{"it":{"id":"EUR-VIN","kind":"site","sub":"Europe","name":"Vinča-Belo Brdo (Vinča culture type site)","place":"Serbia","lat":44.762,"lon":20.623,"date":"c.5700-4500 BCE (INTERPRETATION)","mat":"loess tell; fired clay","nfacts":4,"tags":["Europe"],"sum":"The Vinča mound near Belgrade, Serbia, holds about 9 m of layered deposits over roughly 10 hectares (single source), built up from about 5700 to 4500 BCE.","why":"Vinča is one of Europe's great Neolithic towns, and its ten metres of layers record a thousand years of life in one place.","src":[445],"nsrc":2,"yt":"When does a mark become writing?","rel":["ASI-006","MES-007"],"hook":"Vinča's mound on the Danube holds ten metres of Neolithic town, layer upon layer."},"S":{"445":["Wikipedia: Vinča culture","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_culture"]},"rec":{"id":"EUR-VIN","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"tell","a":"area / deposits / height","v":"10 ha; 9 m; 10.5 m","u":"ha/m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vin%C4%8Da-Belo_Brdo&oldid=1376067975","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3587"},{"f":"site","a":"distance from Belgrade","v":"14","u":"km","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vin%C4%8Da-Belo_Brdo&oldid=1376067975","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"downstream on Danube","id":"M3588"},{"f":"earliest deposits","a":"date","v":"c.5700 BCE (Starcevo)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vin%C4%8Da-Belo_Brdo&oldid=1376067975","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3589"},{"f":"Vinča settlement","a":"abandoned","v":"by 4900 BCE","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vin%C4%8Da-Belo_Brdo&oldid=1376067975","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3590"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"key_structure_dims","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"block_mass","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"stone_count","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"c.5700-4500 BCE (INTERPRETATION)","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"44.76194","lon":"20.62306","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q3560333)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q3560333) vs OSM way 129978485 delta 0.0010 deg","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/129978485"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia Vinca-Belo Brdo","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vin%C4%8Da-Belo_Brdo&oldid=1376067975"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Vinča culture","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_culture"},{"id":"VEUR-VIN-3","t":"Google Arts & Culture: Archaeological site Belo Brdo in Vinča","u":"https://artsandculture.google.com/story/archaeological-site-belo-brdo-in-vin%C4%8Da-archeological-sites-of-serbia/WwWxbKaruyd39Q"},{"id":"VEUR-VIN-4","t":"Grocka municipality: the Belo Brdo site at Vinča","u":"http://www.grocka.rs/nalaziste-belo-brdo-u-vinci/"},{"id":null,"t":"Gradska opština Grocka (Grocka municipality), Nalazište Belo brdo u Vinči, 2020","u":"https://www.grocka.rs/nalaziste-belo-brdo-u-vinci/"},{"id":null,"t":"Tasić, Marić, Penezić et al., The end of the affair: formal chronological modelling for the top of the Neolithic tell of Vinča-Belo Brdo, Antiquity 89 (2015), abstract via University of Stirling","u":"https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/handle/1893/23521"}],"sum":"The Danube was eating the hill. The river was wearing away a high bank of pale loess on its right shore, a short way downstream from Belgrade, and finds from the crumbling bank had already found their way to the National Museum when, in 1908, the archaeologist Miloje Vasić of the University of Belgrade began a rescue dig to save what the water had not yet taken. He found that the hill was not a hill at all. It was a town, or rather many towns, built one on top of another until their ruins rose about ten metres above the old ground.\n\nThe place is Vinča-Belo Brdo, \"White Hill,\" 14 kilometres from Belgrade in Serbia. Archaeologists call it a tell, a mound made almost entirely of the remains of human settlement: floors, walls, hearths, rubbish and the debris of fires, laid down layer on layer. The depth is given as a ten-metre layer by Serbia's Ministry of Culture and as 10.5 metres by the local municipality of Grocka; one account separates 9 metres of cultural deposits from a total height of 10.5 metres. That is a three-storey building made of nothing but the past. Its area is given as 10 hectares, about fourteen football pitches, though another account puts the Neolithic settlement at 29 hectares with up to 2,500 people. It is one of the largest tells in the Balkans, and it gave its name to a whole civilisation of the Late Neolithic, the Vinča culture.\n\nThe setting explains why people came and stayed. The Danube gave water and fish on one side. On the other, the valley of the little river Bolečica opened onto a hinterland of minerals, ores, hunting grounds and good farming soil. From the Danube people could travel on to the Sava, Tisa, Tamiš and Morava, and trade over long distances. Nearby Mount Avala supplied cinnabar, a brilliant red mineral, which the ministry's exhibition suggests may have been the most valuable thing Vinča had to trade.\n\nThe first people here were farmers and herders of the Starčevo culture, around 5700 BC by one account and 5500 BC by the ministry's. They left little, save one large grave holding eleven men together, a collective burial unusual for their culture. Then the Vinča people arrived, and for centuries they built and rebuilt. The ministry dates their settlement to about 5300 to 4500 BC. Thirteen building horizons make up most of the mound, each set of houses rising on the debris left by periodic fires. The houses were rectangular, of wood, wattle and clay, with reed roofs, levelled foundations, insulation and painted walls. Many had several rooms and an attic. They stood in rows along straight streets inside a fence, and the orientation of those rows did not change for centuries. At its peak this was one of the largest settlements in Neolithic Europe.\n\nLife inside was busy and surprisingly connected. Bone hooks and harpoons, stone axes and chisels, loom weights and fine pottery point to fishing, hunting, farming, potting and weaving, perhaps an early division of labour. People grew einkorn, emmer and barley and kept mostly cattle. Spondylus shells for jewellery came from the eastern Mediterranean, and obsidian for blades from the Carpathians. The wider Vinča world has produced the earliest known example of copper smelting, and at another Vinča site, Pločnik, the earliest known copper tools, though metal stayed mostly a matter of ornaments while working tools remained stone and bone.\n\nThen there are the figures. Excavations have produced more than a thousand clay figurines, along with amulets, altars and tens of thousands of vessels. Most show people, sometimes with carefully detailed bodies, clothing and jewellery, skirts, aprons, blouses and trousers incised or painted on the clay. Some have masklike faces with large almond-shaped eyes. Others show cattle, sheep, goats, deer and dogs. The most famous cult objects are lids shaped like faces, with large eyes, ears and nose, made to close storage jars, and the exhibition admits that their \"magical or cult role has not been fully deciphered.\" In the houses, people fixed the painted skulls of cattle to the walls.\n\nPower runs through all of it. In its early phase Vinča seems to have become a ritual centre for its whole region. New kinds of cult jewellery, carved from semi-precious stones brought from far away, appeared here first and then spread to other Vinča sites. Belo Brdo sat at the heart of a prestige economy, a network in which power flowed with sacred objects. Later its star dimmed, as the nearby centre of Vršac took over the trade in Spondylus ornaments. In the late phase the figurines became fewer and more standardised, and they began to carry incised signs, the so-called Vinča symbols, which may show, one account suggests, rival groups within the town competing to control the flow of ritual goods.\n\nThose signs are the strangest thing on the hill. Some researchers conjecture that they are the earliest form of proto-writing, a first step toward recording thought in signs. The mainstream view of the culture is cautious: a village culture without cities, without proto-urbanism or specialised religious and administrative centres, whose marks may be ownership signs, ritual tokens or something we have no name for.\n\nHow it all ended is another unsettled question, and the sources pull in three directions. The ministry's exhibition uses 4300 BC as the end of the Vinča settlement. A 2015 study in the journal Antiquity, modelling the radiocarbon dates statistically, places the end of the Neolithic tell in the second half of the forty-sixth century BC, around 4550 to 4500. Another account says the settlement was abandoned by 4900 BC, some five centuries before the wider Vinča world fell apart. The Antiquity study added something chilling. Two successive layers of tightly packed houses both burned on a large scale, no more than 25 years apart, and the last house was probably used for less than 15 years. \"The evidence suggests,\" the authors write, \"that these house burnings were deliberate.\" They do not say why.\n\nThe hill was never quite empty again. A Baden culture figurine of about 3300 BC and a Vatin culture double vessel of about 1600 BC turned up in the upper layers, then a Celtic hill fort of the Iron Age, and finally a medieval cemetery of more than a thousand graves, perhaps the largest in the Belgrade area, from which came a twelfth-century headband and earrings of the kind worn by brides. Vasić dug until 1934 and published four volumes, Prehistoric Vinča. Later campaigns ran from 1978 to 1986, and from 1998 a team under Nenad Tasić. Protected since 1950, the site was declared of exceptional importance for Serbia in 1979.\n\nStand at the foot of the bank today and the layers are still there in the loess, a thousand years of floors and fires stacked one above another. Near the top lies a burned house that someone lived in for less than fifteen years before the flames came, and somewhere in the clay beneath it a figure with wide almond eyes, scratched with signs that no one alive can read.","qs":["Ten metres of homes rose on one spot. What made people stay for a thousand years?","Why would people rebuild in the same place for centuries?","What can a thousand figurines tell us about the people who made them?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Copper_axes_with_modern_replicas%2C_National_Museum_of_Serbia_04_2413-2423_%2809%29.jpg/1280px-Copper_axes_with_modern_replicas%2C_National_Museum_of_Serbia_04_2413-2423_%2809%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copper_axes_with_modern_replicas,_National_Museum_of_Serbia_04_2413-2423_(09).jpg","title":"Copper axes with modern replicas, National Museum of Serbia 04 2413-2423 (09).jpg","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"CryolophosaurusEllioti","cap":"Neolithic (5000-4500 BCE) Pločnik Hoard II, Serbia"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Cultura_di_vinca%2C_idolo%2C_serbia_4500-3500_ac_ca._01.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cultura_di_vinca,_idolo,_serbia_4500-3500_ac_ca._01.jpg","title":"Cultura di vinca, idolo, serbia 4500-3500 ac ca. 01.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Sailko","cap":"European art in the Cleveland Museum of Art"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Figurine_Divlje_Polje.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Figurine_Divlje_Polje.jpg","title":"Figurine Divlje Polje.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Unknown","cap":"Figurine sa lokaliteta Divlje Polje u Ratini"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Gradeshnitsa_Tablet.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gradeshnitsa_Tablet.jpg","title":"Gradeshnitsa Tablet.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","cap":"Gradeshnitsa Tablet (obverse). Exhibited in the Regional History Museum – Vratsa, Bulgaria."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Hyjnesha_muze.jpg/1280px-Hyjnesha_muze.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hyjnesha_muze.jpg","title":"Hyjnesha muze.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Arbenllapashtica","cap":"This is a photo of a monument in Kosovo, number:","alt":"Vinča-Belo Brdo (Vinča culture type site)"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/EUR-VIN.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Copper_axes_with_modern_replicas%2C_National_Museum_of_Serbia_04_2413-2423_%2809%29.jpg/1280px-Copper_axes_with_modern_replicas%2C_National_Museum_of_Serbia_04_2413-2423_%2809%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}