Torine katun

Transhumance is the seasonal movement of people with their livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures. In mountainous regions like Montenegro, it implies movement between higher pastures in summer and lower valleys in winter. 

In many languages there are words for the higher summer pastures, and shepherds summer camps built on them, and frequently these words have been used as place names. In the Balkans these words are Katun, Stan, Bačija, Torine...I talked about them in my article "Katun"...

In this article I would like to talk about one of these transhumance shepherds summer camps, Torine, which could just be one of the most important archaeological sites in Montenegro, and possibly one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe...

The archaeological site covers a small plateau 150X50 meters which was on the lower side fortified with a stone wall. 

The plateau is located in the Radman gorge 

The archaeological site was discovered by chance, when local villagers tried to widen the road that passed by the plateau, and in process bulldozing away half of the site

Luckily, while pushing through the site, the bulldozers unearthed several skeletons, and the locals thought they better call the police. 

Who called the archaeologists. The archaeologist who came to examine the site was Predrag Lutovac from Polimlje museum.

Archaeologists determined that the skeletons belonged to the people buried on the site during medieval time. 

Then they started opening exploratory trenches and what they discovered was pretty astonishing. One and a half meters of soil contained occupational layers from the end of the 5th millennium BC to medieval time...

The fact that the cultural layers were very thin and very rich in mobile artifacts, indicates that it was a seasonal shepherds summer settlement, Torine... 

According to Predrag Lutovac, the earliest layer located at the depth of only one meter and twenty centimeters, is Vinča cultural layer, from the Vinča-Pločnik phase, dated to the second half of the 5th millennium BC...This is where archaeologists discovered this figurine of a nude woman with a realistically represented torso and a pentagonal head characteristic of the Vinča culture. 

Similar figurines in fragments are known from other Vinča culture sites in Northern Montenegro: 

Trnje near the village of Bijedići which contained few dozen houses...

Beran-krš near Berane, which consisted of about twenty houses. 

Both settlements are believed to have existed from Late Neolithic through Copper Age and into Early Bronze Age period, from 4,500 to 3,000 BC.

Now the above figurine from Torine is similar in shape to the late Vinča culture figurines found in Kosovo, at Fatos and Predionica sites. But while the Vinča culture figurines found in Kosovo are dressed and or have painted decorations, the figurine from Torine is naked and has no decorations at all much like later Bubanj-Hum culture figurines...

This earliest Neolithic Vinča layer is followed by a mixed layer of late Neolithic Vinča culture mixed with the early Copper and Bronze Age Bubanj-Hum culture from Serbia and Mediterranean Copper and Bronze Age cultures, like Nakovana culture. 

These three cultures seem to have peacefully coexisted and merged into a new South Balkan Bronze Age cultural group, that covered huge area of Eastern and Southern Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia and Albania... 

This culture must have had a stronghold in northern Montenegro, because the area is full of Early and Middle Bronze Age fortifications: Tumbarice in Donja Ržanica, Gradac in Budimlja, Pećina grad in Radmanska klisura near Petnjica, gradina Bihor, Samograd in the village of Brzava near Bijelo Polje, Gradac above Godočelj near Petnjica, Gradac in Crnčia near Bijelo Polje, Jerinin grad in Plav, Gradina above the village of Šabotići, Gradina in Korita and Gradina above the village of Muslić.

It is in this Bronze Age layer of the Torine site, at the depth of half a meter, that archaeologists had unearthed a base of a Bronze Age house dated to mid 2nd millennium BC. 

Inside of this Bronze Age house, archaeologists discovered a large number of fully intact ceramic dishes, bone tools, pickaxes made of deer’s antlers, needles, bradawls, studs...All located around a central fireplace. 

A wolf’s teeth necklace was also discovered, showing that here already we have the some form of the wolf cult, not surprising considering that wolves are shepherds main worry in the mountains. After the weather.

Extremely interesting discovery at Torine was a mold for making bronze daggers of the type discovered in Momišići and other Copper and Early Bronze Age tumulus graves, located in the lowlands of the souther Montenegro. 

According to Lutovac this is another proof that Torine was a seasonal summer camp used by people who spent winters in Momišići....

Soooo why is Torine so important? You mean apart from the fact that this is a site used pretty much continuously as a summer camp by transhumance shepherds for 5000 years? Transhumance shepherds which were descended from Vinča people...

Torine site shows that when Vinča culture collapsed at the end of the 5th millennium BC, Vinčans didn't disappear into thin air. We know that some of them contributed to the development of Late Neolithic early Copper Age cultures in the Danube catchment area to the north of the old Vinča territory....

But it seems that at least some of them moved into the highlands to the south of the old Vinča territory and continued living there...And they mixed...And they got influenced and they influenced the seafaring cultures of the Eastern Adriatic coast...

I talked about them in my post about Nakovana cave in Croatia and the Neolithic seafarers...

These are the guys who sailed and traded all along the northern coast of the Mediterranean sea. All the way to Iberia...And beyond? To the Atlantic coast...Ireland???

All of which resulted in the development of some very very interesting Late Neolithic, Early Copper Age links between Montenegro and Ireland...

In my series of articles about Montenegrine tumuli, I showed that archaeological finds from both Montenegro (just south of Pelješac peninsula where Nakovana cave is located) 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.....

But, some of these cultural similarities between Ireland and the Balkans predate the Copper Age, and fall right into the Late Neolithic period between disappearance of Vinča culture and the appearance of the Yamna people in the Balkans...And they have a very strange "Vinča" undertone...Which I couldn't explain, because of the time gap of a 1000 years between the disappearance of Vinča culture and the appearance of Vinča like artifacts in Ireland...Until now...

This is Newgrange, a prehistoric monument in County Meath, Ireland, located about one kilometre north of the River Boyne. It was built about 3200 BC. 

This is Newgrange entrance before excavation and renovation. You can clearly see the carved stone standing in front of the entrance. 

This is what Newgrange entrance looks like now. The carved stone is still standing in front of the entrance into the tumulus. 

Why is this stone placed in front of the entrance and what does this stone represent?

I believe that this stone is a huge votive bread. It is placed in front of the entrance of the tumulus, because this entrance represents vulva and vaginal opening of the mother earth. As I said I believe that Newgrange was designed to represent pregnant mother earth in a shape of a pregnant woman's belly together with reproductive organs. And as pregnant women give birth to babies through the vaginal opening, to continue with the symbolism, this votive bread was placed in front of the entrance (which is in this case viewed as exit) to symbolise mother earth giving birth to bread. And to give mother earth a hint how much bread we want her to give birth to. A lot.

Why do I think that this stone represents votive bread. Well have a look at these two pictures:

Entrance stone, with carved diamond and spiral ornaments, Newgrange, Ireland, 4th millennium BC:

Ritual clay votive bread with carved diamond and spiral ornaments, Potporanj - Kremenjak, Serbia, Vinča culture, 5th millennium BC, currently in Vršac museum. Quite a few of these ritual clay breads were found in Vinča sites, and they all have these types of decorations: 

From my post "Newgrange" and "Can you see me" 

Also this

Here are some examples of the so called "carved stone balls" from Scotland, dated to the beginning of the 4th millennium BC:

At least 1000 years earlier, in Serbia, people from Vinča culture made very very very similar objects from burned clay which they wore as amulets.

This one is from Vinča Beli Breg settlement near Belgrade

And then we have this: Knowth tumulus complex, in the Boyne Valley, also dated to the beginning of the 4th millennium BC...

And this one of the two miniature carved stone ball bead found under the Mound 1 at Knowth...

They were published in 1986 (Eogan 1986, fig. 21) but their significance has not been appreciated until 2011 when professor Alison Sheridan, during her visit to Dublin, saw them and realized that they were miniature versions of a very distinctive type of artefact well known from Neolithic Scotland – the carved stone ball...And a copy of Vinča objects...

I wrote about these objects in my post "Clay balls - stone balls"...

As I said I couldn't explain the almost 1000 years between the Balkan objects and Irish objects mentioned above...But now that we know about the Montenegrin settlements which span period 4500-3000BC and link between Vinča culture and the Late Neolithic and Copper Age cultures of the Mediterranean....

Nakovana

This is the abandoned Nakovana village located near the tip of the Pelješac Peninsula in Southern Dalmatia, Croatia...

The name Nakovana is related to the Slavic word "nakovanj", meaning "anvil", most likely because of the shape of this nearby hill. It is known today locally as Grad (City), because of the ruins of a huge Illyrian fortress which once stood on its top...

The fortress was destroyed during the Octavian's Illyrian campaign which lasted 8 years, from 35 to 27 BC, and encompassed almost the entire eastern Adriatic and much of its hinterland...

During the first year of operations, the Roman army massacred the native populations of the islands of Korčula and Mljet. Historical sources do not say whether the Illyrians on the Pelješac peninsula met the same faith...

But the archaeological survey of the region found virtually no traces of occupation during the Early Imperial or Late Roman periods. This is an unusual situation in Dalmatia, where those periods often account for the bulk of archaeological remains...

Most likely, the conquering Romans could not tolerate a native stronghold at such a key strategic position and they most likely destroyed it and turned the surrounding area into a wasteland. The local population was either exterminated or expelled...

How important Nakovana fort was during the Illyrian times can be seen from the fact that over 50 stone tumuli (cairns) are strewn over the fields surrounding the fort. Like the one on this picture shown with the Grad fortress in the background...

These are burials of important people, most likely the aristocracy of the era and the time - the people who built and lived in the Grad fortress. None of the tumuli have been excavated so far...

You have probably never heard of Nakovana before...Unless you are an archaeologist with an interest in Dalmatian prehistory...But you should have. And the fact that Nakovana is not famous world wide beggars belief...

The reason why Nakovana should be famous is not because of its Illyrian fortress and its tumuli...It is because of this cave that lies near the fortress. 

It is the same cave I talked about in my article about the Neolithic maritime trade...

The reason why Nakovana should be famous is not (just) because the lithics found in the cave's front chamber are the proof of the maritime trade network which existed for thousands of years in the South of the Adriatic Sea...

The reason why Nakovana should be famous was discovered in the cave's second chamber which was deliberately sealed, probably immediately before or after the Illyrian fortress Grad was destroyed by the Romans...

This is how the archaeologists who discovered this hidden chamber described the event:

And what they discovered in the hidden chamber is this: A large gleaming white stalagmite in a shape of a phallus...

The stalagmite sits on top of a series of superimposed prehistoric layers, the earliest being from Early Copper Age and dated to the mid-fourth millennium BC. A direct radiocarbon date on the base of the stalagmite suggests that it began to grow about 3600 years ago...

The floor of the chamber was strewn with broken high quality pottery, mostly drinking cups, mostly imported and mostly Greek, broken and deposited there as sacrifice...

The fact that the pottery was Greek made, doesn't mean that Greeks deposited there. Some of the cairns surrounding the Grad fortress, were looted in the past. What remains in and around them shows that the character of the funerary rite is unquestionably Illyrian...

The people were buried with locally made Iron Age jewellery, handmade pottery, and fairly often, fragments of fine Hellenistic ceramic vessels, identical to those from the cave...

Illyrians were famous maritime traders and pirates and they pretty much controlled the southern Adriatic for hundreds of years...

And the Nakovana Grad fortress controlled one of the most strategically important points, the entrance into the Neretva river which was the entrance into the Balkan hinterland...

Which is the reason why the Romans eventually wiped them out...

By the way, were Illyrians the descendants of the people who controlled the Southern Adriatic since Neolithic??? Just putting this out there for people to think about it...

The broken pottery was deposited around the stalagmite, showing that it was the centre of the cultic activities in the cave. The earliest pottery shards deposited next to the stalagmite date to the 4th century BC, around the time of the Alexander the Great...

Now this is very very interesting...

If I didn't tell you where this cave was, you would be forgiven to think that this was a Siva lingam cave temple located somewhere in India...

I wonder if this Illyrian sanctuary predates or postdates Alexander's Indian campaign and who was celebrated in a shape of a lingam in this cave???

The archaeologists who excavated the cave say Silvanus, Pan...

Hmm...Possibly...

Believe or not, as impressive as this phallus looks like :)  this is not the most amazing thing found in the hidden chamber of the Nakovana cave...The most amazing thing was found among the rubble deposited around it...

Among hundreds of pottery shards, archaeologists have also found several pieces of ivory with engraved astrological signs, which once formed part of an astrologer's horoscope board...The oldest so far found horoscope in the world...

I am here talking about Greek horoscopic astrology, which is believed to have been invented in late Ptolemaic Egypt, in the 2nd or early 1st c. BC...

Now we know that the Nakovana cave was sealed around 35BC. So the horoscope board deposited next to the stalagmite must have been made before that. Radiocarbon dating actually points to much earlier date...

The age obtained by the accelerator mass spectrometry is 2217±21 B.P. The calibrated range of two standard deviations is the period between 375 and 204 BC, with an asymmetrical probability distribution leaning towards the 3rd c. BC...

In plain English, the animal from which the ivory was obtained was killed in the 3rd century BC...

Archaeologists who discovered this amazing artefact say: "It is believed horoscope was invented in Egypt, late 2nd, early 1st c. BC. Therefore, the Nakovana zodiac could not have been made before the 2nd c. BC (probably not much before 100 BC), meaning that the ivory used to make it was at least hundred years old"...

Now I don't know for how long a piece of ivory is usually left lying around before it is cut and carved into sellable objects, but I don't think it was left to "age" for over 100 years...

Why playing it down? "It is believed (!!!) that horoscope was invented in Egypt in late 2nd, early 1st c. BC"...What if it wasn't? What if it was invented somewhere else? Earlier? And brought to Egypt from there?

I have been writing about zodiac for a while...One of the things that I have discovered is that zodiac signs, as they are positioned in this "Ptolemaic Greek zodiac" mark the annual lifecycle events of the depicted animals in Europe. You can read about this in this series of articles about Zodiac signs (work in progress)...

As if someone observed the significant annual behavior (mating and birthing) of the animals in Europe, and derived the zodiac signs from that behavior: Pisces - mating season of Europan salmon, Cancer - mating season of Atlantic crabs and European crayfish, Taurus - calving season of European Aurochs...

By the way, I am here talking about the horoscope zodiac circle the way we know it today. Not animal solar calendar markers found in many cultures in Eurasia and North Africa over last 10,000 years. I wrote about those extensively too. You can read about this in this series of articles about Solar calendar markers (work in progress)...

Do you see now why I think that it is completely unbelievable that Nakovana is not a famous archaeological site? 

Sources

Text and images:

"Zodijak iz Nakovane" by S. Forenbaher, A. Jones

"Recognizing Ritual in the Dark: Nakovana Cave and the End of the Adriatic Iron Age" by T. Kaiser and S. Forenbaher

Images:

The oldest horoscope board 

Nakovana tourism

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.....