Advanced petrographic study of chipped stone artefacts from Lepenski Vir (Serbia): Evidence for across-Danube communication in the Mesolithic?

Abstract

This study revisits a collection of chipped stone artefacts from Mesolithic layers of Lepenski Vir (Iron Gate, Serbia). A sub-set of 909 items of a collection excavated back in the 1960s is re-examined macro- and microscopically, which showed that the raw material is predominantly represented by chert (70.7%) and quartzite (21.5%), whereas volcanic rocks (6.2%) and other rock types (1.7%) are subordinate. Artefacts made of volcanic rocks are rare but they gave us the opportunity to unravel the geological/volcanological context of the samples and to hypothesize about the source area. Among the volcanic material we distinguish two subgroups: a) pyroclastic rocks, mainly represented by devitrified welded tuffs and pieces of pyroclastic-fall and phreatomagmatic deposits, and b) coherent volcanic rocks, mostly as hypocrystalline to vitrophyric rhyolite and dacite-rhyodacite. A detailed volcanological interpretation of these artefacts, in combination with our field observations and knowledge about the regional geology, suggests, first, that this raw material derives from a complete volcanic succession, and second, that the only candidate for the source area is the Permian volcanic complex of Sirinia in Romania. If our volcanological arguments are robust, they imply that the Lepenski Vir residents had skills to cross the Danube and collect raw material at the opposite riverbank. Given the lack of direct evidence for the river crossing, this conclusion should be taken with caution. However, our study at least argues that many similar artefact collections may be worth of re-investigating and searching for possibly ‘hidden’ petrogenetic links among the rock types found as raw material.