The Vin?a Culture was one of the earliest in Europe and spread between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC along the Danube, in the territories that today belong to Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia. If there is one thing that stands out, it is because its proto-writing has been considered the oldest known.
The Vincha script (also called Vin?a alphabet or Old European Script) was discovered in a series of artifacts found in 1875 in Transylvania. Since then many fragments with similar inscriptions have appeared. The symbols, simple at first, increased in complexity until culminating in the Tablets of Tartary (Romania) and the Tablets of Gradeshnitska (Bulgaria), both dating back more than 7,000 years.
From that same era is a giant settlement that researchers from the University of Kiel have just found near the Tamiš River, in northeastern Serbia. The ancient settlement, located a short distance from the modern municipality of Jarkovac, in the province of Vojvodina, would have reached 13 hectares.
“This discovery is of extraordinary importance, since larger settlements from the Late Neolithic are hardly known in the Serbian Banat region,” says Dr. Martin Furholt, from the Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archeology at the University of Kiel and leader of the team. investigation.
The Banat, which today is divided between three different countries (Romania, Serbia and Hungary), is a region in the Pannonian Plain limited by the Danube River to the south, the Tisza River to the west, the Mures River to the north and the mountain system of the southern Carpathians to the east.
Archaeologists discovered the site with the help of geophysical methods. Thus they were able to completely map its entire extension in March of this year, as explained by the experts in a statement. The town covers an area of ??between 11 and 13 hectares and is surrounded by between four and six irrigation ditches. There are also some angular anomalies that indicate a large number of burned houses.
“A settlement of this size is spectacular. The geophysical data also give us a clear idea of ??the structure that the settlement had around 7,000 years ago,” says Fynn Wilkes, co-leader of the team in which members of the Vojvodina Museum, the Zrenjanin National Museum and the Pan?evo National Museum have worked. .
In parallel with the geophysical investigations, German-Serbian archaeologists also inspected the surrounding area for artifacts. This surface material indicates that the settlement represents a residential site of the Vin?a culture, although it also has strong influences from the regional Banat culture. “This is also notable, since only a few settlements with material from this culture are known in modern-day Serbia,” adds Wilkes.
During the same excavation campaign, researchers studied several circular elements from the Late Neolithic in Hungary together with members of the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs. These so-called rondels are attributed to the Lengyel culture (5000-4400 BC).
Specialists were able to differentiate the eras represented at each site more clearly than before. “This allowed us to re-evaluate some of the already known deposits in Hungary. For example, sites that were previously classified as Late Neolithic circular pits turned out to be much younger structures,” explains team co-leader Kata Furholt.
Highlights of this fieldwork in Hungary included the re-evaluation of a settlement previously dating to the Late Neolithic, which probably belongs to the Vu?edol culture of the Late Copper Age and Early Bronze Age (3000-2400 BC), as well as such as the study of a circular grave in the village of Vokány.
“Southeast Europe is a very important region for answering the question of how knowledge and technologies were spread in the early periods of human history and how this was related to social inequalities,” summarizes Professor Martin Furholt. .
It is in this area of ??the continent where, for example, new technologies and knowledge such as metallurgy appeared for the first time in Europe. ”With the newly discovered and reclassified sites we collect important data to better understand social inequality and the transfer of knowledge” at that time, he concludes.
