Starinar (Jan 2016)
To whom does Serbian archaeology belong? The case of Belovode and Pločnik
Abstract
The long-standing archaeological research of the Serbian Vinča culture sites of Belovode and Plocnik has been strengthened with the joint collaborative work with the UCL Institute of Archaeology in the past 6 years. This collaboration yielded scientific demonstration of the world’s earliest copper smelting amongst the excavated materials, c. 7000 years old. In the six years since the first publication of this finding in 2010, a number of detailed analytical studies followed, together with another breakthrough discovery of the world’s earliest tin bronze artefact. This artefact was excavated in a secure context within a Vinča culture settlement feature at the site of Pločnik, which was radiocarbon dated to c. 4650 BC. On the basis of the early metallurgical results from Belovode, the UK Government funded a large international collaborative project from 2012-2015. This included Serbian, British and German teams all of whom brought substantial experience and cutting-edge technology to the study of the evolution of the earliest known metal-making in its 5th millennium BC Balkan cultural context. This project’s forthcoming publications, including a major monograph published by UCL Press, which will be free to download, promise to shed new light on the life of the first metal-making communities in Eurasia, and also outline integrated methodological approaches that will serve as a model for similar projects worldwide. The open, balanced and respectful research atmosphere within our core project team is currently being challenged by an unsubstantiated controversy. This controversy arises from accusations against the project team members by Duško Šljivar, a once an extremely supportive and prominent member of our team. Each of these accusations by Duško Šljivar is completely contradictory to his own previous documented work, and have therefore easily been refuted. The work by Duško Šljivar in question encompasses: two decades of excavations at the sites of Belovode and Pločnik; including single-authored and joint publications prior to 2012, including those with Miljana Radivojević and Julka Kuzmanović-Cvetković; and official field documentation, either signed off solely by him, or together with his co-excavator at the site of Pločnik, Julka Kuzmanović-Cvetković. The first accusation, published in 2014, saw Duško Šljivar deny, together with another colleague, the veracity of his original field journal notes on the context of the previously mentioned tin bronze foil, for which he received an immediate and successful rebuttal. In the second accusation, published in Starinar LXV/ 2015, Duško Šljivar continued with the same practice of denying his own official field journals and publications which he (co-) authored with a series of false accusations relating to the manipulation of the original data from the excavations of the sites of Belovode and Pločnik by Radivojević and Kuzmanović-Cvetković. In the third accusation, Šljivar argues that his copyright was infringed, and that field journals were used without permission. This is despite the fact that these accusations are legally and formally unsupported, and that he shared his data and materials during the course of a long collaboration and co-authorship on a number of articles with both Radivojević and Kuzmanović- Cvetković over the course of the last two decades. In other words, in order to validate his accusations and to seek to damage our untainted academic standings, Duško Šljivar has denied all his professional and academic achievements, research articles, field diaries and formal documents that he ever (co-) wrote and/or signed on the topic. He even goes as far as to exclude a landmark joint publication in an international peer-reviewed scientific journal (Radivojević et al. 2010) from his citation list in order to support his claim that a formal agreement on the joint publishing of Belovode metallurgy results has never been fulfilled. Šljivar also omitted the published rebuttal (Radivojević et al. 2014) to unsubstantiated claims on alleged manipulation of contextual data of the tin bronze foil from the Vinča culture site of Pločnik put forward in a joint article by him and another colleague (Šljivar and Borić 2014). In order to end this malicious debate, we present our rebuttal from 2014 and further elaborate upon it by showing the original quotes from the Pločnik field diary on the day that the tin bronze foil in question was found, and from the concluding remarks of the diary in question. We again clearly demonstrate that there has never been any doubt regarding the secure context of the tin bronze foil within the Vinča culture material, that the Vinča horizon is the only cultural occupation at the site of Pločnik and that no intrusion has ever been observed in the context of this find, not on the day of the discovery, not in the conclusions or the excavation field diary, and not in the first publication of the said find by Duško Šljivar. We have presented a detailed account of this particular case in order to show Šljivar’s contradictory and inconsistent account of the official fieldwork documentation that he co-authored. It would appear that either Šljivar made a false field diary entry regarding the context of the tin bronze foil on the day of its discovery in 2008, or he presented incorrect information in the later joint commentary. The former hypothesis that Šljivar made a false entry in the field diary in 2008 in order to potentially mislead later scholarship does not seem plausible, especially as the object of dispute was not identified as tin-bronze on the day of discovery, but merely as another copper object from Pločnik and therefore not nearly as important to early metallurgical scholarship. To underline further the absurdity of the situation in which we found ourselves with Šljivar, we should also mention Šljivar’s initial agreement to co-author the paper we published in Starinar XLIV/2014, from which he withdrew without offering any constructive comments, only to publicly publish his views as well as professional and personal insults directed towards us in Starinar XLV/2015. The situation where Šljivar had the opportunity to act in his best professional interest was while our article was still in preparation and he chose not to do it; this leads us to assume that professional interests were not his priority on this matter. Finally, Šljivar’s deceitful and erroneous claims were executed in a spiteful language that is unfit for a scholarly journal, and damages both his reputation and the decision of this journal to publish them. We further elaborate on these developments in the broader context of Serbian archaeology, quoting the legislation on the intellectual copyright of excavation directors over the archaeological materials that they have excavated. The current law on Cultural Monuments recognizes the exclusive rights of excavation directors to publish their research for the period of 12 months after the excavations ended. After this period, other interested parties in the field can access the materials and any related field documentation. This demonstrates, alongside previously mentioned scientific arguments, that we have worked with the Belovode and Pločnik materials in accordance with the valid legal regulations. We conclude that there is no formal support for the exclusive interpretation of lives of communities in the sites of Belovode and Pločnik c. 7000 years ago, and emphasise the value of our original scientific contribution as illuminating a particular economic activity of the inhabitants of these two prehistoric villages. Finally, we call for the reinforcement of existing procedures in Serbia so that our profession can prevent any future misconduct such as that exemplified in the attempt by Duško Šljivar.
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