Showing 8 events out of 8 total
The Vinca culture emerges around 5500 on the shores of lower Danube.
As in all prehistoric cultures, the majority of the people of the Vinca network are occupied with the provision of food.
The economy is based on a variety of subsistence techniques: arable agriculture, animal husbandry, and hunting and gathering all contributed to the diet of the growing Vin a population.
Vinca agriculture introduces common wheat, oat, and flax to temperate Europe, and makes greater use of barley than earlier cultures.
These innovations raise potential crop yields, and in the case of flax allow the manufacture of clothes in materials other than leather and wool.
There is also indirect evidence that Vinca agriculture made use of the cattle-driven plow, which would have had a major effect on the amount of human labor required for agriculture as well as the types of soils that could be exploited.
Many of the largest Vinca sites occupy regions dominated by soil types that would have required the use of the plow to farm.
Areas with less arable potential were exploited through transhumant pastoralism, where groups from the lowland villages moved their livestock to nearby upland areas on a seasonal basis.
Cattle was more important than caprids (i.e.
sheep and goats) in Vinca herds and, in comparison to the cultures of the period, livestock was increasingly kept for milk, leather and as draft animals, rather than solely for meat.
Seasonal movement to upland areas was also motivated by the exploitation of stone and mineral resources.
The especially rich permanent upland settlements established would have relied more heavily on pastoralism for subsistence.
The Vinca subsistence economy, increasingly focused on domesticated plants and animals, continued to make use of wild food resources.
The hunting of deer, boar and auroch, fishing of carp and catfish, shell-collecting, fowling and foraging of wild cereals, forest fruits and nuts made up a significant part of the diet at some Vinca sites.
These, however, were in the minority; settlements were invariably located with agricultural rather than wild food potential in mind, and wild resources were usually underexploited unless the area was low in arable productivity.
A copper ax found at Prokuplje in present Serbia indicates that human use of metals started in Europe around seventy-five hundred years ago (~5,500B CE), many years earlier than previously believed.
The first evidence of European metallurgy dates from the sixth and fifth millennium BCE, and was found in the archaeological sites of Majdanpek, Yarmovac, and Plocnik, Serbia.
The earliest copper smelting is found at the Belovode site, these examples include a copper ax, dated from 5500 to 5000 BCE and belonging to the Vinca culture.
The three Tartaria tablets, which date to around 5300 BCE, bear incised symbols, the Vinca signs, which have been the subject of considerable controversy among archaeologists, some of whom claim that the symbols represent the earliest known form of writing in the world.
Known since the late nineteenth century excavation at the Neolithic site of Turdas (in Romanian), Tordos (in Hungarian) in Transylvania, by Zsófia Torma, they will be found in 1961 at about thirty kilometers (nineteen miles) from the well-known site of Alba Iulia.
Nicolae Vlassa, an archaeologist at the Cluj Museum, unearthed three inscribed but unbaked clay tablets, together with twenty-six clay and stone figurines and a shell bracelet, accompanied by the burnt, broken, and disarticulated bones of an adult male.
Two of the tablets are rectangular and the third is round.
They are all small, the round one being only six centimeters (two and a half inches) across, and two—one round and one rectangular—have holes drilled through them.
Vlassa baked the originally unbaked clay tablets to preserve them.
Because of this, direct dating of the tablets themselves through thermoluminescence is not possible.
All three have symbols inscribed only on one face.
Similar motifs have been found on pots excavated at Vinca in Serbia and a number of other locations in the southern Balkans.
The unpierced rectangular tablet depicts a horned animal, another figure, and a branch or tree.
The others have a variety of mainly abstract symbols.
The purpose of the burial is unclear, but it has been suggested that the body was that of a shaman or spirit-medium.
The tablets are generally believed to have belonged to the Vinca-Turdas culture, which at the time was believed by Serbian and Romanian archaeologists to have originated around 2700 BCE.
Vlassa interpreted the Tartaria tablets as a hunting scene and the other two with signs as a kind of primitive writing similar to the early pictograms of the Sumerians.
The discovery caused great interest in the archaeological world as it predated the first Minoan writing, the oldest known writing in Europe.
The earliest copper objects in Europe appear in the Neolithic Danubian Vinca culture of the Balkans, perhaps as early as 5000.
Copper is mined before 4500 BCE at the eastern European sites of Ai Bunar, near Stara Zagora in Bulgaria, and Rudna Glava in present-day eastern Serbia.
At the latter site, which pottery finds show to belong to the Vinca culture, shafts are cut into the hillside, with scaffolding constructed for easy access to the veins of ore.
The very earliest plow was the simple scratch-plow, or ard, which consists of a frame holding a vertical wooden stick that was dragged through the topsoil (still used in many parts of the world).
It breaks up a strip of land directly along the plowed path, which can then be planted.
Because this form of plow leaves a strip of undisturbed earth between the rows, fields are often cross-plowed at ninety degree angles, and this tends to lead to squarish fields.
In the archaeology of northern Europe, such squarish fields are referred to as "Celtic fields.’
Farmers in the lower Danube region begin using cattle as plow animals by about 4500, at which time central and eastern European cultures begin to practice rich burial patterns.
The domestication of oxen in Mesopotamia, perhaps as early as the sixth millennium BCE, provided farmers with the pulling power necessary to develop the plow.