Starcevo culture
The Starčevo culture, sometimes included within a larger grouping known as the Starčevo–Kőrös–Criş
culture, is an archaeological culture of Southeastern Europe, dating to the Neolithic period between
c. 5500 and 4500 BCE (according to other source, between 6200 and 5200 BCE).
Starčevo, the type site, is located on the north bank of the Danube in Serbia (Vojvodina province),
opposite Belgrade. It represents the earliest settled farming society in the area, although hunting and
gathering still provided a significant portion of the inhabitants' diet.
The pottery is usually coarse but finer fluted and painted vessels later emerged. A type of bone
spatula, perhaps for scooping flour, is a distinctive artifact. The Kőrös is a similar culture in Hungary
named after the River Kőrös with a closely related culture which also used footed vessels but fewer
painted ones. Both have given their names to the wider culture of the region in that period.
Parallel and closely related cultures also include the Karanovo culture in Bulgaria, Criş in Romania and
the pre-Sesklo in Greece.
The Starčevo culture covered sizable area that included most of present-day Serbia and Montenegro,
as well as parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, and the Republic of Macedonia.
The westernmost locality of this culture can be found in Croatia, in the vicinity of Ždralovi, a part of
the town of Bjelovar. This was the final stage of the culture. Findings from Ždralovi belong to a
regional subtype of the final variant in the long process of development of that Neolithic culture. It is
designated as Ždralovi facies of the Starčevo culture or the Starčevo - Final stages.
In 1990, Starčevo was added to the Archaeological Sites of Exceptional Importance list, protected by
Republic of Serbia.
There are different opinions about the ethno-linguistic origin of the people of Starčevo culture.
According to one opinion, Neolithic cultures of the Balkans were of non-Indo-European origin and
Indo-European peoples (originating from eastern Europe) did not settle in this area before the
Eneolithic period. According to other opinions, Neolithic cultures of the Balkans were also IndoEuropean and originated from Anatolia, which some researchers identified with a place of origin of
Indo-European peoples. These differing theories are termed the Kurgan hypothesis and the Anatolian
hypothesis (Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses).