ABSTRACT
This originality was bom, no doubt, partly of mere isolation, but it may also be ascribed to some aboriginal Mesolithic element assimilated by the immigrant setders. Among the bone and antler tools, barbed harpoons suggest this strongly,7 though while the Balkan caves remain unexplored nothing more positive can be said. Blade-tools are common in local flint,8
but the flint industry is seen extended to the service of the immigrant art of farming in the serrated sickle-teeth1 above noticed (p. 72) in the Near East. The ground was tilled with the plano-convex stone hoes,2 already mentioned with the bevelled adzes of Thessaly (p. 80), commonly known as ‘ shoelast celts’ and characteristic of this whole European peasant culture.3 Above the irregular pits of the lowest level, Vinca has yielded the remains of rectangular timber-framed huts with wattle-and-daub walls, and the whole material culture bespeaks a sedentary farming-life. Female figurines of the form which we have already encountered in the Near East and the Aegean (pp. 84, 89) are plentiful (PI. I l l , B3): they belong to the culture’s Anatolian inheritance, and thus also recall, more or less crudely and in baked clay, the Asiatic type of the Cycladic idols, which has rather different repre sentatives in Thessaly, or else display squatting or seated postures. There are male figures too, and in all the head may be perforated behind to hold some sort of head-dress. Animal statuettes are also found, and thus the simple religion of fertility appears embracing all aspects of the community’s living. Personal ornaments were plentiful, and some are made from shells which can only have been imported from the seacoast: marble and other foreign substances were also in demand, and we can thus see that some sort of trade was plied between the villagers and Aegean regions. The site has even yielded little beads and scraps of copper, and the cinnabar obtainable near by at Suplja Stena is the best-attested among exchange productions, which may have included even the gold of Tran sylvania beyond the river.
