Balkan Mesolithic
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The Mesolithic is the transitional period between the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gathering existence and the development of farming and pottery production during the Postglacial Neolithic. The duration of the classical Palaeolithic, which lasted until about 10,000 years ago, is applicable to the Balkans. It ended with the Mesolithic (duration is 2–4 millennia) or, where an early Neolithisation was peculiar to, with the Epipalaeolithic.
Regions with limited glacial impact (e.g. the Balkans), the term Epipalaeolithic is more preferable. Regions that experienced less environmental effects during the last ice age have a much less apparent, straightforward, and occasionally marked by an absence of sites Mesolithic era. According to Douglass W. Bailey:
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- “…it is equally important to recognize that the Balkan upper Palaeolithic was a long period containing little significant internal change. The ‘Mesolithic’ may not have existed in the Balkans for the same reasons that cave art and mobiliary art never appeared: the changes in climate and flora and fauna were gradual and not drastic. (…) Furthermore, one of the reasons that we do not distinguish separate industries in the Balkans as Mesolithic is because the lithic industries of the early H`olocene were very firmly of a gradually developing late Palaeolithic tradition…”
There is lithic evidence in Serbia, southwestern Romania, and Montenegro. At Ostrovul Banului, the Cuina Turcului rock shelter in the Danube Gorges and in the nearby caves of Climente people make relatively advanced bone and lithic tools (i.e. end-scrapers, blade lets, and flakes). People started to use more often particular places in the landscape. Significant changes that began in long Upper Palaeolithic did take vaster place during Mesolithic.
The single sites represented materials related to Mesolithic in Bulgaria is Pobiti Kamini. There is no another lithic evidence on the period. There is a 4,000-gap between the latest Upper Palaeolithic material (13,600 BP at Temnta Dupka) and the earliest Neolithic evidence presented at Gulubnik (the beginning of the seventh millennium BCE).
At Odmut in Montenegro there is evidence for human activity in the period. The research of the period was supplemented with Greek Mesolithic well presented by sites such as Franchthi. The other sites are Theopara and Sesklo in Thessaly that present Middle and Upper Palaeolithic as well as early Neolithic period. Yet southern and coastal Greece, which contained materials of the Mesolithic, is less know.
Activities began to be concentrated around individual sites within particular places. Furthermore people declared personal and group identities by using various decorations: wearing ornaments and painting their bodies with ochre and hematite. As regards the point of identity Dailey writes, “Flint-cutting tools as well as time and effort needed to produce such tools testify the expressions of identity and more flexible combinations of materials, which began to be used in the late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic.”
Thus, on the one hand the aforementioned allow us to think of speculating whether there was Mesolithic in southeastern Europe in the sense as it was with cave art that never appeared. Perhaps there was only the extended Upper Palaeolithic. On the other hand, lack of research in a number regions and the fact that many of the sites are close to the shore (it is evident that the current sea level is 100 m higher; a number of sites was covered by water) makes us describe the time of the Balkan Mesolithic (better called Epipalaeolithic) in the notions of gradual continuity and poor-defined development.
We do see the southeastern Europe during about 2,500 years from the end of the Upper Palaeolithic till the beginning of the Neolithic was short and not distinct, because changing climatic environmental conditions were not drastic.
[edit] References
- Balkan prehistory By Douglass W. Bailey ISBN 0415215978
