The communities who lived in the Balkans between 7000 and 4000 Cal. BC have now been the focus of intensive and increasingly inter-disciplinary research for the last forty years. Dwelling between the warm, dry Mediterranean zones of the Aegean and Anatolia and the cooler and snowier Central European heartlands, these communities created distinctive social formations that left enduring marks on today's landscapes. One of the key trends in these millennia concerned the high value attributed to the exotic, especially if that was represented by objects of striking colour and brilliance. Thus, the