Nikola TASIĆ Belgrade HISTORICAL PICTURE OF DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY IRON AGE IN THE SERBIAN DANUBE BASIN*

The paper offers a historical survey of the development of Early Iron Age cultures in Danubian Serbia, its characteristics, relations with contemporary cultures of the Pannonian Plain, the Balkans, Carpathian Romania (Transylvania) and the Romanian Banat. It describes the genesis of individual cultures, their styles, typological features and interrelationships. Danubian Serbia is seen as a contact zone reflecting influences of the Central European Urnenfelder culture on the one hand, and those of the Gornea-Kalakača and the Bosut-Basarabi complex on the other. The latter’s penetration into the central Balkans south of the Sava and Danube rivers has been registered in the Morava valley, eastern Serbia, north-western Bulgaria and as far south as northern Macedonia. The terminal Early Iron Age is marked by the occurrence of Scythian finds in the southern Banat, Bačka or around the confluence of the Sava and the Danube (e.g. Ritopek), and by representative finds of the Srem group in Srem and around the confluence of the Tisa and Danube rivers. The powerful penetration of Celtic tribes from Central Europe into the southern Pannonian Plain marked the end of the Early Iron Age. The time at the end of 2nd and the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, i.e. Bronze to Iron Age transition, is determined by strong economic, social, cultural and by all appearances also by paleoethnic changes. It had not been characterized only by introduction of new metal, iron, for production of weapons, tools and jewelry but also by using new techniques and occurrence of new stylistic traits in the material culture. Almost synchronously, in the beginning of the 1st millennium, there appeared strong influences on autochthonous Bronze Age cultures in the Serbian Danube valley that arrived from two directions. On the one hand these are influences coming from the area of the final phase of the Gava culture, from the south Carpathian *This paper is a continuation of the study “Historical picture of development of Bronze Age cultures in Vojvodina” published in Starinar LIII–LIV (2003/4) pp 23–34.