Recent work at Vinča-Belo Brdo has combined a total of more than 200 radiocarbon dates with an array of other information to construct much more precise narratives for the structural history of the site and the cultural materials recovered from it. In this paper, we present the results of a recent attempt to construct formal models for the chronology of the wider Vinča potscape, so that we can place our now detailed understanding of changes at Belo Brdo within their contemporary contexts. We present our methodology for assessing the potential of the existing corpus of more than 600 radiocarbon dates for refining the chronology of the five phases of Vinča ceramics proposed by Milojčić across their spatial ranges, including a total of 490 of them in a series of Bayesian chronological models. Then we outline our main results for the development of Vinča pottery. Finally, we discuss some of the major implications for our understanding of the source, character and tempo of material change.
We consider the Multilevel Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem (MLUFLP) and propose a new efficient integer programming formulation of the problem that provides optimal solutions for the MLUFLP test instances unsolved to optimality up to now. Further, we design a parallel Memetic Algorithm (MA) with a new strategy for applying the local search improvement within the MA frame. The conducted computational experiments show that the proposed MA quickly reaches all known optimal and best known solutions from the literature and additionally improves several solutions for large-scale MLUFLP test problems.
The setting and context of the Vinča-Belo Brdo tellThe great tell or settlement mound of Vinča-Belo Brdo sits directly beside the Danube, a little to the south of Belgrade, Serbia (Fig.1). Its eight metres of Late Neolithic deposits span the later sixth to the mid-fifth millennium cal BC, and are underlain by a Starčevo culture occupation of the earlier sixth millennium cal BC (Tasić et al. 2015; in press). The site has given its name to the Vinča culture (or interaction sphere or network; for convenience and familiarity we use the first term here), which extends through the river valleys of the Danube, its tributaries and their catchments, in the northern and central Balkans, from southernmost Hungary and easternmost Croatia through southern Serbia and Kosovo down to northern Macedonia, and from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina eastwards as far as parts of Transylvania in Romania (Fig. 1). Belo Brdo, near the centre of this distribution, appears to have emerged relatively early in the Vinča culture sequence and was clearly, as the largest known tell of the complex, a place of considerable and enduring significance. This was a time, after the initial emergence of a Neolithic way of life in the region, of the spread, consolidation and diversification of settlement, involving the formation of large settlements and tells; the emergence of both larger communities and distinctive households within such sites; the intensification of subsistence; and changing materiality and the expansion of material networks (Chapman 1981;Kaiser and Voytek 1983;Tasić 2009;Tringham and Krstić 1990;Tripković and Milić 2009;Orton 2010). To understand the initiation, formation, duration and ending of Vinča-Belo Brdo is to grasp some of the major features of the development of Neolithic communities in a major swathe of south-east Europe as a whole.
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