Vučedol culture
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The Vučedol culture was a culture that flourished between 3000 and 2200 BC (the Eneolithic period), centered in eastern Slavonia on the right bank of the Danube river, but possibly spreading throughout the Pannonian plain.
Following the Baden culture, another wave of Indo-European people came to the banks of the Danube. One of the major places they occupied is present-day Vučedol (Wolf's Valley), named after Vučedol, a location six kilometers downstream the Danube from center of the town of Vukovar, Croatia.
In the early stages of the culture they searched out places not too far from mountain ranges (to find copper deposits), because of their main invention: making tools from arsenical copper in series thanks to reusable double, two-part moulds. When a community could have identical tools, these tools could be converted easily to arms, and peasants to an army.
The difference to other earlier and contemporary cultures was diversity in food sources: they were hunters, fishermen and agrarians, with some strong indications that they cultivated certain domesticated animals. Thus culture could better avert food crises.
The community chief was the shaman (medicine man), moulder, the owner of the knowledge of avoiding poisonous arsenic gas (and others, such as understanding the year cycle), which is connected to the technology of coppersmithing. Still, the whole life of moulder/shaman could not pass without biological consequences: slow loss of body movement coordination, and at the same time, stronger sexual potency. "That is why", quoting Aleksandar Durman, "all eneolithic, or later gods of metallurgy are identified with fertility, and also why all gods in almost all early cultures - limp."
In modern times, the ceramic pottery became famous worldwide. It has a very characteristic bi-conical shape, typical ornaments which evolved, and in many cases with typical "handles" which were almost unfunctional, but they were key of understanding of ornaments that had symbolic meaning representing term such as "horizon", "mountains", "sky", "underworld", "sun", "constellation of Orion", "Venus", et cetera.
One of the most famous pieces is the ritual vessel, called by the speculative attribution of her founder (in 1938) M. Seper - the Vučedol Dove (vučedolska golubica). The latest, very deep synthesis and interpretation of many phenomena of the Vucedol culture by Aleksandar Durman from Zagreb, is that the vessel is in the shape of the male partridge - the universal symbol of fertility (and limping, due to the defensive behavior of male partridge against predator attack on a partridge nest on ground).
Among the most famous pieces is also the oldest Indo-European calendar, based on Orion cycle, shown by precise sequel of constellations on a vessel found in eneolithic tel in the very center of contemporary town of Vinkovci.
It is somehow ironic that they lived in dwelling pits covered by branches and canebrake, and that they did not invent brick as construction material.
The houses found on the Vučedol site were places of birth and burial. A number of skeletons were found in the pits, once serving as food storage pits. Their bodies were placed in a ritual way, with some indications of possible human sacrifice. Also, on foreheads of skulls marks were found that could be attributed to some kind of initiation by a drop of molten copper in an early childhood.
There is a serious hypothesis that the Vučedol culture, which lasted at strongest about 800 years, being strong and spreading very wide in all directions from the Danube basin, from the Czech Republic to Transylvania, and from Ljubljana to the Adriatic seashore, the Gulf of Kotor, could be the originating culture of earliest Troy.
