Europe's First Civilization: the Vinča Culture

Over 8,000 years ago, the first farmers of Europe moved from Aegean Greece northwards by the river valleys into the fertile lands of the central Balkans. And soon these people would develop complex societies and advanced technologies as well as sophisticated artistic and ritual practices expressed in part through astonishing ceramic figurines. They lived in large settlements, some densely populated and existing for centuries, others fortified with huge banks and ditches. These people were farmers who valued cattle above all creatures, but by exploiting the mineral-rich Balkan landscape, they also developed the first metalworking, turning beautiful ores into copper beads and tools. They may also have been warriors, waging war with stone maces and copper axes on their enemies. And perhaps they developed the earliest writing anywhere in the world. This is the incredible story of Europe's first civilization, the Vinča culture. 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And explosions and fire effects have been completely reworked. Download War Thunder for free with the link in the description. All new players and those who haven't played War Thunder for half a year or more will receive rentals for the P-40E1 aircraft and M4 tank for a week, along with free unique skins for them, a special decorator, Eagle of Valor and more. Thank you to War Thunder for sponsoring the video. The Neolithic period in Europe began when farmers and herders from various parts of Anatolia moved into the Aegean islands and the mainland beyond. Over the coming centuries, groups of Neolithic farmers continued to move into new lands, mixing with populations of European hunter-gatherers as they went, creating a series of new and unique cultures. One route of expansion went by the Mediterranean coasts, eventually reaching Iberia, while different groups went north from Greece into the Balkans, using the river valleys as highways into new frontiers. Over the next 2,000 years or so, these first Neolithic societies of southeastern Europe lived in a variety of ways as they adapted their Mediterranean farming methods to a new kind of climate and interacted with local hunter-gatherer societies. These various Neolithic groups were described and defined by archaeologists in the early 20th century as separate archaeological cultures. They were differentiated by where, when and how they lived. The evidence for this is seen in pottery styles, tool types, the house and settlement types and the kinds of crops they grew and animals they preferred to farm and so on. The Vinča culture is one of these archaeological cultures that emerged sometime after 5400 BC and continued until about 4500 BC. It covered a large part of the Balkans, centered on modern-day Serbia and Kosovo, but reaching into many other modern territories like Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The culture was named after the place near Belgrade where it was first discovered by archaeologists in 1908. The Vinča site was an enormous Neolithic tell settlement, an artificial mound built up by centuries of human occupation. This mound was being eroded and ancient pottery and incredible strange figurines were tumbling out of the soil, drawing the attention of the archaeologists who excavated for decades, recording and defining this culture. Exactly how the Vinča culture developed is still not quite clear. It may have evolved from the preceding Starčevo culture or perhaps through migration from and interactions with neighbouring cultures. These earlier societies lived in small farming settlements, made tools, pottery and ritual ceramic figurines. But however it began, the Vinča culture represented a new and more technologically sophisticated kind of Neolithic society. Their settlements were larger and more densely populated and were often well defended with banks and ditches. The new way of life was very successful and it fuelled a population boom and geographical expansion into new lands, spreading especially through the valleys with navigable rivers. The settlement at Vinča was one of the first established, maybe the very first, on top of an earlier Starčevo settlement. The Vinča people lived there for centuries, periodically burning and demolishing houses and building new ones on top of the wreckage. Along with the build-up of refuse from people and animals, this caused the surface area to rise up above the surrounding landscape over the generations until they were living on an artificial mound. Archaeologists call these tells and excavations of these mounds provides incredible information about how the people lived. The mounds themselves tell us that continuity and ancestry was important to these people. The tells themselves serving as a kind of living monument to the long-term occupation of the land. The tell settlement at Vinča covered around 29 hectares or 71 acres. It's famous for its incredible, rather strange looking, anthropomorphic figurines. And in fact, it's possible this was a ritual centre for the wider region, specialising in producing these figurines. Vinča houses were rectangular with wooden frames and plastered walls, some with stone bases or foundations. Some houses even had paved or wooden flooring. Some had an upper floor. Fireplaces or ovens could be inside or just outside the building on the most sheltered side. Later Vinča houses could be rather large at 10 by 20 metres. The houses in many settlements were arranged in rows and in groups, suggesting perhaps internal group organisation within the settlements, perhaps representing extended households or clan groups. There were hundreds of Vinča culture settlements, many of them tell sites but others were flat sites with few layers of occupation. Some of the largest sites may have had 300 to 650 houses occupied at the same time. Settlements were usually by rivers and often, where possible, in elevated positions and many were protected by defensive banks, ditches and palisades. More about them later. Many of these sites were established in new frontiers to access, exploit and control specific resources such as timber, red deer antler, obsidian, salt or copper ores. They all had to grow crops and raise animals, especially and increasingly cattle but also sheep and goats in mountain pastures and pigs within the settlements. But there was also specialisation in resource acquisition, manufacture and trade with other settlements. Some settlements had workshops where specialist craftsmen manufactured stone tools or shell beads or pottery for use locally and for export. The society was able to support craft specialists like this, which explains the astonishing high quality of their work and the technological advancements seen during the life of this culture. The extensive trade networks of the Vinca culture extended by the river valleys to the Aegean, the Black Sea and the Adriatic. The settlements were almost certainly not politically unified but they were part of a complex, interdependent economic and social network. Most were sited within a day's walk from the nearest neighbour. We know these people mainly through their impressive settlements and incredible artefacts rather than from the remains of the people themselves. Like many societies in Neolithic Southeast Europe, we have hardly any human burials. There are some known from burials beneath the floors of houses and there are a couple of cemeteries discovered outside settlements with simple burials but we don't know what they did with the rest of the bodies. Societies that cremate their dead usually leave signs that archaeologists can find, like areas of burned earth and burned human remains, but they don't find that here. So presumably these people were disposing of their dead by excarnation, leaving them out somewhere beyond the settlement to be scavenged by wild animals. Perhaps they also put the remains into the rivers that were so important to their society to be washed away downstream. We will have to speculate because we just don't know. But from the few remains that we do have, we know through DNA testing that they were, as you'd expect, typical Neolithic European farmers. That is, most of their ancestry came from Anatolian farmer populations along with a small amount of admixture from European hunter-gatherers. So we have to look a little deeper at their material culture to find out what these people might have been like. What can their incredible figurines tell us? Their anthropomorphic figurines are unusual for the Neolithic Balkans for a few reasons. One is the sheer number of them. There were over a thousand uncovered during initial excavations at the Vinča settlement alone. Clearly they were important for these people and they needed a lot of them. Perhaps they were used by the households for rituals within the home. Maybe people needed them for their domestic shrines or altars like icons for household gods or as representations of honored ancestors. They may have needed a steady supplier because they were also used as votive offerings, being buried beneath houses or elsewhere in the settlement as a ritual offering to the gods. Perhaps they were made to be used and then disposed of. Another reason they're unusual is the detail they display. Other Neolithic figures can be rather plain with features to show they were female and faces with only a nose depicted. But Vinča figures will include details of what is probably clothing and jewelry and they often have detailed facial features. In fact, the faces are the strangest thing of all. They often have these odd triangular heads with bulging eyes. One might think they are depicting semi-human gods or human-animal hybrids and maybe they are, if only indirectly. Closer examination of some figures where sharp details are preserved shows that these little statuettes are wearing masks. And evidence for life-sized clay masks has even been found at Vinča sites. It seems then that these figurines represent masked human figures. Perhaps the Vinča religious practices involved people wearing masks. Ritual masking is a practice seen all around the world so it would not be surprising but clearly it was especially important in this society. Were the masked figures a class of specialist priests or was masking done at special times by ordinary members of the community? An interesting suggestion is that the masked figures seen in Vinča sculpture might even represent a new class of people who had emerged in this society, metal workers. This special new technology was perhaps dangerous and frightening. Those few who knew the secrets of its mastery had a power that had to be shielded, anonymized and contained through ritual. I don't know if I believe this but it's something to consider when trying to imagine these complex beliefs and practices that are lost to us forever. The Vinča culture is considered to be part of the Neolithic world rather than the Chalcolithic or Copper Age to come, however they did develop metallurgy. The Balkans are rich in copper ores like malachite and azurite that the Neolithic people first exploited for decorative beads. It's perhaps not too surprising that a society that could support specialist craftsmen and artists, especially potters with a mastery of controlling fire and converting minerals into pigments, would soon discover the secret of the metal within the ores. They discovered that ores could be smelted to extract copper and while most objects like decorative beads, sheets and wires were hammered and rolled into shape, they also developed moulds for casting tools like copper axes and chisels. New settlements were founded in ore rich areas and the first ever mines were dug for ore extraction and processing. It's amazing to imagine Vinča culture prospectors exploring the mountains beyond the frontier for new veins of green and blue rocks, digging mines there, founding new settlements nearby to control the magical new resource and erecting defences to fight off rival claimants and perhaps hunter gatherers still living nearby. People were doing all this 7000 years ago. Still, this was a new and special and rare material and most Vinča tools continued to be made from stone, bone and antler. There's another possible first for the Vinča culture. They may have developed the first writing anywhere in the world, beating the Sumerians by a thousand years. Quite an extraordinary claim. Symbols have been found on pottery vessels and clay tablets, uncovered from various Vinča settlements, but what these symbols are exactly is disputed. In fact, the authenticity of some of the artefacts themselves is disputed. If they're real, then they must be intended to convey some meaning, but there's little agreement on what that might be. The symbols include abstract pictograms and hashed marks, chevrons or crosses that appear singly or in groups. Some symbols look like potter's marks, signifying they were made by a certain person or workshop. I think it's possible in some cases they might be related to accounting. After all, we know that trade was vitally important to this society and these marks might have kept track of goods and amounts over long distances. Another good guess is that objects like clay tablets were inscribed with some special ritual meaning and buried as votive offerings, perhaps like messages to gods or ancestors. Maybe symbols represented people or clans who were to receive the blessings. Anyway, it's all hotly debated and perhaps deserves a video all of its own, but at the very least, it provides another insight into the complexity and sophistication of this society. There is little direct evidence for warfare in the Vinča culture, but it's clear conflict was part of their lives from the defences built around many of their settlements. Some of the banks and ditches and palisades have been interpreted as means of animal control or for delineating the boundaries of a settlement, but others are so extensive that they were undoubtedly meant to defend against concerted attacks. One site I read about had a v-shaped outer ditch 3.6 meters or 9 feet deep and 7 meters or 23 feet wide with a rampart inside it with a second smaller v-shaped ditch behind that followed by a wooden palisade wall and then a final shallow inner ditch. These were serious defences maintained through the life of the settlement. In fact, defences like this are one of the things that define the culture, separating it from earlier, later and neighbouring contemporary societies. These people lived in larger settlements than people before them, the population more concentrated and well defended. It was a vital part of their unique way of life. Increased conflict or the threat of violence may have driven the Vinča expansions and shaped their society. Settlements were established near good grazing and farmland but also to exploit local resources like timber, obsidian, salt or copper and were founded near navigable rivers to engage in trade with their neighbours near and far. All these raw materials were valuable and they clearly required defending from those who would take them. These fortified settlements also contained specialised workshops producing tools in stone, bone, antler and copper as well as pottery and figurines for trade. The expert craftsmen who produced these things were perhaps even more valuable. I wonder if settlements were raided for these people and others to be taken away and kept in rival settlements, harming the economic prospects of the victim while benefiting those of the aggressor. People were a resource too. And how many of the defensive structures were also meant for keeping slaves contained within, as well as for keeping enemies outside? That's a rhetorical question, I don't know the answer. As I said earlier, the regular burning of houses seen in the archaeological record is generally thought to be a ritual or practical activity carried out by those who lived there. But some have suggested the burning down of houses could also be related to regular raiding activities. There is a tantalising glimpse of what might be a raiding party discovered at a late Vinča settlement in Serbia, inside a house on a low clay platform. Archaeologists working in 2008 found a group of 46 small clay figurines. 38 formed an identical group while the rest formed another identical group with one large figure discovered in the centre. 11 of them also carried small model weapons or tools on their shoulder, or rather they would have done. The little wooden rods they had used for the hafts had decomposed. Clearly these aren't like the usual Vinča figurines. They didn't usually make little bell-shaped, almost featureless figures like this. And as this group is a unique find, it's hard to say what they were for. Because of the uniformity and the bell-shaped bottoms meaning they were sturdy, some think they may be gaming pieces, like some kind of neolithic version of chess perhaps. Others think it's more likely they had a ritual function, perhaps related to the domestic altars found in homes. But what do these figures represent? Well most are featureless and weaponless, while others carry their weapons and there's the larger central figure. Surely then this is evidence of hierarchy. Perhaps we're looking at an extended household, the people who lived in a group of houses. An analysis of various settlements suggests they were often organized with a common subgroup of 4-10 houses for between 20-50 people. And here we have 46 individuals. Maybe the 11 weapon holders are the head of their own household and the largest figure is the most senior of them all, the clan chief. The stone battle axe or the mace, the symbol of their authority. The Vinča culture may be differentiated by their increased use of violence, but also by increased organization of that violence. Control of resources and trade perhaps led to increased social stratification and powerful leaders. Those with the authority to control their populations in peace and in war, marshalling large forces for the kind of larger scale warfare that required large scale defenses. So perhaps these figures represent a Vinča clan and also a raiding party, a small army, marching off to war against a neighbor. What if these are tokens representing individuals to be preyed over before or during their absence from home? Or because they are so different from the normal representations of Vinča figures, perhaps they are meant to represent an unknown featureless enemy warband. Whatever they are, they are fascinating and I hope future investigations uncover more like them. The Vinča culture came to an end between 4500 to 4400 BC. The Vinča lifestyle, their specific kind of pottery, figurines and settlements and so on, stops appearing in the archaeological record. And just like with the start of this culture, it's actually unclear exactly what happened at the end. People still lived in the region afterwards, but the processes by which the Vinča lifestyle evolved or developed into those that come after is yet to be determined in many places. The cultural and technological progress of the Vinča culture was not lost, however, and later societies continued to develop what they had started. One later society on the shore of the Black Sea also had complex trade networks and social structures and they elevated the art of metalworking to new heights. To find out all about the incredible Varna culture, the first gold workers anywhere in the world, please watch this video now. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you for watching.