Miroslav Milosav Maric

Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts · Institute for Balkan Studies

Buildings destroyed by fire are frequently discovered at sites of the Neolithic Vinča culture of south-eastern Europe. The social context and practical aspects of prehistoric house burning have long been studied through the analyses of architectural and artefactual remains and through experimental building and firing of wattle-and-daub structures....

In 1956, the Institute of Archaeology and the National Museum in Belgrade carried out excavations at the site of Supska, near Ćuprija, in Central Serbia. Based on the material culture findings, the site is mostly known as a Late Neolithic one; however, archaeological findings from other periods were discovered too. In the 1956 excavations, the cult...

Uivar “Gomilă” , a long-awaited and overdue first volume (of a planned set of three), presents, in seven chapters, a comprehensive account of the results of archaeological research on the site of Uivar, Romania. It reports on 10 seasons of investigation into the north-eastern periphery of the Vinča Culture phenomenon and the occurrence of tell sett...

This paper aims to assess the etiology and differential diagnosis of severe pathological lesions in wild and domestic cattle from the Late Neolithic site of At‐Vršac in the northeast part of the present‐day Serbia. Excavations of this multilayered site revealed the remains of a Late Neolithic settlement belonging to the Vinča culture network of the...

Methodology and Archaeometry (MetArh) is an annual scientific conference organized since 2013 by the Department of Archaeology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb, and the Croatian Archaeological Society. The goal of the conference is to entice interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, new insights and approac...

The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia is a landmark study in the origins of metallurgy. The project aimed to trace the invention and innovation of metallurgy in the Balkans. It combined targeted excavations and surveys with extensive scientific analyses at two Neolithic-Chalcolithic copper production and consumption sites, Belovode and Pločnik, in Serb...

The chronology of the sites of Belovode and Pločnik has been discussed several times in the past two decades since excavations were renewed at each site (Arsenijević and Živković 1998; Šljivar 1996; Šljivar and Jacanović 1996a; Šljivar and Kuzmanović Cvetković 1997a), though not in detail and rarely integrating the relative and the absolute chronol...

This chapter reviews the archaeological evidence for the Vinča culture, the broader archaeological context for the majority of the metal production and metal artefacts extensively explored in Chapter 3, as well as for the sites of Belovode and Pločnik, whose investigation forms the core of The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia project. The chapter will...

The Neolithic–Chalcolithic site of Belovode covers approximately 40 ha (Figure 1). In the two fieldwork campaigns of 2012 and 2013, only 31.5 m2 was excavated due to the archaeometallurgical focus of the project. The trench was positioned on the eastern platform of the settlement, where previous excavations had uncovered significant metallurgical e...

The Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic Building 01/06 at the site of Vinča–Belo Brdo on the Danube burnt suddenly. The daub sealed the interior of the three-room structure and preserved its contents as they stood in the forty-six century BC. The building preserved so well that the details of its interior can be reconstructed. On the floor, under thick...

In the chapter we will introduce the results of several recent archaeological surveys in the area of Novi Kneževac, Čoka and Kikinda municipalities on the north Banat side of Tisza and Kanjiža and Senta municipalities on the Bačka side of the River. The north Bačka region of Serbia is physically divided by the waters of the Tisza River from the nor...

A newly discovered network of later Bronze Age fortified sites of unusually large size are discussed, with a primary focus on results of excavations at the site of Gradište Iđoš. Closely associated with the rivers Mureš, Tisza, and Danube, these sites are located in the southeast of the Carpathian Basin in central Europe. On current evidence, the m...

The Neolithic settlement in Vinča near Belgrade, Serbia, was occupied for more than a millennium (c. 5600–4500 cal BC); from about 5200 cal BC the occupation, associated with the regional Vinča culture phenomenon, was uninterrupted. After gradual horizontal expansion in the beginning, the Vinča culture settlement grew vertically. A number of succes...

The strengths of formal Bayesian chronological modelling are restated, combining as it does knowledge of the archaeology with the radiocarbon dating of carefully chosen samples of known taphonomy in association with diagnostic material culture. The risks of dating bone samples are reviewed, along with a brief history of the development of approache...

The strengths of formal Bayesian chronological modelling are restated, combining as it does knowledge of the archaeology with the radiocarbon dating of carefully chosen samples of known taphonomy in association with diagnostic material culture. The risks of dating bone samples are reviewed, along with a brief history of the development of approache...

One of the main goals of the renewed investigations at the large prehistoric site of Vinča near Belgrade, initiated back in 1998, was to optimize the methods of collection, storage and manipulation of the copious archaeological data. The effort at improving the then available techniques was driven not only by the necessity to make the process of fi...

The article deals with the use of an integrated GIS- and image-based modelling approach to archaeological field documentation, developed for the Borderlands: ARISE project. The project, established in 2014, examines social boundaries and interactions from the early Neolithic to the Early Iron Age period in the north-east Banat region of modern Serb...

The paper reviews the current state of research and our knowledge of the Late Neolithic Tisza tradition sites in the Serbian Banat. The first sites were discovered almost one and a half centuries ago, while the first archaeological excavations were undertaken in the late 19th century. The overview of the known sites in the first part of the study i...

The period of transition from the Late Neolithic to the Early Chalcolithic in the central (and northern) Balkans (c. 4500-4000 BC) saw dramatic shifts in the settlement pattern presumably reflecting fundamental changes in the social organisation, economy and symbolism. A range of possible external and internal reasons for the “end of the Vinča worl...

Recent work at Vinča-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronolo...

The archaeological site of Gradište near Iđoš, in the municipality of Kikinda, Serbia, is well known in the archaeological literature of the region. Excavated on several occasions since 1913, the site is best known for the existence of a late Neolithic settlement where material culture belonging to both Vinča and Tisza communities was found in th...

This paper presents formally modelled date estimates,within a Bayesian chronological frame-work, for the sequence of deposits and material at the great Neolithic tell of Vinca-Belo Brdo near Belgrade, Serbia, on the basis of the first excavations, led by Miloje Vasic (1908-1934). This is part of a three-strand approach to dating the occupation and...

A formally modeled radiocarbon chronology for a new profile through the great Neolithic tell of Vinča-Belo Brdo, Serbia, is the third interwoven strand in refining the chronology of the tell. This now joins models for the whole sequence based on the archive of early excavations, and for the last two known horizons at the top of the settlement mound...

The paper focuses on the charred plant assemblage from the Neolithic tell-settlement of Vinča-Belo Brdo near Belgrade in Serbia. The Vinča tell was inhabited over much of the SE European Neolithic sequence, from c. 5600 to 4500 cal BC. It represents the type-site of the cultural phenomenon that developed across large parts of the central, western a...

Recent work at Vin≠a-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronolo...

Bayesian statistical frameworks have been used to calculate explicit, quantified estimates for site chronologies, and have been especially useful for resolving the complex probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates to the level of individual prehistoric lifetimes and generations. Here the technique is applied to the Neolithic tell of...

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the possible trajectory of the movement of the obsidian that was brought to the region of present day Vršac from Carpathian 1 and Carpathian 2 sources, located between Košice and Miškolc (the present day border area between Hungary and Slovakia). This objective has been fulfilled using computer aided modellin...

This paper presents a GIS model of the watercourses and settlement locations in the Danube region around Belgrade during the course of late Neolithic Vinča culture (late 6th and early 5th Millennium BC). Vinča culture settlements and material culture characteristic of the central Balkans and parts of Vojvodina and Transylvania grew up around major...

The tell-site of Vinča is the largest Neolithic settlement in the southern part of the Pannonian plain. It flourished over much of the SE European Neolithic, in the period between 5300 and 4500 cal. BC. The material culture discovered at Vinča has been identified at a number of Neolithic settlements across the Balkans (over 400 known sites), e.g. i...

Renewed excavations at the site of Vinča – Belo Brdo near Belgrade, Serbia have included systematic sampling for archaeobotanical analysis and the use of flotation for recovery of wood, seed, chaff, fruit, nut etc and non-plant materials. Several wild taxa with edible fruit/seed have been observed in the archaeobotanical samples, among which most c...

На основу искуства и резултата досадашњих анализа макробиљних остатака, и пратећи инструкције понуђене у релевантној литератури, предлажемо стратегију за издвајање археоботаничких узорака на неолитским и бакарнодопским локалитетима Србије. У обзир смо узели ограничења наметнута изузетно малим финансијским средствима којa већина археолошких пројекат...

This long-term research was funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (Ref. 177020) and was based at the Institute for Balkan Studies in Belgrade. The research focused on the prehistory and early history of the Balkans. Various aspects of life were investigated using inter- and multidiscipl...