The Balkans & Old Europe
The Balkans is an area of southeastern Europe situated at a major crossroads between mainland Europe and the Near East. Early cultures of the Balkans were predominantly agricultural. The Mount Pleasant Period is a phase of the later Neolithic in Britain dating to between c. 2750 B.C. and 2000 BC. There are parallels with the Unetice culture of continental Europe- The eponymous site is located west of Prague. The Śnetice culture had trade links with the British Wessex culture (1700 BCE). Unetice metalsmiths mainly used pure copper; alloys of copper with arsenic, antimony and tin to produce bronze became common only in the succeeding periods. The Beaker people appear to have had wide ranging trade links with continental Europe, importing amber from the Baltic, jewellery from modern day Germany, gold from Brittany as well as daggers and beads from Mycenaean Greece and vice versa. Daggers may have been produced in Brittany, where a few rich graves have been found in this period. Irish tin was widely traded as well, a golden lunula of Irish design has been found as far south as Butzbach in Hessen (Germany). At first, copper was used to make tools and weapons, but it was then discovered that, by alloying tin with the copper, a much more durable metal could be produced - bronze. Amber was traded as well, but small fossil deposits may have been used as well as Baltic amber. After about 2000 BC, this hoarding tradition dies out and is only resumed in the urnfield period.
Beaker People (from 2300 BCE) were responsible for the magnificence of the innovative monuments of the Old Kingdom at Avebury, Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill, just south of Avebury, is the largest man made mound in Europe. Agriculture became a larger scale operation in the Bronze Age. Hillfort development, traditionally associated with the Iron Age, began, it seems, towards the end of the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age has also been divided into phases based on evidence from metalwork industries. A fourth period in a Copper Age- has been made obsolete in overall Irish and British prehistoric metallurgy by the discovery of the fact that tin-bronzes were introduced very early.
Beaker people have been described as nomadic and pastoral, since very few domestic sites of this period are known. Some of these settlements were once considered to be cattle enclosures from Old Europe and Caspian Culture, since early excavations revealed no trace of internal occupation, although more recent excavations have revealed buildings. They are often associated with Celtic fields and dykes and ditches which continued in use from the European Megalithic Culture into the Iron Age. Settlement was preferred in valleys, near rivers, and along coastal plains. Some nucleated or village-like settlements are known in southern England consisting of trackways, huts and enclosures. Later Bronze Age settlement includes mini-hillforts, consisting of a large hut site surrounded by a large bank and inner and outer ditches.
The Balkan region takes its name from the Balkan mountains which run through the centre of Bulgaria into eastern Serbia. Damascus, a city in Syria that has been inhabited as early as 8,000 to 10,000 BC, is known to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world along with Varanasi, Aleppo and Jericho. Damascus is designated as having been part of the ancient province of Amurru in the Hyksos Kingdom, from 1720 to 1570 BC. The god Amurru was identified with the constellation Perseus: a northern constellation, named after the Greek hero who slew the monster Medusa.
| The Balkan region was the first area of Old Europe to experience the arrival of farming cultures in the Neolithic era- the western zone around the Jordan and upper Euphrates rivers gave rise to the first known Neolithic farming settlements. The practices of growing grain and raising livestock arrived in the Balkans from the Fertile Crescent by way of Anatolia, and spread west and north into Pannonia and Central Europe. The Balkans has been the least developed part of Europe. The Fertile Crescent is a historical region in the Middle East incorporating Ancient Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia, watered by the Nile, Jordan, Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The region extends from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea around the north of the Syrian Desert and through the Jazirah and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. |  |
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