Neolithic seafarers

This is Pelješac peninsula on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. 

In one of the caves near the tip of the peninsula, archaeologists have discovered prehistoric cultural deposits, about 4 meters thick, covering the entire local post-Mesolithic sequence...

Eleven occupation phases and sub phases span 6,000 years, from the Early Neolithic to the Illyrian Iron Age...

You can read about the lithic finds from Pelješac peninsula in the article "Lithic artifacts from nakovana (Pelješac): Continuity and change from early neolithic until the end of prehistory" by S. Forenbaher and Zlatko Perhoč

Among many lithics found in the cave, a few were made from glossy and semi-translucent black obsidian...

The analysis of the obsidian has determined that it came from the Gabellotto Gorge area of the island of Lipari, just above Sicily...

This in itself is amazing...How the hell did Lipari obsidian end up on Pelješac in Neolithic??? But there is more...All other lithics from the cave were made of non local cherts...

The analysis of the material showed that it came from the mines located in Gargano Peninsula in Apulia region. 

Most of the blades were imported from Gargano as finished products...And it seems that the inhabitants of Southern Dalmatia continued acquiring chert tools from the Gargano peninsula for over five thousand years, from Early Neolithic until Late Bronze Age, if not even later. This is quite astonishing...It points to the existence of a highly developed lithic industry which produced enough stone tools for both local and oversees market....

How were stone tools from Lipari and Gargano transported to Dalmatia? Everything points to a well established long running maritime trade route between Sicily, Apulia and Dalmatia...

Ernestine S. Elster from the University of California, Los Angeles talks about the possibility of the existence of a Neolithic "network of seamen and miners" in her article "Scaloria Cave: Found, Lost, and Found Again", about Scaloria Cave located near the Gargano chert mines.

She says that it was this "network" which "brought Gargano flint to Scaloria and the Tavoliere in Apulia and further afield, to the Adriatic Tremiti island of San Domino and the island of Hvar in Dalmatia". We now know that this trade route went further south east to Pelješac peninsula...

How far south east did this trade network reach? Well at least as far south east as the source of the coarse impressed wares from the Early Greek Neolithic sites, which were found in Apulian Neolithic sites...

Who ran this maritime trade network during Neolithic and Chalcolithic? Who were these Neolithic seafarers? 

Not everyone can make sea going vessels and not everyone can successfully sail these vessels across the sea and back...Both of these skills are highly complex and usually passed through families, clans, tribes which is why, by the time we end up in the Bronze Age, we have seafaring nations...

Whoever they were, their trading network covered not just the seas east of Sicily, but also the seas west of Sicily...

How do we know this? Because of the fact that at the same time when chert from Gargano and obsidian from Lipari were traded in Dalmatia, amber from Sicily was traded in Spain...

Also in the article "Sardinian Obsidian Circulation and Early Maritime Navigation in the Neolithic as Shown Through Social Network Analysis" Kyle Freund and Zack Batist also talk about developed mining/seafaring network which produced and transported obsidian from Sardinia to Italy and France where it was exchanged ("sold"???) for thousands of years, between the 6th and 4th millennium BC...

The same guys?

 

There is a high possibility that here we are talking about highly specialised mining and maritime trading societies who worked for profit...Although what they could have exchanged their stones and amber for is a big question...

What is really important is that here we now have a trade network which covered the North Mediterranean during Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron age, connecting Balkans, Sicily and Iberia...And predating Phoenicians and Minoans by few thousand years...

In my series of articles about Montenegrine tumuli, I showed that archaeological finds from both Montenegro (just south of Pelješac peninsula) and Ireland, point at a strange link between Copper age Montenegro and Ireland, and indicate that the copper age could have been brought to Ireland by people who arrived there from Montenegro...

And guess what: the Irish legends, which were first time written down during early medieval time, say that the first farmers, miners and metalworkers arrived to Ireland by sea from the Balkans, via Sicily and Iberia...

This voyage, according to the Irish Annals, took place during the 3rd millennium BC...Of course every historian and archaeologist in the world dismissed these legends as "pseudo history"...No one was able for such maritime voyage at that time...Hmmm.....