Marko Porčić
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 72808 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Marko Porčić |
| PRENOMES | Marko |
| SOBRENOME | Porčić |
| ASSINATURA | PORČIĆ M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Belgrade |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6697-8621 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 72 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2006 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Validating Pottery Seriation with Radiocarbon Dates
Absolute chronology and spatial organization of the Early Bronze Age necropolis in Mokrin
The chronology of the Bronze Age in the Carpathian basin is largely based on relative chronologies, i.e. stylistic analysis of ceramic (and other) materials. While the number of radiocarbon dates is generally increasing, certain important sites are still poorly dated. One of the largest necropolises from this period, i.e. Mokrin necropolis, which traditionally belongs to Maros culture, is dated only with 6 radiocarbon dates. Here we synthesize th…
Child Burials in Vessels at the Middle Bronze Age Necropolis in Ostojićevo (1650–1550 BC)
Burying children in vessels is a funerary practice as old as the art of pottery making. It was present in the Levant and European territories from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, with no continuity or clear geographical frameworks, leaving the question as to what lay behind the custom of placing a child’s body in a ceramic vessel. The earliest records of this practice on the territory of Serbia date back to the Middle Bronze Age, and are found at …
The beginning of the Neolithic in the central Balkans
Since 2020 a wealth of new data has been generated on the beginning of the Neolithic in the central Balkans. The picture that has emerged is broadly consistent with the Wave of Advance model, with the first farmers arriving in the region around 6250 BC and expanding gradually towards the north. In this paper, an updated review of the evidence and interpretations is presented, and potentially problematic or ambiguous aspects of the current interpr…
Deploying Kronfeldner’s concept of human nature in archaeology
This essay represents a reflection on the role and relevance of the concept of human nature in archaeology, inspired by the ideas about human nature presented and elaborated by Maria Kronfeldner in the book What?s Left of Human Nature?. It is a comment from an archaeologist?s perspective. Kronfeldner formulated three ways in which human nature can be conceptualized: classificatory, descriptive and explanatory human nature. In the text, I review t…
Addressing the Intensity of Changes in the Prehistoric Population Dynamics
The intensity of changes in the population dynamics of the Early Neolithic (ca. 6250–5300 cal BC) communities in the Central Balkans was addressed by estimating the growth rate values. The Bayesian approach (Crema and Shoda 2021) of estimating intrinsic growth rates by fitting different models of population growth was applied to radiocarbon dates from the Early Neolithic sites in Serbia. We explored two possible episodes of population growth base…
Chinese whispers in clay
A Contribution to the Study of Social Inequality in the Late Neolithic of the Central Balkans
The social inequality represents one of the major problems of the contemporary world and an important anthropological subject. The transition to agriculture is often viewed as an important turning point for the development of social inequality in (pre)history. For this reason, the study of the social inequality in the Neolithic communities is of particular importance for the understanding of the origins and the development of this phenomenon. Thi…
Stressful times for women - Reply to Edinborough et al. (2021)
Expansion of the Neolithic in Southeastern Europe
Observations on the origin and demography of the Vinča culture
The timing and tempo of the Neolithic expansion across the Central Balkans in the light of the new radiocarbon evidence
The new set of radiocarbon dates was used to explore the timing and tempo of the Neolithic expansion across the Central Balkans. Our results suggest that the first farmers arrived in this region around or few decades before 6200 cal BC. The observed spatio-temporal pattern based on the radiocarbon data suggests that the general direction of the expansion was along the south-north axis. The regression analysis (arrival time vs. distance from the o…
Stressful times for women - Increased physiological stress in Neolithic females detected in tooth cementum
We used the tooth cementum annulation method (TCA) to investigate physiological stress before and during the Neolithic demographic transition in Europe. Episodes of physiological stress are reflected as "stress layers" in the tooth cementum at an almost annual resolution. We used the TCA method to detect and count the number of the stress events for a sample of 21 Mesolithic and 25 Neolithic individuals from the Central Balkans from the period be…
Archaeological Excavation from Epistemological Perspective
Archaeological excavation as the basic form of fieldwork in archaeology is frequently perceived, especially in the Serbian archaeological community, as the focus of the archaeological method. The syllabi of university courses in methodology of archaeological research are often primarily devoted to the methods and techniques of excavation. The aim of this paper is to present a wider picture, i.e. to present the role of excavation in archaeological…
A pattern of metatarsal bovine bone surface alterations produced by human permanent teeth - An experimental approach
The research of human induced tooth marks on bone surface represents a promising field of investigation of high interest for archaeologists. The aim of this study was to address the issue of equifinality of tooth marks recognition and analysis using experimental setup involving permanent teeth. Five volunteers mouthed and chewed fresh metatarsal bovine bone. A total of >2000 marks were recorded and the type, geometry and metrics reported. Differe…
Quantifying prehistoric physiological stress using the TCA method
The Neolithic way of life was accompanied by an increase in various forms of physiological stress (e.g. disease, malnutrition). Here we use the method of tooth cementum annulation (TCA) analysis in order to detect physiological stress that is probably related to calcium metabolism. The TCA method is applied to a sample of teeth from three Mesolithic and five Neolithic individuals from the Central Balkans. The average number of physiological stres…
Assessing continuity in the ancestral territory of the Tsleil-Waututh-Coast Salish, southwest British Columbia, Canada
Evaluating Social Complexity and Inequality in the Balkans Between 6500 and 4200 BC
Radiocarbon test for demographic events in written and oral history
Significance Indigenous oral traditions remain a very controversial source of historical knowledge in Western scientific, humanistic, and legal traditions. Likewise, demographic models using radiocarbon-based simulation methods are controversial. We rigorously test the historicity of indigenous Tsimshian oral records ( adawx ) using an extended simulation-based method. Our methodology is able to detect short-duration (1–2 centuries) demographic e…
Early Neolithic population dynamics in the Eastern Balkans and the Great Hungarian Plain
In this study, we reconstruct population dynamics in the Early Neolithic of the Eastern Balkans and the Great Hungarian Plain using frequency of radiocarbon dates as a population proxy. The method of summed calibrated radiocarbon probability distributions is applied to a set of dates recently published in Bulgaria and Hungary. The aim is to test the hypothesis of the Neolithic demographic transition (NDT) in these regions and to compare the patt…
Beyond culture history
The Approximate Bayesian Computation approach to reconstructing population dynamics and size from settlement data
Simulating cultural transmission
In this paper, we adopt the theoretical framework of evolutionary archaeology in order to model and simulate cultural transmission between hypothetical Neolithic sites in Balkans. We simulate neutral cultural transmission in order to compare the simulation results with empirically observed patterns of material culture variability such as traditional archaeological cultures. Our preliminary results show that a series of random local interactions c…
Exploring the Effects of Assemblage Accumulation on Diversity and Innovation Rate Estimates in Neutral, Conformist, and Anti-Conformist Models of Cultural Transmission
Do Archaeological Cultures Exist
Archaeological culture still persists as a basic analytical and interpretative concept in Serbian archaeology despite criticism. This paper presents a formal view of archaeological cultures and explores the epistemological implications of this formalization. Formal analysis of archaeological culture is achieved through logical and quantitative explication of the traditional definition of archaeological cultures. The main result of the formal anal…
The Approximate Bayesian Computation approach to reconstructing population dynamics and size from settlement data
Between-group Differences in the Patterning of Musculo-skeletal Stress Markers
This paper presents a method for studying between-group differences in physical activity patterns through the analysis of musculo-skeletal stress markers (MSM). The specific aim was to develop a method that could overcome the problems related to confounding variables such as body size by shifting the analytical focus from the comparison of differences in intensity to the comparison of differences in kinds of activity. Instead of testing whether t…
Effects of Residential Mobility on the Ratio of Average House Floor Area to Average Household Size
The aim of this article is to test the hypothesis that mobile or predominantly mobile societies have a lower ratio of average house floor area to average household size. The analysis is performed on a cross-cultural sample consisting of 11 mobile and 35 sedentary cases. The research hypothesis is supported by the data, and the result is significant in two ways. First, it contributes to general anthropological understanding of relationships betwee…
Evaluating Social Complexity and Inequality in the Balkans Between 6500 and 4200 BC
House Floor Area as a Correlate of Marital Residence Pattern
The goal of this article is to reflect on the relationship between average house floor area and marital residence pattern.This article brings three novel elements to this research problem: (a) it combines cases from the previous studies thus creating a larger empirical base, (b) logistic regression is used as an analytical technique which can test the significance and strength of the correlation between variables and establish explicit classifica…
De facto refuse or structured deposition? House inventories of the late neolithic Vinca culture
The goal of this paper is to determine whether there are reasons to believe that inventories from the Late Neolithic Vinca culture houses do not represent systemic assemblages and to offer an interpretation of household assemblage variation. Pottery inventories from Vinca culture houses were compared to the ethnographically recorded range of variation in household inventory size. The discard equation was used to make projections of the accumulate…
Stressful times for women - Increased physiological stress in Neolithic females detected in tooth cementum
We used the tooth cementum annulation method (TCA) to investigate physiological stress before and during the Neolithic demographic transition in Europe. Episodes of physiological stress are reflected as "stress layers" in the tooth cementum at an almost annual resolution. We used the TCA method to detect and count the number of the stress events for a sample of 21 Mesolithic and 25 Neolithic individuals from the Central Balkans from the period be…
Expansion of the Neolithic in Southeastern Europe
The timing and tempo of the Neolithic expansion across the Central Balkans in the light of the new radiocarbon evidence
The new set of radiocarbon dates was used to explore the timing and tempo of the Neolithic expansion across the Central Balkans. Our results suggest that the first farmers arrived in this region around or few decades before 6200 cal BC. The observed spatio-temporal pattern based on the radiocarbon data suggests that the general direction of the expansion was along the south-north axis. The regression analysis (arrival time vs. distance from the o…
Exploring the Effects of Assemblage Accumulation on Diversity and Innovation Rate Estimates in Neutral, Conformist, and Anti-Conformist Models of Cultural Transmission
Absolute chronology and spatial organization of the Early Bronze Age necropolis in Mokrin
The chronology of the Bronze Age in the Carpathian basin is largely based on relative chronologies, i.e. stylistic analysis of ceramic (and other) materials. While the number of radiocarbon dates is generally increasing, certain important sites are still poorly dated. One of the largest necropolises from this period, i.e. Mokrin necropolis, which traditionally belongs to Maros culture, is dated only with 6 radiocarbon dates. Here we synthesize th…
The goodness of fit and statistical significance of seriation solutions
The beginning of the Neolithic in the central Balkans
Since 2020 a wealth of new data has been generated on the beginning of the Neolithic in the central Balkans. The picture that has emerged is broadly consistent with the Wave of Advance model, with the first farmers arriving in the region around 6250 BC and expanding gradually towards the north. In this paper, an updated review of the evidence and interpretations is presented, and potentially problematic or ambiguous aspects of the current interpr…
A pattern of metatarsal bovine bone surface alterations produced by human permanent teeth - An experimental approach
The research of human induced tooth marks on bone surface represents a promising field of investigation of high interest for archaeologists. The aim of this study was to address the issue of equifinality of tooth marks recognition and analysis using experimental setup involving permanent teeth. Five volunteers mouthed and chewed fresh metatarsal bovine bone. A total of >2000 marks were recorded and the type, geometry and metrics reported. Differe…
Social complexity and inequality in the Late Neolithic of the Central Balkans
The aim of this paper is to review and critically evaluate relevant archaeological evidence regarding recent claims about the social complexity of Late Neolithic societies in the Central Balkans. Theory suggests that the relevant evidence should be related to population size, economic intensification, ranking, and craft specialisation. It is concluded that, although there are indications that inequalities existed and also demographic potential fo…
Ethnoarchaelogy – the Present as Key to the Past
This text discusses the theoretical aspects of ethnoarchaeology, as a discipline that represents a specific hybrid of ethnology and archaeology and thus asserts itself as a significant pathway to building middle-range theories. Methods in ethnoarchaeology enable us to study all aspects of human action, with the necessary reliance on the premise of uniformness, which also gets tested in the course of research. In many ways, this subdiscipline reli…
Connection of mobility and foraging - A cross-cultural analysis
The goal of this inquiry is to explore the existence and severity of the liaison in-between mobility and cattle breeding. The author has decided to test the hypothesis of a relation between mobility and cattle breading through quantitative analysis of a cross-cultural data base. It is determined that there exists a statistically important bond between mobility and cattle breading in the economy. Although the connection is strong, a significant pa…
Nomadic pastoralism in the Early Bronze Age of the central Balkans evaluation of background knowledge
The aim of the paper is to examine background knowledge about the orga?nizational properties of mobile pastoral groups in order to assess the likelihood of the existence of pastoral nomads in the Early Bronze Age in the central Balkans. The patterning found by A. L. Johnson (2002) is taken as a point of departure for the cross-cultural analysis conducted in this study. Johnson?s findings are in the main corroborated. Acquired knowledge about the …
Archaeology, Evolution and Darwinism
This paper presents a short history of the influence evolutionary thinking has had on anthropology and archaeology. The focus is on four major "schools" in evolutionist thought: the classical evolutionism of the 19th century, Neo-evolutionism, social biology (sociobiology) and Neo-Darwinian archaeology. The basic conclusion of this text is that the idea of socio-cultural evolution, understood in the broadest sense, has left a lasting impression…
Physical activity and social status in Early Bronze Age society
Gender Anthropology of Prehistoric Populations
This paper explores some gender anthropology issues in a prehistoric context. Specifically, the paper attempts to shed light on the question of why certain male and female persons were interred in positions contrary to the strict norm that applied to the burial of men and women at the early Bronze Age necropolis in the town of Mokrin near Kikinda. Three elements have been analyzed, namely physical activities, funerary offerings, and the layout of…
House Floor Area as a Correlate of Marital Residence Pattern
The goal of this article is to reflect on the relationship between average house floor area and marital residence pattern.This article brings three novel elements to this research problem: (a) it combines cases from the previous studies thus creating a larger empirical base, (b) logistic regression is used as an analytical technique which can test the significance and strength of the correlation between variables and establish explicit classifica…
An exercise in archaeological demography
This paper reflects on the methodology for estimating population size from settlement data. Archaeologists are faced with a static record of houses, which is the result of dynamic processes of population growth and house use. There is no simple relationship between the total number of houses and population size. In order to produce more realistic estimates of population size, a quantitative model is presented which takes into account population d…
Marital Residence Patterns in Late Neolithic Communities of the Vinča Culture
This paper aims to reconstruct the marital residence patterns in late Neolithic communities in the central Balkans. The average size of the habitation site was used as a correlate of patrilocality or matrilocality. A study of the habitation sites of the Vinča culture shows that judgments about marital residence patterns vary between sites and their phases. There are, however, certain indications that patrilocality may be considered the more proba…
A Tentative Attempt to Estimate the Systemic Number of the Late Neolithic Vinča Culture Figurines
In this paper an attempt is made to estimate the number of figurines which were in "use" in households of the Late Neolithic Vinča culture. The number of accumulated figurines and houses is used as a starting point. Given the complexities of the settlement dynamic, figurine use and the formation processes of the archaeological record, the ratio of the number of accumulated of figurines to the number of accumulated houses is only an indirect refle…
Contextual Analysis of Fragmentation of the Anthropomorphic Figurines from the Late Neolithic Site of Selevac
The biographical approach to material culture and the hypothesis of deliberate fragmentation of anthropomorphic figurines are used in this paper to deduce a hypothesis that there should be an association between particular fragmentation categories and context types in the archaeological record of the Late Neolithic settlements in Central Balkans. This hypothesis is tested using published data from the site of Selevac by performing correspondence …
De facto refuse or structured deposition? House inventories of the late neolithic Vinca culture
The goal of this paper is to determine whether there are reasons to believe that inventories from the Late Neolithic Vinca culture houses do not represent systemic assemblages and to offer an interpretation of household assemblage variation. Pottery inventories from Vinca culture houses were compared to the ethnographically recorded range of variation in household inventory size. The discard equation was used to make projections of the accumulate…
Social complexity and inequality in the Late Neolithic of the Central Balkans
The aim of this paper is to review and critically evaluate relevant archaeological evidence regarding recent claims about the social complexity of Late Neolithic societies in the Central Balkans. Theory suggests that the relevant evidence should be related to population size, economic intensification, ranking, and craft specialisation. It is concluded that, although there are indications that inequalities existed and also demographic potential fo…
Effects of Residential Mobility on the Ratio of Average House Floor Area to Average Household Size
The aim of this article is to test the hypothesis that mobile or predominantly mobile societies have a lower ratio of average house floor area to average household size. The analysis is performed on a cross-cultural sample consisting of 11 mobile and 35 sedentary cases. The research hypothesis is supported by the data, and the result is significant in two ways. First, it contributes to general anthropological understanding of relationships betwee…
Do Archaeological Cultures Exist
Archaeological culture still persists as a basic analytical and interpretative concept in Serbian archaeology despite criticism. This paper presents a formal view of archaeological cultures and explores the epistemological implications of this formalization. Formal analysis of archaeological culture is achieved through logical and quantitative explication of the traditional definition of archaeological cultures. The main result of the formal anal…
The goodness of fit and statistical significance of seriation solutions
Between-group Differences in the Patterning of Musculo-skeletal Stress Markers
This paper presents a method for studying between-group differences in physical activity patterns through the analysis of musculo-skeletal stress markers (MSM). The specific aim was to develop a method that could overcome the problems related to confounding variables such as body size by shifting the analytical focus from the comparison of differences in intensity to the comparison of differences in kinds of activity. Instead of testing whether t…
Simulating cultural transmission
In this paper, we adopt the theoretical framework of evolutionary archaeology in order to model and simulate cultural transmission between hypothetical Neolithic sites in Balkans. We simulate neutral cultural transmission in order to compare the simulation results with empirically observed patterns of material culture variability such as traditional archaeological cultures. Our preliminary results show that a series of random local interactions c…
Exploring the Effects of Assemblage Accumulation on Diversity and Innovation Rate Estimates in Neutral, Conformist, and Anti-Conformist Models of Cultural Transmission
Beyond culture history
The Approximate Bayesian Computation approach to reconstructing population dynamics and size from settlement data
Radiocarbon test for demographic events in written and oral history
Significance Indigenous oral traditions remain a very controversial source of historical knowledge in Western scientific, humanistic, and legal traditions. Likewise, demographic models using radiocarbon-based simulation methods are controversial. We rigorously test the historicity of indigenous Tsimshian oral records ( adawx ) using an extended simulation-based method. Our methodology is able to detect short-duration (1–2 centuries) demographic e…
Early Neolithic population dynamics in the Eastern Balkans and the Great Hungarian Plain
In this study, we reconstruct population dynamics in the Early Neolithic of the Eastern Balkans and the Great Hungarian Plain using frequency of radiocarbon dates as a population proxy. The method of summed calibrated radiocarbon probability distributions is applied to a set of dates recently published in Bulgaria and Hungary. The aim is to test the hypothesis of the Neolithic demographic transition (NDT) in these regions and to compare the patt…
Assessing continuity in the ancestral territory of the Tsleil-Waututh-Coast Salish, southwest British Columbia, Canada
Evaluating Social Complexity and Inequality in the Balkans Between 6500 and 4200 BC
Archaeology (30 obras) · Geography (28 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (27 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · History (19 obras) · Demography (15 obras) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (13 obras) · Mathematics (12 obras) · Population (11 obras) · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies (10 obras)