Talk:Vinča culture

Title wrong

The title of this page is incorrect, as it contains an Ä. I don't know how to fix this.

Not at my Windows system.HJJHolm (talk) 17:39, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Wrong Chronology

The chronology adduced seems to be severely wrong. It should in fact be 1,000 years older. New calibrated data see the German wiki.HJJHolm (talk) 17:39, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know much about this culture, but I'm assuming that they aren't an Indo-European group. Does someone have more info?--Moosh88 05:53, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

No, they were not. In the 6th millenium BC, the Indo-Europeans still lived in their Urheimat. bogdan ʤjuʃkə | ^Talk 07:47, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I find the "Vinča today" section lacks neutral phrasing ("thanks to" and alike...).

This article uses far too many times modern toponyms such as Serbia, Bulgaria, etc., which didn't exist for another 5000 years, as these peoples came a lot later into the Balkans. Phrases such as "modern-day Bulgaria", "what is today Serbia" should be used. 87.202.108.116 22:24, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

What is the pronunciation of the Č (c with caron) in this word? How is it different from plain vinca?

It's pronounced as ch in chair. Plain vinca doesn't mean anything, I assume the only reason people sometimes write it that way is because they don't have the central european languages character set installed on their machine. Edrigu 23:26, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Please delete that map

The map titled File:Old Europe.png is very innaccurate and needs to be deleted immediately. The Vinča Culture shown on that map is completely wrong - it was actually only in a relatively small area in modern-day Serbia, and that map indicates that it took up half of Southeastern Europe! That is just one of the many errors in that map, and having it displayed in this article is just one more example why people feel that Wikipedia is not reliable. Delete it now, please. --Saukkomies ^talk 04:03, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

I believe the map is based on a map in EIEC but I'm unsure now. Anyway, the map is intended to show the spheres of influence of archaeological horizons, not the boundaries of archaeological cultures in the narrow sense. And yes, it is a rough overview, the culture boundaries cannot be expected to aim for pixel accuracy. You are most welcome to replace it with a more accurate version.

And no, the Vincha culture is not restricted to Serbia. The type site Vincha is in Serbia, and patriots tend to pick a type site as near to home as possible, the Romanian type site would be Turdaş and the Bulgarian one Gradeshnitsa, but the internationally most current name is still "Vincha culture". --dab (𒁳) 13:08, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

I do understand about the problem concerning ethnocentricism in regard to he study of Neolithic European cultures - it's something I have to deal with a lot in my work here on Wikipedia articles. One of the biggest problems is the debate about "what to call Culture X". This has been somewhat resolved in Wikipedia with the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, which takes its name from both the Romanian and the Ukrainian terms for the same culture (as I'm sure you are aware of). This issue was resolved by combining the terms, and this is what is maintained as the standard within the English language Wikipedia encyclopedia. The use of the combined term "Cucuteni-Trypillia" is not confined to the English Wikipedia, it is actually based on what many leading English-speaking scholars have tended in recent years to use.

However, because of the history of independent research in other countries, there are outside sources that keep labeling Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in other ways - the most notable being the use of the discouraged Russian language term of "Tripolie culture". THis boils down to a matter of standardization here in Wikipedia, which should overcome the bruised egos of various nationalistic patriots who desire that their particular jargon be used instead of others'. Since the culture was named after two separate villages: one in Romania and the other in Ukraine, the compromise in the English Wikipedia has been to use the names of these villages in their own native tongue - so, the name of the village in Ukraine is Trypillia, and although the Russian name is transliterated as Triplie, we here in the English Wikipedia have chosen to use the Ukrainian form of the word, since the village is in Ukraine, not Russia.

One of the various problems regarding that map is the term "Tripolie", which may be what the original map it was borrowed from had used, is that it does not reflect the standard terminology that has been agreed upon not only by the editors in the English language Wikipedia, but by many other modern English language-speaking scholars in the international community. If nothing else, that map should be updated to include the accepted standard. However, that is just one issue regarding the problems with that map.

It very well may be that the Vinča culture and the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture end up becoming one and the same. Indeed, I have some suspicions that such may actually be the case. However, I am also not in the position to make that call. I do know that what that map shows is that the Vinča culture (which existed at the same time as the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture) is shown to occupy the same territory that the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture did at the same time. Using that map is therefore confusing to anyone trying to understand which culture existed in what locations at what time. It also presumes to dictate to the English Wikipedia editors that the Vinča culture (which is a Serbian term) should be paramount in any dispute regarding a turf war against other nationalities' terms such as the Romanian and Ukrainian.

I would love to see some resolution to this dispute among the international academic community, and if you (or anyone else) knows about such a compromise or resolution, I would like to know. It seems to me that at this point there were so many crossover cultural borrowings between the Cucuteni-Trypillian and the Vinča cultures, that they simply must be considered to have been roughly the same culture, or at the least, something akin to the modern-day examples of the Castilian and Catalonian Spanish. One of the best examples of this is to be found in a map that is copyright-protected (so I can't just post it here), that is to be found in a very excellent article written by the outstanding archaeological scholar Ruth Tringham, one-time Head of the University of California Berkeley Department of Archaeology, and current Director of the Berkeley Archaeologists @ Çatalhöyük (BACH) team working on excavating the Catalhöyük site (as you can see, she comes with flawless credentials). In 2005 she published an article entitled: "Weaving house life and death into places: a blueprint for a hypermedia narrative", in which on the bottom right of page 101 she included a map that shows the extent of what is called the "Burned House Horizon", which shows the geographical region where archaeologists have found evidence of the practice of periodically burning homes. There is also a chart at the top left of page 102 of that article that provides detailed description of the various areas and times that this practice of house burning took place. Taken together, these two pieces of information present a very compelling case to indicate that there was not several cultures in that region, but one larger culture that had tremendous influence, as is demonstrated by this practice of periodically igniting their entire settlement on fire, which is not something that would be a random coincindental flukish thing to do.

Further information: House burning of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture

All of this is to demonstrate that I actually believe that the map in question that is posted to this Wikipedia article on the Vinča culture is somewhat correct - that I believe that the Vinča culture's influence did extend into the territory occupied by the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture. However, when I say that, I am actually saying that both cultures (the Vinča AND the Cucuteni-Trypillian) should actually be regarded as one-and-the-same. Here is where that map totally falls apart:

1. The map shows the Vinča culture to extend far into the Cucuteni-Trypillian geographical area
2. The map mislabels the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture as the "Tripolie" culture, and isolates it to a small region of its actual geographical extent
3. The map makes the presumption of dictating to the Wikipedia community that the "Vinča culture" term is paramount over other terms that have been accepted by the Wikipedia editors as standard
4. As such, the map is in direct disagreement with the rest of the Wikipedia community

Resolution: get rid of the map. It is incorrect and misleading. Until such time that the international academic community accepts a definition that the Vinča culture and the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture are indeed one-and-the-same, then we here in the English Wikipedia ought to abide by the standard naming conventions that have been worked out here in the various "talk pages" of our encyclopedia.

I would be open to having this issue discussed among Wikipedia editors and perhaps a compromise might be reached, but regardless of the outcome of that discussion, this map would STILL be incorrect. So, please, do us all a favor and get rid of it. Thank you. --Saukkomies ^talk 14:38, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

New Comments posted 20 January 2010 I've given this subject some thought, and would like to retract much of what I had said in the above comments. After having looked into this some more, I've come to the realization that the map does perhaps show the boundaries of the Vinča culture land as it would have been at the furthest limits of its influence somewhere around 5000 B.C. The problem, though, is that the map also shows the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture next to it. However, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture had not even started at this time.

By the time the C-T culture arrived on the scene (probably coming from the north out of Poland) and began to exert its influence in the region, the Vinča culture's geographical area of influence had begun to dramatically decrease. Not only that, but the Hamangia & Boian cultures appear out of Anatolia and start occupying the region of the lower Danube, further pushing the Vinča culture's influence to the west.

What ends up happening is that by 4500 B.C., the Vinča culture's influence has retreated to the southwest, abandoning the Transylvania region, and the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture has extended its influence into Transylvania to replace it. The Hamangia & Boian cultures have also transformed into the Gumeliţa culture, which continues to maintain a pressure against the Vinča culture.

By the time that the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture's influence is at its greatest, between 3500 and 3000 B.C., the Vinča culture has shrunk to a small few villages, and then just dissappears altogether.

So, this is why that map is so dumb. If we were to go by what that map is apparently trying to say, we would draw the conclusion that the Vinča culture and the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture existed side-by-side at the same time with the Vinča culture occupying the region of Transylvania. However, that's not what happened. To put it into a different context, this would be the same as if someone drew a map of the Mediterranean at the time of Alexander the Great's conquests, showing the furthest extent of Greek influence before Alexander's death in 323 and the division of his empire into various smaller realms ***AND*** at the same time, showing the Roman Empire existing along with it in the western Mediterranean as it would have been after, say, the Punic Wars (circa 140B.C.). This sort of a map would be entirely misleading and ... in a word ... stupid. That's exactly how I feel about this map in question that purports to show the region of Southeast Europe during the Neolithic period. It's misleading and wrong.

Anyway, while I was researching this, I came upon a great site that is hosted by a married couple (he's British, she's Romanian) who live in England and teach folk dancing and have an avid interest in the history of southeast Europe. They have a series of maps that show how the various cultures existed over the course of time, which makes all of what I was trying to say here much easier to understand. Here's the link: South East Europe history maps.

The part of my previous post that I wish to retract would be about the bit where I'm trying to push a pet theory of mine about where I would like to see some kind of consolidation of the various cultures of the late Neolithic and Eneolithic southeast Europe who shared so many similar traits to be given a name that could indicate their close commonalities. This has been attempted before, notably by Marija Gimbutas (who coined the phrase "Old European culture"), and now with Marco Merlini, who has apparently been using the name "Danubian culture" to apply to a much larger group of these cultures than it originally was intended to cover when Vere Gordon Childe first coined the phrase in the 1920s to describe the LBK, stroked pottery and Rössen cultures. Merlini has broadened this out, and has recently been using the term "Danubian culture" to include the Vinča, the Cucuteni-Trypillian, the Gumeliţa, and the Langyel, among others. Merlini's interest in this is to try to show how these cultures were using what he believes to have been a form of proto-writing which would have predated the earliest cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia - and would make the invention of writing something that took place in Southeast Europe instead of Sumeria. This is just one of the many cultural aspects that these southeast European cultures shared with one another, and further supports my idea that there should be a unifying term to give to all of these cultures. However, I'm not comfortable with Merlini's use of "Danubian culture", since it implies that the cultures associated with it would be close to the Danube River, and this is simply not the case with some - for instance, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture extended all the way to the Dneiper River in Ukraine! Calling people who lived in a Neolithic settlement near present-day Nikopol, Ukraine as being "Danubian" is ridiculous, in my opinion, even if their culture had originated a thousand years earlier near the Danube River... And the other problem with that label is it was already being used to describe something completely different. What we need is a new term that doesn't carry with it the negative "cultish" feel of Gimbutas' "Old European culture" (which also had problems, since it wasn't specifically southeast Europe), and the misnomer "Danubian culture" of Merlini's use.

At any rate, this is the problem I saw with my previous comments - Wikipedia is not to be used to push anyone's personal pet peeve, and so I regretted in part what I had said earlier here. However, I still maintain that the map in question is just bad and wrong, and ought to be tossed in the trash can. If it would be acceptable to the people who have been the most involved in working on this article about the Vinča culture, I could create a map showing its extent, and include it here in the Talk Page to see if you would find it acceptable to be used instead of the one that is there now that is so dumb. Comments and feedback about anything I've said here are appreciated. --Saukkomies ^talk 15:58, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the maps on this article (there were three of them as of last week) were unsuitable for many reasons, I've replaced them with one that just shows the Vinca culture. Re. nomenclature, I don't think it as much as an issue as with Cucuteni-Tripolye, where you have the culture equally divided between Romania and Ukraine and discovered at the same time. Vinca is by and large a Serbian culture, with relatively small protrusions into neighbouring countries, and from what I've read the term Vinca culture is accepted by Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian scholars, and universal in the (small) English-language literature. The only time you see Turdas &co. appearing is in the form Vinca-Turdas, referring to local variants. —Joseph Roe^Tk•Cb, 08:38, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

References

Regional names

The opening section of the article is inaccurate. In Romania the Vinča culture is not called the Tordos or Turdas culture. It's called the Vinča culture. The Turdas-Vinča culture (or Tordos-Vinča culture, depending on whether you prefer the Romanian or Hungarian variant of the town name) is considered a sub-group within the Vinča culture. It's not used by all researchers even. When it's used, it denotes a late Vinča culture group based on pottery styles which vary slightly from the contemporary Vinča type pottery found in the Danube region around Belgrade. It's geographically specific to Transylvania. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.143.39.201 (talk) 08:45, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Back in the 1800s some researchers referred to this culture as Turdas/Tordos culture but it was before they realised that it's the same culture as what was found in Serbia. Now it's not called Turdas culture in Romania. Like the above person writes, Vinca-Turdas is a specific sub-culture in late phase of Vinca. The pottery style varies slightly from the regular Vinca pottery styles of this period. Even so, not all researchers use the term Vinca-Turdas. Probably the beginning of the article should be re-worded to reflect that there are not used now such regional names (at least not in Romania).--Fata Muntilor (talk) 13:26, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

I would like to fix this but I can't find an appropriate reference. —Joseph Roe^Tk•Cb, 08:39, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Based on Pottery

It might be worth noting somewhere that the term Vinča culture (like many other prehistoric cultures) is defined almost solely on pottery typology. This is understandable as pottery is probably the most visible and easily determined cultural factor that an archaeologist can study. It can be done in the field after picking up a few potsherds. BUT it doesn't tell the whole story. Architectural styles, lithic styles, raw material acquisition patterns, social/communication/trade networks, and other factors often indicate that cultural groupings based on pottery typologies alone are not completely accurate. In the case of the Vinča culture there is a difference in the architectural styles used in different regions. As well, based on raw materials used for lithics, it appears that the Vinča populations in the Transylvanian plateau area had little or no contact with the Vinča populations in the Southern Carpathian and Danube regions. They DID though have extensive contact with non-Vinča populations to their north-west and north-east. Pottery typologies are a valuable tool for relative dating but they are often misapplied to cultural studies and give a misleading picture or in the least a highly incomplete picture of the past. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.143.39.201 (talk) 09:38, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

I think you are underestimating the sophistication with which archaeologists try to relate material remains to actual people - the discipline has come a long way from "pots equal people". In the case of the Vinca culture it is the widespread distribution of relatively homogeneous ritual artefacts (which appear to originate from Vinca-Belo Brdo) that has led archaeologists to believe Vinca sites were connected by some kind of exchange network and probably had a degree of culture cohesion, maybe even a shared cultural identity. Even if that were not true the rise and fall of these large settlements at about the same time and in a particular ecozone justifies treating Vinca culture as a discrete historical phenomenon. That said, in updating this article I've tried to be very careful in my wording so that it's clear that the "Vinca culture" is an archaeological culture defined on artefact typologies, and the relationship between that an actual past human group is an extra step in the interpretation. That way, even if the picture is not complete, it shouldn't be misleading. —Joseph Roe^Tk•Cb, 12:53, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

68.188.203.251 (talk) 00:41, 9 March 2013 (UTC) Extensive mining---but where did that hard labor go? Trade? For what? Copper can be site specific so where did it go? Malta?

List of Vinča sites

Does there exist a list of Vinča archaeological sites? If not, should there? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fata Muntilor (talk • contribs) 13:28, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Chapman has an extensive list of the Vinca sites, 639 in total. But I gather reproducing large lists just for their own sake is frowned upon, so perhaps just selecting the major ones would be better. Also, it was published in 1981 so there are probably a lot of newly discovered sites missing. —Joseph Roe^Tk•Cb, 08:42, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Tautological?

"The village's population increased when Romans settled." 86.135.244.44 (talk) 23:09, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Untrue, too, there was no Roman settlement at Vinca-Belo Brdo as far as I'm aware. —Joseph Roe^Tk•Cb, 08:42, 17 September 2010 (UTC

There were Romans around Vinca, at least the foundations of mansions and villas left near the present day Vinca. However, due to the huge area that current population occupies, it is not thoroughly researched. But, as we talk here about time period of 4000 years, it is irrelevant whether population has grown or not as we do not have any clues in between Pixius talk 15:00, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

p.s. I used to live few kilometres from Vinca, visiting museum and excavation site was weekly ritual during the summer

What are "western aborigin cultures"

See File:European Late Neolithic.gif - and what are "eastern aborigin cultures'?
I found a good map, which we can't use, of the Vinca culture at [1] (p. 63). Dougweller (talk • contribs) 13:02, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Major link to add

A link to this study should be added (I'm not familiar with Wikipedia so I won't do it):

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2010.06.012

"On the origins of extractive metallurgy: new evidence from Europe" - comment added by noop - 17:23, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

There's only one way to get familiar! —Joseph Roe^Tk•Cb, 19:48, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

NO WORD ON MOST ANCIENT LETTERS OF THE WORLD ?

In French version of the same article there is a nice writing on MOST ANCIENT LETTERS OF THE WORLD = VINCA LETTERS. Why there is no mention on so imortant issue? People have to know that Vinca letters are more ancient of the world and that Serbian culture is the leading one — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.167.132.175 (talk) 04:07, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

The French article is pretty poor - but it doesn't call them letters, it calls them "symbols" which is what they are. A letter is a part of an alphabet, and this is not an alphabet. Unlike the French wikipedia we have a separate article on them at Vinča symbols. And there was no Serbian culture at that time of course. Dougweller (talk) 11:08, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Since when is the "letter" only part of the "alphabet"??? It is a writing system, they may have not written poems, but definitely wrote something with it. Pixius talk 15:04, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Earliest known example of copper metallurgy

@Joe Roe: so far as adding "Eurasia", that's straight from the source which is looking at the development of extractive metallurgy in Eurasia. Note that the source also confines itself to extractive metallurgy. As I understand it, the working of metal in its native form is also metallurgy. The Old Copper Complex was working with copper 10,000 years ago, and there's a copper pendant in the Middle East about 8500 years old [2] and there is evidence of processing copper at Çatal Höyük according to the source used in this article.

So after consideration, I propose that the article should say first copper smelting in Eurasia. Doug Weller talk 15:17, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Good point, thanks. I was also wrong in my edit summary about the Radivojević et al. source already being cited in the article body—I'm sure it was at one point, probably lost to the mists of time—so I've added that back in too. One of the great things about that paper is that it doesn't just say "hey look we found a really old piece of slag", but shows that the invention of smelting followed a long period of experimentation with metal ores and high-temperature kilns for pottery, so it really does seem like Vinča was an independent centre of origin.

You're also right about Çatalhöyük possibly being earlier, though Radivojević et al. have disputed that evidence.[3] Sorry, I was too quick to revert. – Joe (talk) 18:04, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

No problem, we all do something like that from time to time no matter how experienced we are.😀 Doug Weller talk 18:11, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Preceded by/ Followed by

"Like the Vinca, the Tisza culture descended from the Starcevo (Koros) culture … its divergence from the Vinca culture is due to specific ecological conditions in the River Tisza basin, and its emergence as a separate unit is correlated with the appearance of tell settlements and tell-based economies.”

Gimbutas (1991), 'The Civilization of the Goddess', p.70-71

The Tisza culture is partly contemporary with Vinca but begins later. It might be better to put this as a related culture if this can be added to the infobox. Ario1234 (talk) 18:17, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

Genetics

User:Joe Roe, primary sources reputably published can be still used, cited and based section on them. There was no interpretation or misuse of the information from the sources, only "descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access...". In the section were cited three peer-review studies, of which the third was basically a secondary source as it made an additional review of the samples. Miki Filigranski (talk) 19:46, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

There were three primary sources cited for that section. Only one mentioned the Vinča culture in the article text, and that was to say that the authors excluded the Vinča and Tiszapolgár population groups because they lacked sufficient high-quality data. Another had a short section on a single Vinča sample in the supplementary materials, again stating that this site is one of only 2 known cemeteries of this cultural group in this region [...] demographic studies suggest that the Vinča burials are not representative of the average Vinča population. The third, which is about the genetic history of Britain in the Bronze Age, 1500 km and 2000 years distant from the Vinča culture, has data on a handful of samples in a supplementary table. So the only thing approaching a usable, secondary interpretation we can find in these sources is that there are insufficient samples from the Vinča culture to say much about its population genetics. Ignoring that and digging through supplementary tables to cobble together the claim that they were 90-97% Early European Farmers, 0-12% Western Hunter-Gatherer and 0-8% Western Steppe Herders, apart from being impenetrable nonsense to the general reader, is textbook original research by synthesis. – Joe (talk) 10:38, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

That's not SYNTH nor nonsense to the general reader. --Miki Filigranski (talk) 10:46, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

We disagree here, thanks for response, won't take it further. There will be other studies in the future which will, most likely, prove old results, have more text on the samples and so on, until then.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 10:57, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

"Europe is not a period"

- The above comment was posted by editor Joe Roe.

Thanks Joe. The European Neolithic is a distinct period. It's a subset of the Neolithic in general. Neolithic cultures in Europe should go to the dedicated European Neolithic page before the general Neolithic page. The European Neolithic page, as it is, is called 'Neolithic Europe'. Ario1234 (talk) 02:17, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

@Ario1234: Old Europe is not, and doesn't belong in that part of the infobox. – Joe (talk) 06:45, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

What does prosomorphic mean??

The word 'prosomorphic' is used in one the gallery images. I've been unable to locate a definition for prosomorphic. Should it be protomorphic? Creedweber (talk) 04:15, 27 November 2022 (UTC)