Observations on the origin and demography of the Vinča culture

Abstract

The Vinča culture represents one the most important archaeological phenomena of the Neolithic and Eneolithic world in Southeastern Europe. As all other archaeological cultures, the Vinča culture is defined in the era of culture-historical archaeology, representing a set of sites with similar material culture with a core area in the Central Balkans. The task of modern archaeological research is to reconstruct social and cultural processes that gave rise to the observed patterns of material culture. In this paper I explore two partially related issues: 1) the formation of the Vinča culture (Early-Late Neolithic or Starčevo-Vinča transition) 2) regional and settlement demography of the Vinča culture. The transition between the Early Neolithic Starčevo culture and the Late Neolithic Vinča culture was marked mainly by changes in pottery style and technology, as well as in settlement size and architecture. The analysis of the regional population dynamics pattern based on the summed probability of calibrated probability distributions of radiocarbon dates suggest that the population rapidly increased after ~5300 cal BC. The relative population size proxy curve reached its peak ~5200 cal BC and had remained relatively constant until 4500 cal BC when it declined sharply. Estimates of settlement population sizes suggest that changes in the community organization also occurred, as Vinča culture settlements with hundreds of people, even over a thousand in some cases, could support higher levels of scalar stress than earlier Starčevo settlements. The current state of evidence is such that no definite answer can be given regarding the hypotheses about the formation of the Vinča culture.