Balkan archaeology

Alleged "Aegean migrations" have long been seen as underlying major transformations in lifeways and identity in the Balkans in the 12 th-11 th centuries BC. Revisiting the material culture and settlement changes in the north-south "routeway" of the Velika Morava-Južna Morava-Vardar/Axios river valleys, this paper evaluates developments within local communities. It is argued that mobility played an important role in social change, including an element of inward migration from the north. We argue that rather than an Aegean end point, these river valleys themselves were the destination of migrants. The prosperity this stimulated within those communities led to increased networks of personal mobility that incorporated elements from communities from the wider Carpathians and the north of Greece over the course of two centuries.

The past few decades have witnessed a growing realisation that market based measures of human well-being—measures that centre on income and consumption
distributions—miss some other perhaps even more essential elements of human well-being. This insight has found a prominent expression in the work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s so-called capability approach. At the same time, the market-based measure of inequality as a function of the distribution of material remains in graves and other locations remain dominant in archaeology. In this
paper, we explore the significance of the capability approach, and the associated concept of human well-being based on the idea of capabilities, to the archaeology of social inequality and socialmalintegration.We discuss these notions using the case study of the Late Neolithic Bosnian tell site Okolište and argue that there, in c. 5200–4600 BCE, the monopolisation of certain critical goods led to a critical capability inequality,
malintegration and to a prolonged period of social unrest and decline.

Georgia Stratouli, Nikos Katsikaridis, Tasos Bekiaris, Eleni Maousidou, Giannis Petsalnikos, Eleni Tsiola
"Trita at Koromilia”:  A New Riverside Neolithic Site at the District of Kastoria", AEMTh 28, 2014 (2019), 1-8.

The Neolithic site of Trita is located near the banks of Livadopotamos River, 800 m southeast of the modern village of Koromilia, at Kastoria. It represents a flat site that expands over an area of c. 3,0 hectares. The site was detected during the construction of a modern highway and was excavated from October 2013 to January 2015 by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. Based on four radiocarbon dates, the site of Trita dates to the Late Neolithic Period (c. 5200-4300 cal. BC). Excavations at the site revealed several pits of various shapes, sizes and contents, probably reflecting different functions, as well as a series of well-preserved clay thermal structures, located both in the interior of the pits, but also in open areas in-between. Based on the detected flood episodes,
which often occurred at the riverine environs of the site, along with the preliminary study of its rich archaeological assemblage and the scarcity of houses, it seems likely that Trita does not represent a typical roundyear habitational area. Moreover, several categories of the ‘typical’ neolithic material culture are missing or are represented by only a few specimens (i.e. bone tools, clay figurines and miniature objects, ornaments, loom weights). On the contrary, other material categories seem to be abundant (i.e. ground stone tools, especially grinding implements, chipped stone tools, such as blades, and various clay pots). The exact character of the site will be explored more thoroughly in the near future as the study of the archaeological assemblage is still in progress.

The Balkan Peninsula played a crucial role for the introduction of metallurgy during the Copper Age and numerous archaeometallurgical examinations have delivered highly interesting insights on this topic. However, there is a lack of systematic analytical research on copper ore smelting and metal exchange for the later Bronze Age. In this paper we focus on the first archaeometallurgical results of slags from the sites Ružana, Trnjane and Čoka Njica, Eastern Serbia, complimented by the discussion of XRF and lead isotope analyses carried out on 28 copper-based artefacts. Importantly, radiocarbon dating from these sites points to copper production already being undertaken at the end of the Early Bronze Age (19th–18th centuries BC), more than 500 years earlier than previously assumed. This enables us to investigate the flow of metal during the 1st half of the 2nd millennium BC. The analyses of the metallurgical slags indicate a copper matte smelting process in small open pit furnaces and the use of local sulfidic copper ore sources. The fact that these intensive smelting activities in Eastern Serbia can be paralleled with the early production hotspots in central Europe e.g. on the Hochkönig (Mitterberg mining areas) sheds new light on the development of copper based metallurgy in Europe. At the same time, the evidence from Eastern Serbia shows that this area was a source of raw material for copper and bronze alloys providing a regional and supra-regional perspective. Furthermore, our analyses revealed the remarkable result, that by the start of the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1700 BC) copper from the Northern Italian mining areas in the Trentino region also reached the western and central Balkans:
...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................!!THE XRF and lead isotope data is added at the end of the article!!

"The authors intend to raise the discussion about how the identity of the dead was constructed with reference to male-female social roles, in the case of North-Thracian tumuli graves, attempting in an extended perspective to debate the meaning and specific attributes of gendered identities in the Thracian society.
The clearest references about how sexual identity was perceived and represented, and to what degree it influenced the distribution of active roles in a society, may be accessible to archaeologists essentially as twofold data: anthropological analyses of skeletal remains in relation with associations of deposited grave goods, and iconographic representations of men and women performing their roles either in a social or symbolic context. As both burials and iconography are constructs to be manipulated and loaded with ideological content, any gendered identity model identified is to be seen as a declaration on the ideal social organization or even on individual aspiration."

The paper deals with a rare example of а whole graffito scene in the middle bay of the south gallery in the church Hagia Sophia. In view of the posture, clothing and headgear of the figures, most likely the anonymous author has intended to present the theme of Deesis in which the Virgin with a halo around her head is a focal point of the drawing and where it is emphasized her supreme role as intercessor, as mediatrix between the two supplicants by the side and below her and an imaginary Christ. A remarkable and somewhat surprising detail is the adornment of the woman’s headdress that looks like a band or diadem (stephanos) with a small square projection in the front. The diadem leaves no doubt that the image is of a noblewoman. The concern of the anonymous author was to present the persons in his drawing in such a way as if they look toward the Mother of God from the mosaic Deesis in the south gallery of Hagia Sophia and not to follow the iconographical scheme. The hypothetical time span for the drawing’s creation is between the 1261 and 1453.

Throughout antiquity the landlocked highlands of northern Macedonia employed various local and imported marbles. Among them a certain fine-grained white dolomite stands out both in number of artefacts and in quality of workmanship. The material was used for Roman sculptures as well as the best carvings from Late Antiquity and can be traced back to an ancient quarry at Sivec near Prilep. Local workshops must have been based there or at nearby cities. This contrasts with the southern lowlands south of the Demir Kapija Gorge, where Thasian marble appears the default white marble preference and could be imported with relative ease via the Axios/Vardar River. In Late Antiquity, Sivec marble started to be carved in a style and quality that is without precedent in the region, but often indistinguishable from the production of the quarries and workshops at Proconnesus/Constantinople and Docimium in Anatolia. The three Late Antique quarries seem to have been interconnected in a way that is reminiscent of and possibly in part based on the Roman quarry system.

Миодраг Аралица • Miodrag Aralica Звонимир Недељковић и Небојша Станојев • Zvonimir Nedeljković and Nebojša Stanojev мАнАСТИРИШТЕ -мАЈДАн (40) MANASTIRIŠTE MAjDAN (40) 88 91 95 99 102 105 108 112 115 119 123 126 129 132 138 143 146 151 155 160 Светлана Хаџић • Svetlana Hadžić ИСТРАЖИвАњА У мАнАСТИРУ ЗочИШТЕ, ЗочИШТЕ, Со оРАховАц, коСово И мЕТохИЈА (41) ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS IN ZOčIŠTE MONASTERY, ZOčIŠTE, SO ORAHOVAC, kOSOVO AND METOHIjA (41) Гордана Тошић • Gordana Tošić ЗАШТИТнА АРхЕоЛоШкА ИСТРАЖИвАњА мАнАСТИРА вЕЛУћЕ (42) RESCUE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS IN VELUĆE MONASTERY (42)