Vinča culture
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:European Middle Neolithic.gif The Vinča culture was an early culture of Europe (between the 6th and the 3rd millennium BC), stretching around the course of Danube in Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the Republic of Macedonia, although traces of it can be found all around the Balkans.
It was named after Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade, where in 1908 several artifacts were found by the first archaeological excavation team led by Miloje M. Vasić. After WWI excavations were resumed in 1924 and the site was visited by numerous prominent scholars of the time: Veselin Čajkanović, Ch. Hyde, J. L. Myres, W. A. Hurtley, Bogdan Popović.
At that time it was believed by both Yugoslav and Romanian archaeologists that the Vinča culture began around 2700BC. However carbon dating of the Tartaria tablets discovered by Nicolae Vlassa at Tărtăria in Romania in 1961, pushed the date of the civilisation back to before 4000BC. If the inscriptions on the Tartaria tablets are indeed pictograms, as Vlassa argued, they would be the earliest known writing in the world. This claim however remains controversial; most experts consider the Tartaria finds to be an example of proto-writing rather than a full writing system.
See also
- Old European script (Sometimes called "the Vinča alphabet".)
- Tartaria tablets
- Neolithic Europe
- Cucuteni culture
- Yamna
Bibliography
Gimbutas, Marija A. (ed.) "Neolithic Macedonia as reflected by excavation at Anza, southeast Yugoslavia." Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California, 1976. OCLC# 3073058