Rhiannon Stevens’s research while affiliated with Museum of London Archaeology and other places

The strategic geographical position of the Balkan Peninsula, at the crossroads between southwest Asia and central and western Europe, make of this territory a key area for understanding the different human migrations into Europe during the Pleistocene. This long-time neglected area for the Palaeolithic research, last years has experienced a ‘blossoming’ in terms of research projects and key discoveries. Only in the past decade, sites from the Balkan Peninsula have yielded, for instance, the oldest anatomically modern human occupations in Europe, the first human remains of our species in the continent, the first confirmation of interbreeding between ‘us’ and Neanderthals and evidence of Palaeolithic rock art, a phenomenon traditionally restricted to South-western Europe. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the previous data and new discoveries, addressed by an international list of contributors among the most renowned scholars developing archaeological researches in this territory. It summarises the state of the art for the Early Prehistory Archaeology of one of the most important emerging territories for the discipline.

The strategic geographical position of the Balkan Peninsula, at the crossroads between southwest Asia and central and western Europe, make of this territory a key area for understanding the different human migrations into Europe during the Pleistocene. This long-time neglected area for the Palaeolithic research, last years has experienced a ‘blossoming’ in terms of research projects and key discoveries. Only in the past decade, sites from the Balkan Peninsula have yielded, for instance, the oldest anatomically modern human occupations in Europe, the first human remains of our species in the continent, the first confirmation of interbreeding between ‘us’ and Neanderthals and evidence of Palaeolithic rock art, a phenomenon traditionally restricted to South-western Europe. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the previous data and new discoveries, addressed by an international list of contributors among the most renowned scholars developing archaeological researches in this territory. It summarises the state of the art for the Early Prehistory Archaeology of one of the most important emerging territories for the discipline.

The article presents evidence about the Middle Palaeolithic and Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition interval in the karst area of the Danube Gorges in the Lower Danube Basin. We review the extant data and present new evidence from two recently investigated sites found on the Serbian side of the Danube River – Tabula Traiana and Dubočka-Kozja caves. The two sites have yielded layers dating to both the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and have been investigated by the application of modern standards of excavation and recovery along with a suite of state-of-the-art analytical procedures. The presentation focuses on micromorphological analyses of the caves’ sediments, characterisation of cryptotephra, a suite of new radiometric dates (accelerator mass spectrometry and optically stimulated luminescence) as well as proteomics (zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry) and stable isotope data in discerning patterns of human occupation of these locales over the long term.