Monday 13 July 2015

Bjelopavlići tumulus

Several years ago, archaeologists discovered a partially destroyed tumulus in the area between the two villages Frutak i Kujava near the town of Danilovgrad in Montenegro. The area is located in extremely fertile region which surrounds the lake Skadar and its tributaries.

 
The tumulus which originally had a diameter of 20 meters and a height of 1,75 meters was badly damaged by farming. Eventually plowing exposed a stone dolmen cist. Inside archaeologists discovered two bronze spearheads, a bronze needle, a bronze bracelet, a bronze armlet and a bronze fibula. Unfortunately I don't have any more info about this tumulus nor pictures of the artifacts found in it. I would really appreciate any help in locating additional information about this tumulus.

Anyway, the area where this first tumulus was found had many more ancient tumuluses which managed to stay undisturbed until the present day. There were 6 more tumuluses in Frutak and 4 more in Kujava. So the archaeological investigation in the area continued.

In 2014 a team of archaeologists lead by Predrag Lutovac opened the second tumulus. Inside of the tumulus archaeologists discovered two stone dolmen cists.




The cists were surrounded by two concentric stone circles, one inside the tumulus and one marking the outer edge of the tumulus. 



Archaeologists believe that the edge of the tumulus was marked with a stone circle not only to prevent the tumulus soil erosion but also in order to separate the land of the dead from the land of the living. 

The data available about this archaeological site is extremely limited and confusing. It amounts to few news articles and one video interview. From this I was not able to determine how many people were buried in the tumulus. I believe that from what I can gather there were all together four people buried in the tumulus. I can't wait to see the DNA data retrieved from the remains. I'd say we are in for a surprise... :)

This is the picture of the skeleton of the person buried inside the bigger dolmen cist. It is a skeleton of an adult male. He was buried in a fetal position. According to the archaeologists this symbolises rebirth after death and points to a belief that the death was seen as a new birth.


The tumulus was originally provisionally dated to the early Bronze age to the period around 1850 BC, but the latest results have moved the dating even further back in time, to around 2400 BC. According to the archaeologists the tumulus was built by the people who belonged to the early bronze Age Ljubljana culture.

Inside the tumulus archaeologists discovered ceramic artifacts. 



They also discovered bronze bracelets but unfortunately I don't have any pictures of these bracelets.

And finally, archaeologists discovered this mysterious bronze disc like object.


Now are you seeing what I am seeing? Are you seeing the concentric groves, the holes which look like they were drilled in the metal and used for screws or some kind of bolts or rivets? What is this and what was it used for? How was it made? And am I the only one who can see a "Celtic"  cross shape in it?



The vertical hands go below the circle and the horizontal ones go above the circle? Maybe yes maybe no :) Unfortunately I don't have the picture of the other side of this object so I can't confirm my hypothesis. O and by the way, "Celtic" is in quotes for a reason :) This object has nothing to do with Celts or Christianity....I use the name "Celtic cross"  because this is today the most commonly used name for this type of solar crosses even though the earliest examples of these solar crosses predate Celts by millenniums and date to 6th millennium BC Balkans and Central Europe...

Regardless of whether this is a "Celtic" cross or not, this is still a very intriguing object. Few people asked me if I had a scale of the object. Luckily I do. I hope this helps the speculation about the use of the object. 





This is a comparative table of Macedonian, Balkan and Caucasian bronze Early Iron Age (8th century bc) ornaments (pieces oj horse gear) . Have a look at the item 27 from the Balkans. I think this can help us understand the purpose of the above object. 



But we have to be careful when making conclusions based on the similarity of these two objects. Just because the symbol on two objects is the same doesn't mean that they have the same function. The same symbol is found on Celtic standing crosses. Also just because the symbol first appears on horse riding equipment in bronze in the late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, it doesn't mean that it could not have been used on other earlier objects with completely different function. This doesn't mean that the object from the tumulus is not part of the later contamination.

Anyway this is not why this discovery is already rewriting European history. It is the fact that we have early bronze age dolmens in the western Balkans that is so important. This is going to take some digesting and explaining. But I believe that this is just the beginning of the "surprise discoveries" and that what is to come is going to be even more interesting. 

According to the archaeologists only in Montenegro there are between 3000 and 5000 tumuluses of which only 10 have been excavated. What else will be found when all the other tumuluses are excavated and how will this change our understanding of the Early European Bronze Age? 

27 comments:

  1. Fascinating: this puts Montenegro (and in general the Western Balcans) in the Megalithic (Dolmenic) map, with lots of potential significance for the understanding of this major cultural phenomenon.

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  2. As for the Celtic Cross, I do not see it at all: the top and bottom arms just do not exist. The object is anyhow most intriguing.

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    1. I believe that the top and bottom arms could be underneath the circle while the left and right go on top. Unfortunately we don't have the picture of the other side of the object so this is my guess...

      This predates Unetice culture and the later Tumulus culture....

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    2. Yes, this corresponds with late Vucedol in the region. However dolmenism is not part of Vucedol, so it indicates some sort of links with and or expansion of SW European cultures into that area. It is well within the Bell Beaker period, largely associated to pre-existent Dolmenism, although so far there's nothing "Beaker" present anywhere so far to the East or Southeast.

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  3. The pattern on the pottery and the disc remind me of the concentric circles found on some of the ancient threshing floors and Celtic Maslin bread and traditional Serbian cakes.

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  4. Looked like a shield to me, possibly with a wooden or leather cover secured through the holes that had since decayed away.

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    1. Too bad we don't have a relative size comparison

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    2. Few people asked me if I had a scale of the object. Luckily I do. I have added the picture to the post. I hope this helps the speculation about the use of the object.

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    3. What is each unit? A centimeter?

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  5. In regard to Christianized "Megalith" traditions.

    In early Middle-Age central Europe there was a Christianized heathen tradition of erecting so-called atonement crosses/ murderstones "German:Sühnekreuz / Mordstein" on the site of a killing by the murder himself. The thing about these stone crosses is that they were always made by the murderer himself as a form of atonement, which in most cases gives them a crude look. The basic background is that people thought that the soul of the murdered would be trapped in the stone "cross" or otherwise it would become restless and haunt the place of the murder. In some cases the murder weapon is incised on the cross. Also, almost all crosses have scratch and drill holes on them because people have extracted rock-flour from the stones over centuries. They believed that the rock-flour contained the life force of the trapped soul and used it for medical-magical purpose. The tradition reflects pre-Christian believes.

    German language site with lots of examples of murderstones.
    http://www.suehnekreuz.de/

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    1. Many megalithic traditions have been preserved in Europe. Some of them actually in an unchanged form since Neolithic times. I wrote about the continuous use of stone solar observatories in the Balkans in my post about Ognjena Marija.

      www.oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.ie/2014/07/ognjena-marija.html

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  6. http://www.crichtonmiller.com/experience_celtic_cross.php

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  7. Anyways no matter how much I look at it, the strange bronze object looks more and more like a piece of a modern machine or devise of some sort, an out-of-place object, with the protruding center being an axis or screw and the holes designed for bolts of some sort. I wonder if they found it in the dolmen itself or rather in the upper layers of the mound.

    Even if it is ancient, I think the general functional description may stand (with whatever modifications). Maybe it was the bronze center of a larger wooden shield or the embelisher for a cart's wheel or... if it only has 4 cm, a button of some sort (the "bolt holes" would then be for sewing it but the detail of the carvings seems excessively precise for such a tiny size).

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    1. As I said Maju, there is not excavation documentation I could find. I had to rely on few news articles and a tv documentary. I don't really know what the measurement unit is. I only have that picture...This lack of publicly available documentation seems to be the case with most of the recent finds from the Balkans. Its as if someone doesn't want these things to be known...

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  8. I have no clue, but the thing looks like a Roman bronze disc brooch or some sort of disc Fibula. I am only irritated by the 4 holes,as if it was fixed to something with circular motion.

    Examples - Roman bronze disc brooch
    http://www.forumancientcoins.com/numiswiki/images/DSC05145.jpg
    http://www.antiquesnavigator.com/ebay/images/2015/391130167916.jpg

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    1. I can see the similitude too. However what irritates me is that I can't see how the Roman brooches could be attached to the cloth while I see it clear in the Montenegro disk: the four holes that are just like those of a button: so sewn or tied with leather strips, surely in artful form.

      Not really irritated for not seeing the back of the Roman brooches, I reckon but for not being able to find the English word. I know the object however and I'm pretty sure that it was not developed until the Iron Age.

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  9. At least the Roman ones were fastened with a coil spring pin, shown in the link below.
    https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/396009

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    1. Yeah, that was what I was thinking about and no wonder I could not recall the name (if I ever heard it before). In Spanish there's a very specific and common word: "imperdible" ( = what can't be lost) but could not figure the English one.

      As far as I know those pins don't show up before the Iron Age, late Bronze maybe? They're typical of Hallstatt and La Tène for example.

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  10. Somehow those 4 holes will not leave me alone.
    So at one point I thought of some sort of ornamental horse gear, so I googled it and came up with this site. Look at object 27 in the section Balkans, kind of looks like that disc object.

    Link
    http://historylib.org/historybooks/E-V-YArovoy_Drevneyshie-obshchnosti-zemledeltsev-i-skotovodov-Severnogo-Prichernomorya--V-tys--do-n-e----V-vek-n-e--/58

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    1. Wow, man this is amazing. Thank you

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    2. Yeah, number 28 for instance is very similar. Does that mean this is (possibly) one cheek piece, where the bit is attached to the briddle?

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  11. Few things:

    1. just because the symbol on two objects is the same doesn't mean that they have the sam function. The same symbol is found on Celtic standing crosses.
    2. just because the symbol first appears on horse riding equipment in bronze in the late Bronze Age, it doesn't mean that it could not have been used on other earlier objects with completely different function. This doesn't mean that the object from the tumulus is not part of the later contamination.
    3. The symbol is a religious symbol and is related to the fire worship. It is the fire cross which first appears among the Vinca symbols, but quickly spreads all the way to Indus valley.
    4. You will love my next post. It is about another tumulus from the same group, dated to about 2400 bc. The man buried in the tumulus had bone deformities of someone who spent all their life on the horseback.... :)

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    1. There is no cross, Serbian Irish, there's only one horizontal bar but no vertical one. This may be thought missing because of deterioration in the top half but the lower half is well preserved and you can see perfectly that there is no such vertical bar.

      So it's no "symbol" we can discern: I can't think of any other with only one horizontal bar. If anything it'd be novel, unique and therefore not belonging to any obvious symbolic category such as celtic crosses, double axes, triskels, swastikas or violin-shaped idols. Or as dolmens themselves are: the only clear cultural element here is the dolmen itself.

      "You will love my next post. It is about another tumulus from the same group, dated to about 2400 bc. The man buried in the tumulus had bone deformities of someone who spent all their life on the horseback...."

      Well, that supports the horse-bit theory.

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    2. I wrote this as a reply to the creative's comment and the object 27 which is what the tumulus object would look like if it had vertical hands. But as I said this is not really that important. What is important is that this tumulus object could indeed be a part of the horse riding equipment. But if the dating of the bones in the tumuluses is correct, and if this metal object is not a later contamination, then this horse riding equipment dates to 2400 BC. By the way, what do you think who were these horse riders who were burried under the tumuluses in Montenegro?

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    3. It's difficult to establish because we don't have enough data but a clear fact is that horse domestication happened (simultaneously?) in the steppes and in Iberia. While modern horse Y-DNA has a single origin in the steppes, the mtDNA shows two poles of highest diversity: Eurasian Steppe and Iberia (http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2011/04/horses-double-origins.html). Also archaeological data supports horse domestication, as they were eating way too many horses in South Iberia in Chalcolithic times for mere hunting.

      So I see no reason not to think that the peoples organized in the Dolmenic cultural-ethnic-political area were not horse riders. In fact we see them (Artenac culture) actively expanding on the remains of Michelsberg (SOM) and establishing a stable border at the Rhine vs Corded Ware (IEs). They did so using mostly bow and arrows (longbowmanship is suspected but not yet confirmed) but they must have also got good mobility, so horse riding is at least plausible.

      We may compare with Medieval Almogavars who used other equipment (spears and sword) but were in any case mounted infantry troops perfectly able to fight against heavy armored knights (they ripped the horses' bellies and forced the knights to fight on foot, where armor was a hindrance. They were so feared that, when besieged in Gallipoli, they (not really good for defending fortifications) just rushed out and the besiegers run away in panic. These were probably the same kind of troops who defeated Charlemagne's knights at Roncevaux (Orreaga): one of the best kind of irregular troops ever.

      Just saying, food for thought again, because what is truly striking is not horse-riding but the bronze. Sure: Bronze in the Balcans is older than elsewhere in Europe (and judging on the latest findings, anywhere on Earth) but not in the Western Dolmenic context and AFAIK not in the Adriatic Balcans either (maybe it is the oldest known Bronze object in Montenegro or even the wider "Illyria", you tell me). So I'd think it's an import from the inland Balcans, maybe Vucedol.

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  12. I immediately thought of this: https://www.google.com/search?q=Antthekarian+mechanism&oq=Antthekarian+mechanism&aqs=chrome..69i57.14050j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=Antikythera+mechanism
    and also, how about the dolmens in the Republic of Georgia? Cheers

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