Iron Gates Mesolithic
archaeological culture
The Iron Gates Mesolithic is a Mesolithic archaeological culture dated to between 13,000 and 6,000 years cal BCE, in the Iron Gates region of the Danube River, in modern Romania and Serbia.
The people who inhabited the Iron Gates area during this period of time have been surmised, through archaeological discoveries, to have lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, living off food they gathered from the land or from the Danube River. Varying burial practices have also been discovered.
Major sites within this archaeological complex include Lepenski Vir. Despite a foraging economy, stages at this site dated at c. 6300–6000 BCE have been described as "the first city in Europe", due to its permanency, organisation, and the sophistication of its architecture and construction techniques. Lepenski Vir consists of one large settlement with around ten satellite villages. Numerous piscine sculptures and peculiar architecture have been found at the site.
Archaeology
Survey and Site Discovery
During the 1960s to the 1980s the Yugoslav and Romanian governments constructed two hydroelectric dams along the Danube River. The first dam (Iron Gates I) was constructed between 1964 and 1971, and the second (Iron Gates II) between 1977 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Iron Gates Mesolithic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.