Abstract
Archaeological interpretation often links both the European Mesolithic and the complexity with reduced mobility and permanent or semi-permanent settlements. The Iron Gates Gorge (IGG) Mesolithic, on the banks of the Danube, with substantial formal disposal areas for the dead and canonized architecture, especially as manifested at the site of Lepenski Vir, fully conforms to this notion. Different aspects of bioarchaeological analysis – when evaluated concurrently – offer a counter-intuitive picture: at the time of its most complex development, the site of Lepenski Vir represented a focal point for a larger, more mobile hunter-gatherer group that identified with the site, its burials and its smaller resident population. The article explores the evidence provided by human skeletal remains and possible reasons behind these contradictory results.
Highlights
For a number of reasons—including excavation practices, resolution of the available documentation and the state of publication—human skeletal remains represent the most direct source of information on life and experience of the people who inhabited the Iron Gates Gorge in the Mesolithic and left behind impressive artistic achievements, habitation sites and burial grounds that bear witness to the complex world they created
In the following pages, basing my discussion on skeletal evidence, I summarize the findings of biological anthropology research in its archaeological context and give one of more plausible pictures of regional developments that led to the formation of the Mesolithic village of Lepenski Vir at the time it reaches its fullest artistic and ritual significance
A fully mobile hunter-gatherer population could have been using this “sedentary/semi-sedentary site” as focal points for burial of their select dead. This would account for the appearance at Lepenski Vir site at that time of individuals with “exotic” trace element signatures (Boric, 2006). As both dietary and non-metric traits suggest that population of Lepenski Vir during Contact times was more divergent from the preceding Mesolithic population and more variable than at other Iron Gates Gorge (IGG) sites, this explanation seems to me the most parsimonious
Summary
Archaeological interpretation often links both the European Mesolithic and the complexity with reduced mobility and permanent or semi-permanent settlements. The Iron Gates Gorge (IGG) Mesolithic, on the banks of the Danube, with substantial formal disposal areas for the dead and canonized architecture, especially as manifested at the site of Lepenski Vir, fully conforms to this notion. Different aspects of bioarchaeological analysis—when evaluated concurrently—offer a counter-intuitive picture: at the time of its most complex development, the site of Lepenski Vir represented a focal point for a larger, more mobile hunter-gatherer group that identified with the site, its burials and its smaller resident population. The article explores the evidence provided by human skeletal remains and possible reasons behind these contradictory results
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