Stone raw materials in the Vinca culture: Petrographic analysis of assemblage from Vinca and Belovode

Abstract

This paper shows the results of petrographic analyses of raw materials used for making the ground stone industry implements in two Vinca culture sites Vinca and Belovode. The assemblages from the aforementioned sites feature a number of specific characteristics. In Vinca, in late strata, a kind of devaluation in the selection of stone raw materials is registered, which is closely related to the decline in quality of stone processing and may be a consequence of territorial narrowing of the Vinca culture per se in its later phases, and of introduction of metallurgy in everyday life. For this reason an analogy with the Belovode site was made, which subsists only throughout the early phase of the Vinca culture and is doubtlessly a metallurgic settlement. Petrographic analyses of the raw materials from which ground stone tools used to be made at the Vinca and Belovode sites are only a part of the commenced petro-archaeological research. They imply that further investigations should focuses on field work, principally in the vicinity of the sites themselves. Primarily by petrographic, and, as applicable, by other analyses of samples brought from the field work, and by comparison of the tools, it could be possible to define more precisely the territory from which the raw materials originated.