To date, the earliest copper smelting is found at the Belovode site, these examples include a copper axe from 5500 BC belonging to the Vinča culture.

Among the earliest cultural complexes of this area are included the Sesklo culture in Thessaly, which later expanded in the Balkans giving Starčevo-Körös ( Cris ), Linearbandkeramik, and Vinča.

* Vinča culture ( also endured the 6th, 4th, and 3rd millennia )

By the end of the neolithic, the Hamangia and Vinča culture developed on what is today Bulgaria, southern Romania and eastern Serbia.

Among the earliest cultures utilizing swastika is the neolithic Vinča culture of South-East Europe ( see Vinča symbols ).

* Vinča culture

In the 7th millennium BC, the Starčevo culture existed for a millennia, succeeded by the 6th millennium BC Vinča culture that prospered in the region.

There are numerous finds of Vinča culture, Hallstatt culture, as well as from both Roman and Medieval periods.

Remains from two types of neolithic cultures have been discovered in the area: an older one, known as the Starčevo culture, and a newer one, known as the Vinča culture.

The oldest traces of human activity in Săliştea date back to the Vinča culture of the Middle Neolithic.

The Vinča symbols, sometimes called the Vinča signs, Vinča script, Vinča-Turdaş script, Old European script, etc, are a set of symbols found on Neolithic era ( 6th to 5th millennia BCE ) artifacts from the Vinča culture of southeastern Europe.

Thus, the culture of the whole area is called the Vinča culture, and the script is often called the Vinča-Turdash script.

This theory is now mostly abandoned, as the same symbols have been repeatedly found throughout the territory of the Vinča culture, in locations hundreds of kilometers and years away from each other.

The Vinča culture appears to have traded its wares quite widely with other cultures ( as demonstrated by the widespread distribution of inscribed pots ), so it is possible that the " numerical " symbols conveyed information about the value of the pots or their contents.

Other cultures, such as the Minoans and Sumerians, used their scripts primarily as accounting tools ; the Vinča symbols may have served a similar purpose.

The tablets, dated to around 5300 BC, bear incised symbols-the Vinča symbols-and have been the subject of considerable controversy among archaeologists, some of whom claim that the symbols represent the earliest known form of writing in the world.

Similar motifs have been found on pots excavated at Gradeshnitsa in Bulgaria, Vinča in Serbia and a number of other locations in the southern Balkans.

Since, over one hundred and fifty Vinča sites have been identified in Serbia alone, but many, including Vinča itself, have not been fully excavated.

There are, however, some similarities between the Vinča signs and other Neolithic symbologies found elsewhere, as far afield as Egypt, Crete and even China, but scholars have suggested that such signs were produced by a convergent development of proto-writing which evolved independently in a number of societies.

However, Vinča logographics themselves have not been found on an area wider than southeastern Hungary and western Bulgaria, as described by Winn.

Archaeologists have identified several early culture-complexes, including the Cucuteni culture ( 4500 to 3500 BC ), Starcevo culture ( 6500 to 4000 BC ), Vinča culture ( 5000 to 3000 BC ), Linear pottery culture ( 5500 to 4500 BC ), and Ezero culture ( 3300 — 2700 BC ).

Griffen ( 2005 ) even claims to have discovered a sign for the bird goddess in the Vinča signs.

The importance of these findings lies in the fact that the bulk of the Vinča symbols was created in the period between 4500 and 4000 BC, with the ones on the Tărtăria clay tablets even dating back to around 5300 BC.

Some scholars believe that the prehistoric Vinča signs represent one of the earliest known forms of writing systems ( dating to 6000 – 4000 BC ).

) She also incorporated the Vinča markings into her model of Old Europe, suggesting that they might either be the writing system for an Old European language, or, more probably, a kind of " pre-writing " symbolic system.

Pre-writing in Southeastern Europe: the sign system of the Vinča culture, ca.

* Vinča signs

* Vinča signs

It is an area where road which leads to the Belgrade city dump and the Nuclear Institute " Vinča " separates from the Smederevski put.

This means that the Vinča finds predate the proto-Sumerian pictographic script from Uruk ( modern Iraq ), which is usually considered as the oldest known script, by more than a thousand years.

The Late Neolith is characterized with an influence by the Vinča culture from the north.

Since the 1960s and 1970s new, vast in area boroughs were developed further to the east, like Šumice and Konjarnik which connected Belgrade in one continuous urban area with former villages of Mali Mokri Lug, Veliki Mokri Lug, Kaluđerica, Leštane, Vinča and Boleč, so today, the Dušanovac is closer to the downtown Belgrade ( 10 minutes by public bus ) than to the eastern outskirts of the city.

The remains of the large Neolithic settlement from the period of the Vinča culture is found in the area ( Cerak Vinogradi ).

It belongs to the Vinča culture, as is shown by pottery-finds.

According to M. Gimbutas ( 1991 ), " The discontinuity of the Varna, Karanovo, Vinča and Lengyel cultures in their main territories and the large scale population shifts to the north and northwest are indirect evidence of a catastrophe of such proportions that cannot be explained by possible climatic change, land exhaustion, or epidemics ( for which there is no evidence in the second half of the 5th millennium B. C .).

* Vinča script

The Vinča symbols on it predate the proto-Sumerian pictographic script.

The Vinča symbols on it predate the proto-Sumerian pictographic script.

In 1908, a similar cache was found during excavations conducted by Miloje Vasic ( 1869 – 1956 ) in Vinča, a suburb of Belgrade ( Serbia ), some 120 km from Turdash.

Gimbutas observed that neolithic European iconography was predominantly female — a trend also visible in the inscribed figurines of the Vinča culture — and concluded the existence of a " matristic " ( woman-centered, but not necessarily matriarchal ) culture that worshipped a range of goddesses and gods.

Initially, the Vinča Nuclear Institute in Belgrade was established in 1948, followed by Rudjer Boskovic in Zagreb in 1949 and the Jožef Stefan Institute as an Institute for Physics within the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.