The Vučedol Culture, a prehistoric European legacy

The Vučedo culture, or Vučedolská kultura, is named so for the town, found in its core area in eastern Croatia, though this culture dates back 5,000 years. It was one of the earliest Indo-European cultures to emerge, after the Yamnaya had expanded westward into Europe. See my video on the Indo-European homeland for more about those migrations. This was in the same era as ancient Sumeria, in the early dynasty of a united Egyptian civilization. Following the Baden culture to its north, emerging out of the Chalcolithic period, when we began to use copper for battle axes, blades, weapons, and, more importantly perhaps, tools, another wave of Indo-Europeans came down through Romania, from the steppe, and up the Danube. Around present-day Vučedol, these people built a powerful settlement with around 3,000 people. For that era, 3,000 people was very big. Hi, I'm Benjamin, and I'm the guy who runs this channel, and this episode is possible because of the Vučedol Museum, in eastern Croatia, near the Serbian border. This place, behind me. And I hope they don't mind me using their fantastic website. I'll put a link down to their merchandise shop below, if you would like to help these guys out. And I hope that you'll visit, if you're going anywhere in the middle Danube area, eastern Croatia, Serbia, going up toward Hungary. That kind of area. I'll put links to the location as well, so you can check them out. I hope I get to visit them in person someday. Now back to the video. Vučedol was influenced by the Coţefeni culture, western Romania, as part of the Indo-European movement up the Danube from 3500 BCE. Early on, from around 3000 BCE, this culture took up positions near the mountain ranges with copper deposits. They wanted better weapons, and built settlements on defensive hilltops and high riverbanks. They wanted to defend themselves. Like this site at Vučedol, here they began making tools in arsenic copper. This requires higher temperatures, more advanced kiln technology than pre-Indo-Europeans had before them, and it makes this arsenic way of producing copper, it makes the metal stronger. This culture is the last of the Chocolithic period in the region, lasting from 3000 BCE to 2200 BCE, during which time copper and gold spread and multiplied, with ceramic pottery becoming more ornate, more sophisticated, and social hierarchies showing a slow increase toward military warrior castes and more fancy burials, as Indo-Europeans took over. The Vučedol culture used a benjebek, an early form of the war axe. To make weapons and common tools, the Vučedol culture mined copper on a scale not seen before. They were expansive. They destroyed earlier settlements and built new ones on top of them, as well as expanding and settling in new areas not settled before by people, at least from what we can tell. Through Bosnia, Serbia, present-day Hungary, Slovenia, North-East Italy, Western Romania, Montenegro, Kosovo, Czechia, Austria. And we know they were shipbuilders using dugout canoes with harpoons made from deer antlers. They settled islands like Hvar, Korčula, and Kres, which is impressive for over 4000 years ago, to take a bunch of people and go to an island in a ferocious sea. Compared to nearby cultures, the Vučedol culture had a more diverse range of food sources. They fished along the river Danube, hunted in the forests and the Balkan mountains, and used planes on either side of the Danube to grow crops. They had baking ovens outside their houses, and bell-shaped storage pits for grain. They even appeared to have domesticated dogs, pigs, and cows. So this culture was more resilient in times of scarcity than most of its competitors. All of this variation allowed a more complex social organization, which led, naturally over time, to stratification and the birth of a tribal and military aristocracy. The chief was a shaman-smith, having both knowledge of coppersmithing and astrology in relation to the yearly cycle. He would know how to avoid the poisonous gases created by coppersmithing and making their instruments. Coppersmithing was so respected that people across Europe in this era had gods related to this craft and this job. Indeed, having further social stratification allowed them more time to express spiritual ideas. And we see this in their pottery. The most famous is the Vučedol dove, which is probably a male partridge, which could be a religious symbolism for fertility, with the male figure dancing upon ground and resting in a nest of the earth goddess. It is the oldest dove or partridge figure found in Europe thus far, over 4,500 years old. This Vučedol culture also appears to have devised an advanced calendar, which can be seen on its pottery, showing Orion, the Sun, and constellations like Gemini and Pegasus. Orion's belt vanished over the horizon at winter's end, showing a new year had begun, and soon the planting of crops would too. These people made four-wheeled wagons, impressive for that age, and burial mounds, not too unlike the Kurikins of Eurasia. Indeed, we see a Kurganization of the Danube valley and the Carpathian zone, under influence from the steppes, and the Indo-European expansion. Vučedol was part of this, and for the early parts of its history, certainly, Vučedol is the frontier of Indo-European expansion. They also had rituals, quite cruel ones, and it seems, from the skulls we have, a drop of molten copper was dripped upon the head of children, as part of some kind of initiation. Material items, like stones, suggest this culture traded with the Heletic culture of mainland Greece, that would be an extensive network, hundreds of miles to the south. We're not sure exactly where this culture went, but according to Bogdan Brokner, the Illyrians of Roman times are descended from these people, and if the Albanian language is descended from Illyrian, could the Albanian language and culture be the surviving descendant of these people? In the late 3rd millennium BCE, the Bronze Age began a series of social upheavals, destroying the old chocolithic copper societies, with ethnic conflict and mass migrations. We don't know where these people went. Thank you very much for watching. If you liked this video, watch this video here, about the Cucuteni culture.