Institute of Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology

Archaeology of the Vinča culture: formation, demography, and social structure

Marko Porčić

The Vinča culture represents one of the most important archaeological phenomena of the Neolithic and Eneolithic world in Southeastern Europe.  As all other archaeological cultures, the Vinča culture was defined in the era of culture historical archaeology, representing a set of sites with similar material culture encompassing the area of 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 presentation I provide a review of the archaeology of the Vinča culture from the perspective of anthropological archaeology - with an aim to reconstruct the historical and anthropological reality between 5300 and 4500 BC in the Central Balkans. I explore the following issues: 1) the formation of the Vinča culture (Starčevo-Vinča transition) 2) population size of Vinča settlements based on house architecture and regional population dynamics based on the method of summed calibrated radiocarbon probability distributions 3) social structure and social change over 800 years based on household and funerary evidence.