Researchers agree that domesticated plants were introduced into southeast Europe from southwest Asia as a part of a Neolithic “package,” which included domesticated animals and artifacts typical of ...farming communities. It is commonly believed that this package reached inland areas of the Balkans by ∼6200 calibrated (cal.) BC or later. Our analysis of the starch record entrapped in dental calculus of Mesolithic human teeth at the site of Vlasac in the Danube Gorges of the central Balkans provides direct evidence that already by ∼6600 cal. BC, if not earlier, Late Mesolithic foragers of this region consumed domestic cereals, such as Triticum monococcum, Triticum dicoccum, and Hordeum distichon, which were also the main crops found among Early Neolithic communities of southeast Europe. We infer that “exotic” Neolithic domesticated plants were introduced to southern Europe independently almost half a millennium earlier than previously thought, through networks that enabled exchanges between inland Mesolithic foragers and early farming groups found along the Aegean coast of Turkey.
Questions about how farming and the Neolithic way of life spread across Europe have been hotly debated topics in archaeology for decades. For a very long time, two models have dominated the ...discussion: migrations of farming groups from southwestern Asia versus diffusion of domesticates and new ideas through the existing networks of local forager populations. New strontium isotope data from the Danube Gorges in the north-central Balkans, an area characterized by a rich burial record spanning the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition, show a significant increase in nonlocal individuals from ∼6200 calibrated B.C., with several waves of migrants into this region. These results are further enhanced by dietary evidence based on carbon and nitrogen isotopes and an increasingly high chronological resolution obtained on a large sample of directly dated individuals. This dataset provides robust evidence for a brief period of coexistence between indigenous groups and early farmers before farming communities absorbed the foragers completely in the first half of the sixth millennium B.C.
The beginnings of extractive metallurgy in Eurasia are contentious. The first cast copper objects in this region emerge c. 7000 years ago, and their production has been tentatively linked to centres ...in the Near East. This assumption, however, is not substantiated by evidence for copper smelting in those centres. Here, we present results from recent excavations from Belovode, a Vinča culture site in Eastern Serbia, which has provided the earliest direct evidence for copper smelting to date. The earliest copper smelting activities there took place c. 7000 years ago, contemporary with the emergence of the first cast copper objects. Through optical, chemical and provenance analyses of copper slag, minerals, ores and artefacts, we demonstrate the presence of an established metallurgical technology during this period, exploiting multiple sources for raw materials. These results extend the known record of copper smelting by more than half a millennium, with substantial implications. Extractive metallurgy occurs at a location far away from the Near East, challenging the traditional model of a single origin of metallurgy and reviving the possibility of multiple, independent inventions.
This paper presents results of contextual, technological, use-wear and residue analyses of body ornaments from two Late Mesolithic burials recently excavated at the site of Vlasac in the Danube ...Gorges of the central Balkans. Common to both burials are ornaments made from modified and unmodified carp (Cyprinidae sp.) pharyngeal ‘teeth’ along with Cyclope neritea marine gastropods. Experimental and low and high magnification use-wear approaches have been employed in reconstructing the way these ornaments were made and used. The precise contextual distribution of these ornaments has been recorded for the first time. The two examined burials exhibit a number of similarities, particularly in the way ornaments were placed in relation to the body. Both burials are also contemporaneous, dated to the mid-7th millennium BC. Implications of these findings for Mesolithic foragers' corporeal symbolism, group identity and regional and long-distance acquisition networks are briefly examined.
► Carp pharyngeal teeth and Cyclope neritea shells used to embroider cloths in Mesolithic Vlasac. ► Red ochre used with tendon strings that fastened carp ornaments to clothing. ► C. neritea shells were intentionally modified to facilitate fastening to clothing. ► A Mesolithic adult and a child buried with ornaments exhibit the same embroidery on clothing. ► Developed use-wear traces on ornaments from burials indicate their prolonged use.
The (re-)appearance of harpoon technology during the Mesolithic in the southern Dinaric Alps is discussed by presenting the results of contextual, technological and use-wear analyses on the sample of ...36 osseous harpoon specimens recovered in Mesolithic and Early Neolithic levels of the rockshelter of Odmut in western Montenegro. The assemblage of harpoons from this site is unique in Balkan prehistory, as there is currently limited evidence for the use of barbed weaponry prior to the regional Late Mesolithic. Technological and functional data related to the introduction of harpoon technology at Odmut and the southern Dinaric Alps are discussed against the background of the appearance of harpoons in the Alpine regions of Switzerland, Italy, and the northern Adriatic. Reasons and mechanisms that might have fostered the spread of harpoons in the circum-Adriatic region and a late use of harpoon technology in Montenegro are discussed.
Forager focus on wild cereal plants has been documented in the core zone of domestication in southwestern Asia, while evidence for forager use of wild grass grains remains sporadic elsewhere. In this ...paper, we present starch grain and phytolith analyses of dental calculus from 60 Mesolithic and Early Neolithic individuals from five sites in the Danube Gorges of the central Balkans. This zone was inhabited by likely complex Holocene foragers for several millennia before the appearance of the first farmers ~6200 cal BC. We also analyzed forager ground stone tools (GSTs) for evidence of plant processing. Our results based on the study of dental calculus show that certain species of Poaceae (species of the genus
) were used since the Early Mesolithic, while GSTs exhibit traces of a developed grass grain processing technology. The adoption of domesticated plants in this region after ~6500 cal BC might have been eased by the existing familiarity with wild cereals.
To explore the use of sulphur isotopes as an indicator of the consumption of freshwater fish, we undertook sulphur isotope analysis on bone collagen extracted from humans and animals from five ...archaeological sites from the Danube Gorges region dating from the Mesolithic to the middle Neolithic periods. The results show a difference in the sulphur isotope values between freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems of 8.7‰. To reconstruct human diets, bone collagen from 24 individuals was analysed for carbon, nitrogen and sulphur isotopic values. The nitrogen isotope ratios ranged from 10.3 to 16.5‰ and the carbon isotope ratios ranged from −20.8 to −18.3‰. Low nitrogen isotope values were found for individuals with low sulphur isotope ratios reflecting the low sulphur isotopic values of the terrestrial animals. The highest human nitrogen isotope values coincided with higher sulphur isotope ratios, which are related to the higher sulphur isotope values of the freshwater fish. Intermediate human sulphur isotopic ratios between these two extremes showed mixed diets of both terrestrial and freshwater resources.
The authors discuss Late Mesolithic ornament suspension techniques on the basis of their analysis of 288 cyprinid fish pharyngeal teeth appliqués found in an infant burial at the site of Vlasac in ...the Danube Gorges region of the north-central Balkans. Our interdisciplinary approach includes archaeozoological and taphonomic analyses of archaeological cyprinid teeth ornaments, experiments on modern reference specimens, and the identification of use-wear traces and morphological and physicochemical signatures of residues on archaeological as well as comparative ethnographic ornaments from a selection of traditional hunter–gatherer societies worldwide. While focusing on one particular case study, the paper aims to provide an analytical and methodological framework for archaeological cases dealing with the reconstruction of materials and techniques used in prehistoric systems of ornamentation. Finally, our findings are compared to a strikingly similar set of cyprinid pharyngeal teeth ornaments from broadly contemporaneous Mesolithic sites found in the Upper Danube region, and a discussion is provided that attempts to account for this similarity.
•Ornamental cyprinid pharyngeal teeth at Vlasac belong to Rutilus genus.•Suspension techniques involved organic glue compound mixed with red ochre.•Cyprinid beads distribution along the body is similar in infant and adult burials.
The Mesolithic in Eastern Europe was the last time that hunter-gatherer economies thrived there before the spread of agriculture in the second half of the seventh millennium BC. But the period, and ...the interactions between foragers and the first farmers, are poorly understood in the Carpathian Basin and surrounding areas because few sites are known, and even fewer have been excavated and published. How did site location differ between Mesolithic and Early Neolithic settlers? And where should we look for rare Mesolithic sites? Proximity analysis is seldom used for predictive modeling for hunter-gatherer sites at large scales, but in this paper, we argue that it can serve as an important starting point for prospection for rare and poorly understood sites. This study uses proximity analysis to provide quantitative landscape associations of known Mesolithic and Early Neolithic sites in the Carpathian Basin to show how Mesolithic people chose attributes of the landscape for camps, and how they differed from the farmers who later settled. We use elevation and slope, rivers, wetlands prior to the twentieth century, and the distribution of lithic raw materials foragers and farmers used for toolmaking to identify key proxies for preferred locations. We then build predictive models for the Mesolithic and Early Neolithic in the Pannonian region to highlight parts of the landscape that have relatively higher probabilities of having Mesolithic sites still undiscovered and contrast them with the settlement patterns of the first farmers in the area. We find that large parts of Pannonia conform to landforms preferred by Mesolithic foragers, but these areas have not been subject to investigation.
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