Observations on the origin and demography of the Vinča culture

Abstract The Vinca culture represents one the most important archaeological phenomena of the Neolithic and Eneolithic world in Southeastern Europe. As all other archaeological cultures, the Vinca culture is defined in the era of culture-historical archaeology, representing a set of sites with similar material culture with a core area in the Central Balkans. The task of modern archaeological research is to reconstruct social and cultural processes that gave rise to the observed patterns of material culture. In this paper I explore two partially related issues: 1) the formation of the Vinca culture (Early-Late Neolithic or Starcevo-Vinca transition) 2) regional and settlement demography of the Vinca culture. The transition between the Early Neolithic Starcevo culture and the Late Neolithic Vinca culture was marked mainly by changes in pottery style and technology, as well as in settlement size and architecture. The analysis of the regional population dynamics pattern based on the summed probability of calibrated probability distributions of radiocarbon dates suggest that the population rapidly increased after ∼5300 cal BC. The relative population size proxy curve reached its peak ∼5200 cal BC and had remained relatively constant until 4500 cal BC when it declined sharply. Estimates of settlement population sizes suggest that changes in the community organization also occurred, as Vinca culture settlements with hundreds of people, even over a thousand in some cases, could support higher levels of scalar stress than earlier Starcevo settlements. The current state of evidence is such that no definite answer can be given regarding the hypotheses about the formation of the Vinca culture.