To whom does Serbian archaeology belong? The case of Belovode and Plocnik
Authors: Radivojevic Miljana , Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic Julka 
Published: January 2017

The long-standing archaeological research of the Serbian Vinca 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 Vinca culture settlement feature at the site of
Plocnik, 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 Dusko Sljivar, a once an extremely supportive and prominent
member of our team. Each of these accusations by Dusko Sljivar is completely
contradictory to his own previous documented work, and have therefore easily
been refuted. The work by Dusko Sljivar in question encompasses: two decades
of excavations at the sites of Belovode and Plocnik; including
single-authored and joint publications prior to 2012, including those with
Miljana Radivojevic and Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic; and official field
documentation, either signed off solely by him, or together with his
co-excavator at the site of Plocnik, Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic. The first
accusation, published in 2014, saw Dusko Sljivar 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, Dusko Sljivar 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 Plocnik by Radivojevic and
Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic. In the third accusation, Sljivar 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 Radivojevic and Kuzmanovic- Cvetkovic 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, Dusko Sljivar 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 (Radivojevic 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. Sljivar
also omitted the published rebuttal (Radivojevic et al. 2014) to
unsubstantiated claims on alleged manipulation of contextual data of the tin
bronze foil from the Vinca culture site of Plocnik put forward in a joint
article by him and another colleague (Sljivar and Boric 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 Plocnik 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 Vinca culture material, that the Vinca horizon is the
only cultural occupation at the site of Plocnik 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 Dusko Sljivar. We have presented a
detailed account of this particular case in order to show Sljivar?s
contradictory and inconsistent account of the official fieldwork
documentation that he co-authored. It would appear that either Sljivar 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 Sljivar 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 Plocnik and therefore not nearly as important to early
metallurgical scholarship. To underline further the absurdity of the
situation in which we found ourselves with Sljivar, we should also mention
Sljivar?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 Sljivar
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, Sljivar?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 Plocnik 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 Plocnik 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 Dusko Sljivar.