With National Science Foundation support Dr. Ivana Radovanovic and an international team of colleagues will conduct one field season of a targeted survey and test excavations of the Mesolithic sites in the Danube Iron Gates hinterlands in Serbia. This initial phase will provide the basis for a long-term research project, which will explore the material record in the full context of hunter-gatherers' land-use, mobility, and interactions in this part of the Carpathian-Danubian region. Archaeological evidence gathered in previous decades from the coastal Mesolithic Iron Gates includes unique hunter-gatherers' residential, aggregation and ceremonial sites used by a variety of groups over seven millennia. More exact data are needed to infer if material culture content, change, and phases of abandonment of these sites correspond directly to a climate change induced deterioration of environmental resources, or if the population movement, contact and ensuing competition over resources were a more important factor that led to risk management strategies such as a greater seasonal mobility and greater emphasis on exploitation of resources in the hinterlands. It is necessary to bring together this previously explored record and the new data from the Iron Gates inland sites that this survey and the subsequent studies will provide. The initial phase in 2011 focuses on systematic archaeological and geoarchaeological survey, mapping, small test excavations and data collection from the caves and rock-shelters in the Iron Gates hinterlands along with previously unexplored open-air artifact concentrations in the coastal areas that contain Postglacial and Early Holocene deposits. The further long-term research will help clarify chronostratigraphic, paleoecological, and material culture correlations among these sites and allow assessing a finer resolution of cultural and social dynamics in the area, as well as a more accurate assessment of the causes of Mesolithic cultural and social change from a diachronic perspective. Although this research will contribute to understanding of the Mesolithic interactions in one geographical area, the utility of its results will be applicable to general anthropological research of hunter-gatherers and their economic, social and cultural responses to environmental change, population movements and contact.
The project will help to further reanimate scientific dialogue between Serbian and international scholars that was broken during Yugoslavia's 1990s disintegration. During the current phase and through subsequent research, this project will provide team members from the US, Serbia, and The Netherlands with an important co-mingling of approaches and methodologies. Dr. Radovanovic's archaeological research and academic experience related to both Serbian and US practices will provide an important bridge for this international collaboration. Students from both countries will be active members of the team. They will contribute to data collection while gaining critical experience in survey and excavation techniques, mapping, methods of data analysis, report preparation, and cooperation strategies as members of a multinational team. In the long-term, this research will result in a monograph, papers and conference presentations that will interest scholars and students in various fields of the sciences and humanities, including archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, material culture studies, geography, environmental studies, palaeoecology, and palaeontology.
Evidence from the survey and excavations accomplished in Phase 1 of this research in Eastern Serbia supports establishment of a long-term systematic exploration of the hunter-gatherers’ settlement along the Danube and its hinterlands. Our focus is on the Mesolithic period dated between 13,000 and 7,000 years ago - a period marked by global warming of climate that followed the last Ice Age, but also by the abrupt cold oscillations, rapid climate changes within the general warming trend. Phase 1 of our research provided a framework to further explore the effects of these changes on the environment and on the hunter-gatherers’ settlement. New data obtained in this project now provide geological and environmental context for potential further evidence of hunter-gatherers’ settlement, movement and contact with neighboring and more distant groups, which also include first farmers in the area. Mesolithic stone tools were collected at four new sites: two riverine and two inland, along with pottery, bones and metal from the later prehistoric and historic periods collected at the locations surveyed in 2011 and 2012. Undergraduate and Graduate students from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Belgrade and University of Kansas had an opportunity to experience work in an international team of scholars with different expertise in the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic research. They were engaged in survey, GPS recording, test excavations, sifting, coring, drawing of situation plans and sketches, photo and video documentation, and developed their knowledge and expertise in these tasks. The project helped to further reanimate scientific dialogue between Serbian and international scholars that was broken during Yugoslavia’s 1990s disintegration. During the current phase, this project provided team members from the US, Serbia, and The Netherlands with an important co-mingling of approaches and methodologies.
