The earliest tin bronze artefacts in Eurasia are generally believed to have appeared in the Near East in the early third millennium BC. Here we present tin bronze artefacts that occur far from the Near East, and in a significantly earlier period. Excavations at Pločnik, a Vinča culture site in Serbia, recovered a piece of tin bronze foil from an occupation layer dated to the mid fifth millennium BC. The discovery prompted a reassessment of 14 insufficiently contextualised early tin bronze artefacts from the Balkans. They too were found to derive from the smelting of copper-tin ores. These tin bronzes extend the record of bronze making by c. 1500 years, and challenge the conventional narrative of Eurasian metallurgical development.

The Neolithic in the central Balkans saw dramatic changes in settlement forms, architecture, and material culture, with substantial, often long-lived settlements that can reasonably be called villages emerging in the later part of the period. This paper examines the role of herding practices in the development of these large, more-or-less settled communities. Radiocarbon results (including twenty-seven new AMS dates from Gomolava, Opovo, and Petnica) are used to place the available zooarchaeological data into a chronological framework, allowing comparison of inter- and intra-site changes across the region. The data point to the development of large-scale cattle herding in the later Neolithic, the implications of which for mobility and community cohesion are discussed. This trend is seen clearly over time at certain sites but, like the settlement evidence, is neither universal nor synchronous across the region, emphasizing that change occurred, and should be understood, on the level of individual communities.