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| Hušnjak Hill near Krapina is one of the greatest Neanderthal sites in Europe. It features reconstructions of Neanderthals in their every day life such as the fierce looking fellows above. |
It seems that humans - or hominids that might have looked and acted close enough to us to be considered human - inhabited the hills north of Zagreb several hundred thousand years ago. In 1899 at Hušnjak hill near the city of Krapina the Croatian paleonthologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger discovered a collection of human remains. The site with its 900 human fossils and about a thousand flint tool and weapon fragments is now considered as one of the world's greatest finds of Neanderthal-driven Mousterian culture, which flourished some 130 000 years ago. Not far from Krapina in the Vindija cave near Varaždin Neanderthal remains were found and attested to be around 28 000 years old, the most recent Neanderthal find ever. This capital discovery lends credit to the hypothesis that Neanderthals cohabited with Homo sapiens. And in light of the prevailing driving habits on the streets of Zagreb, one could be forgiven for thinking that this still might be the case.
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| The Vucedol Dove on display at the Archeological Museum in Zagreb. |
The Neolithic - the age following the discovery of agriculture that revolutionized human existence - was marked in what is now Croatia by some dozen different cultures. The Adriatic seaboard was influenced by Mediterranean cultures while the North tended to have a lot in common with Danubian cultural groups. One of the first agricultural communities from this period on the plains of Northern Croatia was that of Starčevo. The Starčevo culture dates back to 5300 BC. The Starčevites lived in houses and huts with fully fledged foundations, they buried their dead in fetal position, crafted polished stone tools and figurines and decorated earthenware with incisions and paintings. The Sopot culture, which existed in modern day Syrmia and Slavonia around 4500 to 4000 BC was known for its fortified dwellings surrounded by moats. The Sopot ceramics were typically black or dark grey biconical vases with ribbed decorative patterns.The most important culture in late Neolithic in the South of Croatia was found on the island of Hvar between 3500 and 2300 BC. From its Hvar origins it spread to the entire eastern Adriatic coast as well as Herzegovina and Istria. It most striking legacy are finely polished ceramic ware with ornate spirals that were either incised or painted in red.
When the Croatian soccer squad came in third at the World Cup in 1998 they wowed the world. In Croatia itself most were ecstatic to be on the world soccer map for the first time as an independent nation. A few did think, however, that the Golden Generation could have done more than bronze. It was a sort of "Bronze Age" of what if.... The actual Bronze Age few thousand years back, between 3000 and 2200 BC to be more precise, a highly evolved Vučedol culture thrived on the right bank of the Danube near the modern day city of Vukovar. While there is no evidence Vučedolians ever played soccer, the spatial organization of the site finds attests a hierarchical society with a high degree of division of labour. The predecessors of Vučedol were familiar with copper, but this culture was the first to master the alloy of copper and tin we know as bronze, as evidenced by the foundries and molds found on the site. Vučedol was thus able to produce more sophisticated ceramics with geometrically designed ornamentations or covered in paste made of crushed shellfish and snail shells. The most remarkable extant artifact from this period is the well-known Vučedol Dove, a partridge-shaped ritual vessel made of baked clay.
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