A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

[groovedaddy]

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through April 25.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01arch.html?th&emc=th

[YOY]

1. Not the Tracians? My neice is working in a dig near Popovo, Bulgaria.

Found a female skeleton. Really cool stuff.

[Posteritatis]

3. Looks like they predate the Thracians by millenia. (nt)

[ashling]

2. Neo Con Archeologists found that this culture was absolutely opposed to wars of Empire

in central Asia.

To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

Archeologists have yet to find Weapons of Mass Destruction.

:rofl:

[Alameda]

4. Interesting article, but I think Chatalhoyuk predates it....

Çatalhöyük (Turkish pronunciation: ; also Çatal Höyük and Çatal Hüyük, or any of the three without diacritics; çatal is Turkish for "fork", höyük for "mound") was a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BCE to 5700 BCE. It is the largest and best preserved Neolithic site found to date.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk