Ars Praehistorica : commemorating Nikola Tasić’s legacy in Balkan antiquity

It was my distinct honor to compose the introductory text for the collection of papers dedicated to Academician Nikola Tasić (1932–2017), an eminent figure and towering authority in Serbian and Yugoslav archaeology. The very mention of Academician Nikola Tasić evokes associations with the great triad of Serbian prehistorians, which, alongside him, included Milutin Garašanin and Dragoslav Srejović. Together with contemporaries such as Vladislav Popović and Bogdan Brukner, this generation epitomized what may rightly be termed the golden age of Serbian archaeology, both within the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts andintellectual legacy of Academician Nikola Tasić within the confines of a single text is an almost impossible task. His career, spanning over half a century, was not merely a succession of publications and excavations, but a foundational enterprise—constructing the very framework upon which the modern understanding of the prehistory of Southeastern Europe continues to rest. As an archaeologist, a synthesizer of knowledge, director of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the National Museum in Belgrade, and vice-president of the Academy itself, Nikola Tasić embodied an institution in his own right: a scholar who mastered empirical data while also possessing the rare capacity to discern major historical processes within the multiplicity of cultural fragments. His legacy endures, crystallized around several pivotal contributions. in the broader scholarly domain. To summarize the scholarly opus and