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*	Lepenski Vir: a Mesolithic Paradise*

***	The birth of town planning, the birth of sculpture***

In the winter of 1940, the worst in the memory of those then living, the
Danube froze solid in the gorge of the Iron Gates between Yugoslavia and
Romania. The pressure of the ice weakened the cliff-like banks in many
places, and when the spring thaws came, huge chunks fell into the stream.
One of these left a broad fresh gash on the Yugoslav side of the stream,
overlooking the great whirlpool known as Lepenski Vir. Some local
peasants, making their way over a goat path along the cliffs, noticed
something odd about the gash: several yards below their feet there was a
ledge with what looked like layers of cement floors sticking out. They
reported this strange sight to the authorities.

But wily peasants are always reporting strange sights of this sort since
they have heard that there is money to be made in finding prehistoric
objects. Besides, a world war was underway just over Yugoslavia's
borders, and the authorities had more important things to think about.
The peasants' report was filed away in a drawer in a Ministry in
Belgrade. Shortly thereafter Belgrade was bombed by the Germans, and the
Ministry disappeared along with the rest of the Yugoslavian government.
Grass and brush quickly reclaimed the gash in the river-bank, and one of
the great archaeological discoveries of our time was delayed by a
quarter of a century.

In 1965 Dragoslav Srejovi, who had been six years old in 1940, was a
bright young assistant professor of archeology at the University of
Belgrade. The Yugoslavian and Romanian governments, each looking for
independence in matters of energy, had just signed an agreement to build
a giant hydroelectric dam which would back water up for more than 30
miles and turn the Iron Gates area into a quiet lake. Lepenski Vir,
about half way up the gorge, was one of the sites he visited to
determined whether there were any ancient remains that would justify a
digging expedition before the waters rose.

There seemed nothing unusual about the ledge when he first came to it
Through the thick underbrush, he could detect remains of a Roman road
and watch-tower, and fragments of pottery made by a Neolithic people who
had spread over the Danubian basin in the fifth millennium B. C. Such
finds are common in this part of the world. The site was very cramped,
measuring barely 550 by 160 feet: it was unlikely that anyone would have
chosen to build anything interesting or important there.

Still, he found something odd and challenging about the spot. When the
fog settled down on the multicolored water of the Danube as it churned
up ore-bearing muds from its bottom, Srejovi had the impression of being
on another planet, at least on another continent. Botanical specialists
would soon point out to him that the vegetation at Lepenski Vir is
indeed quite different from that growing on ledges and in gorges only a
few miles away. Located on a north-south loop of an east-west gorge,
this is a site that is sheltered from all destructive winds: the cold
ones from the Russian steppes as well as the searing sirocco from
Africa. Snow rarely falls here. As a result it is what botanists call a
refuge area, where plants could survive when they were being killed off
by global cooling elsewhere in northern Europe thousands of years ago
and can now be found only on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Srejovi decided to dig. That summer, on a shoe-string budget, with a
workforce of two students and ten pick-and-shovel laborers, he began
scooping up and examining the earth.

Just beneath the surface, he found what he had expected: traces of Roman
military occupation, and below that objects that could be identified as
belonging to the Starevo culture, a primitive people believed to have
been the first in the Danube valley to have scratched the ground to
plant a little wheat and barley, and to have begun the domestication of
wild cattle and goats.

The Starevo period stands at the dawn of the Neolithic or New Stone Age
in this part of the world (roughly, the first half of the fifth
millennium BC). Anything beneath it therefore belongs to the Mesolithic
of Middle Stone Age, generally regarded as the dark ages of prehistory.
It was a period which in Europe extended for about three millennia
between 8000 and 5000 B.C. Global cooling had produced a harsh climate,
game was elusive, and mankind was reduced to a few bands of nomadic
hunters living a precarious life, stumbling through snow and ice and
rock for a chance to get a few mouthfuls of food, passing their nights
in caves or in holes in the ground. The marvelous skills of the their
ancestors, the Paleolithic hunters who had not only plenty to eat but
also the leisure time to make the marvelous cave paintings of caves like
Lascaux and Altamira, were forgotten. Srejovi himself had excavated
Mesolithic sites in southern Yugoslavia, and they all bore witness to a
low brutish form of existence. The people's health was bad, their bones
showed every symptom of malnutrition and exposure: rickets, rheumatism,
rotten teeth. They were stunted in build, and they rarely lived beyond
the age of 30.

Imagine the astonishment of Srejovi and his crew when they found they
had dug down to a flat surface which looked very much like cement, and
which even turned out to /be/ like cement, the very floors that had
caught the eyes of the peasants 25 years before. They were made of an
amalgam of local limestone with sand and water, a level of technological
achievement that would have been thought surprising in people living
hundreds or even thousands of years later. And the slabs of this cement
were not laid down haphazardly; they were measured out carefully to form
the foundations of houses, with upright slabs around them, some of them
arranged so that they could support slanting poles. Presumably these
poles were covered with animal hides, and the whole structure was a
flat-topped tent which could shelter a family of about five people.

There were several dozen such foundations, some built one over the
other, houses that had been built and rebuilt as circumstances demanded.
But at every layer there was a striking uniformity. There was always a
house, or two houses, bigger than the others and in a central position,
presumably indicating some position of importance within the community.
All the houses faced in the same direction, their wider ends toward the
river, all were built in the same shape: a trapezoid with one rounded
end (more exactly, a section of a circle with an outward angle of 60
degrees) with fixed proportions of 3:1 or 4:1 between its length and
each of its sides.

In each house the same trapezoidal shape is repeated in the hearths
surrounded by vertical slabs, always in the eastern or sunny end of the
house, in the exact center of an equilateral triangle which Srejovi
believes was the module on which all construction at Lepenski Vir was
based. .

There had been nothing anything like this is previous human history, or
at. least in any human history that has been unearthed to this date.

The same sense of precision and order found in the construction of the
houses is found also in their arrangement on the site. Prehistoric
settlements are characteristically haphazard, the dwellings huddled
together or scattered at random about the available space. Rational town
planning, in the form of straight streets dividing city blocks, does not
appear before the Greeks, a scant 2,500 years ago, But here, 5,000 and
more years before the Greeks, in this wilderness village, all the houses
are neatly arranged in a fan-shaped pattern opening out from the
river-bank. There was always an empty space, labeled "marketplace" by
Srejovi, in front of the bigger houses. And between all the houses
narrow alleys ran in straight lines either to the marketplace or to the
river's edge.

There were 20 archaeologists working on the project by now, and 70
laborers, provided by the government with a barracks that had been used
by border guards. Behind every hearth in the houses they found a flat
stone with a cuplike depression in it -- presumably some kind of altar.
Behind the altar were generally two or ore upright stones, at first
assumed to be natural boulders picked up off the riverbank.
Investigation then revealed that they were all of a reddish sandstone
which appeared to have come from a ravine a couple of miles away. Some
of these stones were indeed natural boulders, but others were found to
have decorations, wavy lines or chevrons, chipped into them in low
relief. Were these lines stylized representations of hair, snakes, fish
scales, or were they mystical abstractions, or mere doodling?

While the argument raged during the third summer of excavation, a new
and more startling discovery was made. An upright stone, of the familiar
red sandstone, turned up in the largest house yet uncovered. It was
almost two feet tall. A burly workman carried it down to the river to
wash off some of the incrustations of the ages, and then Srejovi began
to scrape away the mud still clinging to the surface. All at once his
chief assistant, Letica Zega, let out a screech. "It's a face!"

No one believed her at first. Every one knew that monumental sculpture
entered human history in the Near East two or more millennia after the
settlement at Lepenski Vir had ceased to exist. Old Stone Age men had
made little figurines of clay or stone and scratched designs on bones
and rocks, but no one had ever dreamed of their making life-size
statues. Nevertheless, as Srejovi scraped away, more and more features
stood out, and every one had to admit that he was holding in his hand a
sculptured head.

A human head, but a strange one. Srejovi at first thought it was a fish,
and it did have oddly fishlike features. Like the 20 or os very similar
works which would later be found on the site, it was goggle-eyed,
gape-mouthed, very fishy. But it had a nose, the eyes were in the front
of the head and not on the sides, and there was a suggestion of
shoulders and arms, a bust, below the head. It was undoubtedly human.

Perhaps these statues represented gods, perhaps ancestral figures
guarding the hearth. Whatever they were, they were, so far as any one
can tell today, the first pieces of monumental sculpture ever made on
earth. Their only rivals would be some heads found far off at Jericho in
Palestine, of roughly the same epoch. But these were not carved out of
stone, they were human skulls filled with clay and coated with white
plaster. It was apparently here at Lepenski Vir, on this lost ledge,
that some unknown genius first got the idea of hacking or chipping
life-size, or more-than-life-size, effigies out of solid rock

Carbon-dating of charcoal found in the hearths covers a span of several
hundred years in the sixth millennium and perhaps the beginning of the
fifth. But there are no charcoal samples from the earliest layers, so
there is no certain way of knowing how far back the origins of the
settlement may go. All that can be said for certain is that the
community must have held together for an immensely long time to be able
to develop and the cultural resources that would make such statues possible.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the dean of British archaeologists, says of these
achievements that they make Lepenski Vir one of the few sites in the
world to which the epithet "unique" can be legitimately applied. Its
sculpture, he says, "enters world history substantially in his own right
and without convincing parentage.".It is, in short, an original
invention, by people of whom we can never learn the name.

Analysis of fossilized pollen on the site shows that the climate at
Lepenski Vir was colder then that it is today. Birches grew where oak
and elm now cover the mountainsides. But in general the landscape must
have looked much the same as it did to Srejovi on his first visit. Only
it would not have seemed so tight, enclosed, foreboding to those early
inhabitants as it did to him. It must have looked more like a
Shangri-La, an Eden before the Fall, a place of peace and plenty and joy
and rest. Instead of passing their whole lives, like their ancestors,
scurrying after enough food to keep them barely alive, they could now
let the food come to them as they lolled about in comfort.. There were
edible berries and tubers growing along the bank, and the game animals
which swarmed on the mountains could be casually knocked on the head
when they came down to eat the berries. The seeds of blackberry and wild
plum and wild cherry, the bones of martens, beavers, deer, wild boars
and aurochs which have been found in the hearths of their houses, showed
that all these source of supply were plentiful, And there was a still
more plentiful inexhaustible supply waiting only a hundred yards or so
out in the river. There they could see, perpetually churning, the
greatest whirlpool in all the turbulent course of the Danube through the
Iron Gates. The Danube was unpolluted then, and it swarmed with every
shape and size of fish. Little fish had to give the whirlpool a wide
berth or they would be swept to their death on the rocks, but big fish
like sturgeon and salmon had only to position themselves firmly at the
edge of the whirl and open their mouths and the river would sweep up a
constant supply of nutrients from its bed to thrust down their throats,
and they could lazily grow to monstrous size. As for the inhabitants of
the village, all they had to do was to paddle out on a treetrunk or a
rude raft, brain a couple of fish with a club and come back with enough
ingredients for a long round of feasts.

Fish were thus the guarantee of prosperity for Lepenski Vir; and it is
no wonder the statues of their gods (assuming that they were gods) had
fishlike features. Even when the climate turned milder, and they were
able to replace fish with game as their staple food, they went on
putting fish-faced statues by their hearths.

Once the inhabitants had settled in, time seems to have stood still in
Lepenski Vir. Study of the bones found there shows that there was no
admixture of foreign population; the same people remained on the spot,
intermarrying generation after generation, perhaps 120 generations in
all - well over 2,500 years. During all that time they remained healthy.
(Did they, like the ancient Greeks, toss aside the infants that did not
live up to their sturdy standards?) There are no deformed or diseased
bones here, and the women were so robust that it is hard to tell their
skeletons from those of the men. They lived long, often into their
eighties.

There were never many of them. The narrow ledge could never have had
room for more than 20 or 25 houses at a time, each of which could hardly
have held more than five adults. This would hardly be called a village
in most countries today, but in Megalithic terms it was enormous, it
represented a whole new dimension of human life. And though the
community was so self-sufficient that it never had to import any
merchandise, it apparently exported some of its conceptions. For at
about a dozen locations on both banks of the river within a radius of
some 20 miles, archaeologists have found remains of Mesolithic villages
which look like crude copies of Lepenski Vir. They were smaller, the
buildings were less solid, they had no carved stones or statues. But
their houses and their hearths are trapezoidal in shape. Srejovi
considers that Lepenski Vir must have been a kind of cultural
metropolis, a mini-Rome to which outlying groups owed at least spiritual
obedience.

Then one day the inhabitants went away from Lepenski Vir forever. There
is no sign of a violent end, no fire or rockslide; the settlement was
simply abandoned. While we can do more than guess, it is tempting to
guess that the end came about as it did in the Garden of Eden, because
of progress, an increase in knowledge. Some time in the fifth millennium
BC, the "Neolithic Revolution" came to the Danube basin. Humans learned
to grow crops and domesticate cattle, opening immense horizons for
humanity but dooming Lepenski Vir, which simply lacked the room for
either agriculture or pasture on a successful scale.

And so after a time span that only Egypt and China can compare with in
the more recent world, this tight little culture faded away.

And the physical remains might have disappeared too, with water rising
behind the giant dam and lapping over the ledge, if Srejovi had not
persuaded the government to provide the funds to hoist all the surviving
floors and stones 60 feet up to another ledge, oriented like the
original one to the rising sun, And there they sit to this day, waiting
for the government to build a road for the army of tourists who should
be tramping to see these relics of a lost Eden.

©1975 Robert Wernick

The text above appeared in /Smithsonian /in 1975.  The tourists predicted
in the last sentence have yet to materialize in any substantial numbers
because of the tragedy of the Yugoslav civil war.