Ural Historical Encyclopedia of the Neolithic Urals. Ural Neolithic

forest area of Eastern Europe extends from the Baltic to the Urals and from the coast White Sea and the Kola Peninsula to the Middle Volga and the Oka. The development of the economy and culture in the Neolithic here was based on hunting, fishing and gathering and followed the path of constant improvement of fishing and hunting tools. Arrowheads made of bone and stone, harpoons of various shapes and spears are the main ones. Large stone adzes and axes, with which wood was processed, were widely used. Only in some places at the end of the Neolithic, the beginnings of cattle breeding appear. The main monuments of this territory are settlements. They were located along the banks of the rivers. The rivers were the main transport routes. C

Over time, the appearance and territory of the Neolithic cultures of the forest belt changed. It is possible to single out the cultures of the early Neolithic, the end of the 6th and 5th millennia BC. e. and cultures of the developed and late Neolithic - IV-mid III millennium BC. e. The following cultures belong to the Early Neolithic of the forest zone: Lyalovo, Narva-Neman, Volga-Kama and Sperings in the Far North. The picture of the formation and spread of cultures in the Late Neolithic is very varied.

In the early Neolithic, north of the Dnieper-Donetsk culture, in the Volga-Oka basin, the Lyalovo culture developed, named after the parking lot near the village. Lyalovo on the banks of the Klyazma. The settlements were located on the swampy banks of rivers, lakes and islands. Dwellings were arranged on a deck of poles and logs, on piles. The inventory is dominated by oval and elongated stone axes and adzes, bone harpoons, leaf-shaped arrowheads retouched on both sides, knives, flake scrapers, and chisels. Chisels, pestles, and grinding plates were made from stone. The Lyalovo culture is characterized by egg-shaped vessels, decorated with zonal ornamentation of pits and comb impressions and therefore called pit-comb.

To the west and northwest of the territory of the Lyalovo settlements in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, the Narva culture developed, which developed on the basis of the local Mesolithic, but was influenced by the southern Neolithic tribes. At a later stage, it also covered Northern Belarus (Narva-Neman culture). The culture has been studied from settlements on peat bogs in Latvia, Belarus and the Pskov region. Their age is from the middle of VI to IV millennium BC. e. The culture is named after the settlement of Narva. It is characterized by vessels with drawn bottoms and straight edges, the presence of small bowls with a flattened bottom, some of them are boat-shaped.

Neolithic monuments of the forest belt are often located in large groups in places convenient for hunting and fishing, on coastal elevations. Dwellings were above ground, pillar construction. In their place are the remains of stakes and pillars. The area of ​​dwellings was usually 40-50 square meters. m with one or two rectangular rooms. The inventory contains a lot of flint arrowheads and darts, scrapers and knives; there are slate items obtained from the north, from the territory of modern Finland. A special place is occupied by stone drilled axes with a sharp and flattened butt, a lot of bone and horn items: arrowheads, harpoons, piercings and awls.

To the east of the region of the Lyalovo culture lay a vast territory of the Volga-Kama Neolithic. Here the vessels are similar to ovoid, with a slightly narrowed throat. typical ornament are comb-stamp impressions. Continuously alternating oblique stamp impressions created a special pattern, called the "walking comb".

In Karelia and partly in Finland, the Early Neolithic is represented by sites of the Sperings culture, which date back to the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e., near the city of Medvezhyegorsk, in the vicinity of the city of Povenets and other places. These monuments are few. The inventory of culture is archaic, although ceramics with incised patterns are found.

In the developed Neolithic on the European territory of Russia, new archaeological cultures are formed, which is associated with the development of the economy and, in general, with a change ethnic composition population, the movement of Neolithic tribes. The tribes of pit-comb ceramics had a great influence on this process. Their origin is associated with the carriers of the Lyalovo culture. The tribes of pit-comb ceramics expand their territory and penetrate into the Baltic, to the north up to the Pechora, and influence the Volga-Kama culture. As a result, about twenty different Neolithic cultures developed on the territory of the East European Plain alone. The origin of many local Neolithic cultures in the Volga and Oka basins is associated with the settlement of Pit-Comb Ware tribes.

The Neolithic cultures that occupied the territory north of the Volga to the shores of the Baltic and the Arctic Ocean differ significantly from the central group. In this vast area, hundreds of settlements are known, located along the banks of rivers, lakes and on the coast of the White Sea. The choice of location was determined by the convenience of fishing and hunting. Bone harpoons, spears, hooks are found in abundance in all settlements. The Neolithic population of the North was mixed: there is a Caucasoid type with an admixture of Mongoloid.

Many sites on the territory of modern Karelia - from Svirsk to St. Petersburg - are united in the so-called Karelian culture. It is characterized by settlements with huts and long-term settlements such as Pitkajärva with large dugouts. Tools of labor were often made of slate stone. These are axes, chisels, picks for breaking ice. The basis of the economy was fishing and fishing for sea animals. Hunting tools were bow, arrows, spear. One-sided bone harpoons, bast and nettle fiber nets, hooks, and traps were widely used.

Next to the Karelian culture were the tribes of the Kargopol culture. It is known from numerous settlements on the shores of lakes Lacha, Vozh, Beloe-Kubenino, Modlena, Upper Veretye, etc. Along with ceramics, the inventory includes harpoons, flint elongated retouched arrowheads, darts, quite a lot of scrapers and convex-blade flint knives.

The monuments located on the coast of the White Sea are united by the similarity of the pattern on the ceramics. They belong to the White Sea culture. The inventory of this culture consists mainly of arrowheads. There are also many scrapers and there are almost no large percussion tools. They were not needed here. The so-called lanceolate-shaped arrowheads made of massive flakes with serrate retouch along the edge predominate among hunting tools. Obviously, Marine life were the main source of food for the tribes of the White Sea culture.

The Baltics in the Late Neolithic were inhabited by tribes of the Baltic culture. The formation of the Baltic and Karelian cultures was influenced by the tribes that came in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. e. from the south, from the territory of the Lyalovo culture. In the process of their merging with the local Early Neolithic population, these two great cultures were formed. The Baltic culture on the territory of Estonia and Latvia combined elements of the local Narva and alien Lyalovo culture. And the latter clearly prevailed.

In a number of northern sites, there is much in common with the sites of other territories, for example, with the Ural Neolithic. They are united by peculiar bone arrowheads of the so-called Shigir type. These arrows are unusual: they are made of bone, have a thin long stem and a point that looks remarkably like a spindle head. The earliest arrows of this type are found in the Urals and Western Siberia.

It should be noted that with all the differences in the inventory, reflecting the local traditions of the development of the Neolithic culture, the Neolithic sites of the north - Chukotka, Taimyr, the Kola Peninsula and other polar territories - have much in common, which was due to the dominance of the same type of economy based on seafaring and fishing, as well as the specific conditions of the natural environment of the subpolar zone.

Neolithic of the Urals and Siberia

On the territory from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean, several communities developed in the Neolithic. An extensive Neolithic community in the IV - early III millennium BC. e. represented the Urals and adjacent territories. The Neolithic culture of the Urals arose on the basis of the Mesolithic. In the early stages of this culture, the microlithic, characteristic of the Mesolithic, stone processing technique was preserved: most of the tools were made using inserted knife-like plates. There are two main areas: the Neolithic of the Southern Urals and the Neolithic of the forest Middle and Northern Urals.

The Neolithic of the Southern Urals was influenced by the southern Kelteminar tribes of the Aral and Transcaspian regions. Even in the Mesolithic, the penetration into the Southern Urals of the population from the Southern Caspian region was noted - carriers of microlithic technology and a manufacturing economy, from whom the ability to make pottery (and many ornamental motifs) and flint jagged arrowheads was borrowed.

The Neolithic commonality of the forest Middle and Northern Urals is represented by two historical and cultural regions: the East Ural, or Ob-Ural, and the West Ural, or Kama-Volga. There is much in common between them. The settlements are located on the shores of lakes and on ledges of floodplain terraces. People lived in semi-dugouts of a rectangular shape, were engaged in hunting and fishing. A feature of the Neolithic culture of the Urals are round-bottomed or round-conical clay vessels, decorated with a jagged (comb-shaped) ornament. Bone arrowheads were widespread. In general, the Neolithic of the Urals is associated with the Mesolithic, with its inherent microlithic technique for making thin knife-like plates.

The Western Ural Neolithic passed through three stages in its development. Early - end of V - beginning of IV millennium BC. e. The most typical site is the Borovoye Lake I site near Perm. Archaeological material is represented by earthenware, close to ovoid in shape and decorated with a comb jagged ornament, leaf-shaped arrowheads, curved retouched knives. The second stage refers to the IV millennium BC. e. Grinding axes-adzes appear, items made of knife-like plates almost disappear, patterns on vessels become more diverse. This stage is characterized by long quadrangular semi-dugout houses with hearths in the center. The third stage dates back to the beginning of the III millennium BC. e. The shape of the dishes changes: it becomes a convex-bottomed cylindrical shape and is decorated with “walking comb” patterns or in the form of a lattice. At the end of the stage, the first copper products appear.

The East Ural Neolithic culture developed somewhat differently, the emergence of which is attributed to the beginning of the 4th millennium BC. e. The transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic took place on a local basis under the influence of the southern neighbors, and some elements of culture were perceived from them. The East Ural Neolithic also went through three stages.

The first - Kozlovsky - was studied from the earliest settlement on Andreevsky Lake and is associated with a vast territory of the forest and forest-steppe Trans-Urals. At the first stage, the strong influence of the southern Kelteminar Neolithic culture was felt. Characteristic are large, slightly narrowed upward vessels with a rounded conical bottom. The ornament covered their entire surface, including the bottom. It was applied with a narrow spatula, by drawing on wet clay with periodic pressure (“retreating spatula”). Comb drawings were also used, with which straight or wavy parallel lines were drawn. The flint inventory retained its Mesolithic appearance: the overwhelming majority of tools were made of knife-like plates; Arrowheads of the Kelteminar type with a tooth at the point were common. Obviously, bone and horn multi-pronged harpoons, points with grooves for attaching flint inserts, and spindle-shaped arrowheads found on the peat bogs of the Middle Trans-Urals obviously belong to this time.

The second stage - Poludensky - dates back to the end of the 4th - the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e. This is the heyday of the Neolithic culture. It includes the settlements of Strelka, the lower layer of the Gorbunovsky peat bog, Poludenka I in the basin of the river. Chusovoi, Shaitanka I near Yekaterinburg, the middle layer of the Murat site in Bashkiria. The dishes retained a semi-ovoid shape. The ornament in the form of wavy drawn lines and belts of hatched triangles was widely used. There were no Mesolithic techniques in the flint processing technique. Polished adze axes with side protrusions for fastening and horn hoes with a ledge appeared. Unique wood products preserved in the thickness of the Gorbunovsky peat bog are skis, sledge runners, buckets with bird heads on handles, idols and ritual vessels in the form of elk figures. People lived in semi-dugout dwellings, the basis of which was a log cabin.

The third stage is named after the settlement Sosnovy Ostrov Sosnovoostrovsky. Among the monuments of the settlement along the Northern Sosva and Tavda are: Chestyyag, Sortynya, Rybatskoye, Tumanskoye, etc. The finds are distinguished by a comb ornament with bulges, the so-called pearls, formed from depressions on the inside of the vessel, and sculptural images made of clay. At that time, rather large knife-like blades, knives and scrapers made from blades and short flakes were used. People lived in large, almost square dugouts with an area of ​​\u200b\u200babout 100 square meters. m.

The Urals, with the expanses adjoining it from the east and west, in the Neolithic was the territory of the formation of the early Finno-Ugric ethnic community- the oldest basis of the Finno-Ugric peoples.

In the vast expanses of Western Siberia, in the Ob region, in the Neolithic, the Upper Ob Neolithic culture of sedentary and semi-sedentary fishermen and hunters developed. The Upper Ob Neolithic culture includes burial grounds and settlements of Samus II, III, Nagorny Ishtan in the basin of the river. Tom, a burial ground and a settlement in the places of Burial Grounds, Zavyalovo on the Ob, Krokhalevka, Irmen 2, etc.

The Upper Ob culture is characterized by the lamellar technique. Labor tools are represented by stone axes and adzes, numerous side-scrapers, retouched arrowheads resembling a willow leaf in shape, spearheads, and long bone plates used to make insert daggers. Among the materials of this culture, stone figurines of a bear, fish, bone figurines of elks are known. The most numerous group of materials is made up of ceramic vessels: flat-bottomed, elongated, with a narrowed bottom, flat-bottomed, and round-bottomed, squat with convex sides.

Of the patterns, horizontal, wavy and zigzag stripes predominate. In the Late Neolithic, the incised ornament gradually gives way to the comb ornament. At the same time, it is observed that the once united West Siberian Neolithic community is disintegrating.

The culture of the West Siberian Neolithic developed on the basis of a hunting and fishing economy: people hunted elks, bears, waterfowl, were engaged in fishing and gathering. According to anthropologists, the Neolithic population of the forest and forest-steppe zone of Western Siberia was not ethnically homogeneous: along with the Caucasoid, there were also Mongoloid elements.

In Eastern Siberia, a special Neolithic zone was the Neolithic of the Baikal region. The burial grounds, settlements and rock carvings located here allow us to trace the historical development of the tribes living there. The inhabitants of the Baikal region, the Angara and the lower reaches of the Selenga were hunters. Taiga conditions determined the development of their culture along the path of improving hunting equipment. The Baikal Neolithic is represented by two cultures: Isakovo-Kitoi and Serov, named after the burial grounds of the same name. It is believed that the Baikal Neolithic arose on the basis of the local Late Paleolithic (Mesolithic) culture.

By the IV - the beginning of the III millennium BC. e. include burial grounds of the Isakovo type. Their inventory is dominated by hunting weapons, primarily large bone spearheads with sharp flint blades, arrowheads made with the help of pressure retouching. At this time, polished adzes for gouging boats appeared. The earliest semi-egg-shaped clay vessels in the Baikal region were found in the Isakov burials.

A new stage in the development of the Neolithic tribes of the Baikal region began in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. e. It received the name Serov (after the burial ground near Irkutsk). On the banks of the Angara, extensive settlements of large tribal groups were discovered. The settlements had dozens of hearths made of stones, huge pits for food supplies, smoking meat and salting fish. The dwellings probably resembled a conical tent or hut.

Almost every burial contains a bow with arrows, a clay vessel with a polished adze and a knife. The Serovites used a composite bow made of several wooden and horn plates connected together. The length of the bow reached 1.8 m. The range and lethal force of the arrow were incomparably greater than that of simple bows. Fishing has risen to a higher level. Fish were caught with hooks made of bone and wood or entirely carved from bone, with bone harpoons, with the help of bait fish made of bone or stone. The shape of pottery also changed: most of the vessels had a narrowed throat and a convex bottom.

Neolithic of the Baikal region: I, Isakovskaya culture; 1 - arrowheads; 2 - slate knife; 3-5 - bone punctures; 6 - bone dagger with liners; 7 - ax; 8 - jade knife; 9, 10 - ceramic vessels; II - Serov culture: 1 - image of a fish; 2-4 - bone harpoons; 5 - stone knife.

The Isakovskaya and Serovskaya cultures give an idea of ​​the same line of development of the East Siberian Neolithic. Another line of Neolithic culture in the Baikal region is known from the sites of the Kitoi type of the end of the 5th-4th millennium BC. e. The Kitoi tribes were clearly dominated by fishing. This is evidenced by numerous fishhooks, which are found in the burials in whole sets. Hooks are composite, the rods for them were made of soft slate, and the points were cut out of bone or wood. Fish were caught not only with hooks, but also with the help of nets. This culture is characterized by polished axes, adzes, jade knives. Ocher was widely used during burial. The clothes of the dead were richly decorated with various stripes, most often from wild boar fangs.

Several archaeological cultures developed on the territory of the modern Republic of Sakha. Early Neolithic IV millennium BC. e. represented by the Syalakh culture. Its settlements were found on the Lena, Vitim, Aldan rivers - almost to the Arctic Ocean. These are the sites of Belkachi I, Malaya Munku, Syalakh. There are clay vessels with imprints of a wicker net, prismatic cores, knife-like plates, end-scrapers, piercings, and insert plates. Of the bone tools, multi-toothed one-sided harpoon tips, spears, and knives with longitudinal slots for liners are widespread. Settlements were established on capes of small tributaries and lakes, in places convenient for hunting and fishing. Bow hunting played a leading role in the economy.

The Middle Neolithic Belkachi culture (beginning of the 3rd millennium BC) is known from the materials of several dozen settlements located along the Lena, Aldan, Vilyui and Kolyma. The most characteristic of it are polished stepped adzes, hoe-shaped tools, flint retouched small adzes, knives, scrapers, elongated beak-shaped points and triangular arrowheads. Here, the method of obtaining ceramics by knocking out is being mastered. The surface of the egg-shaped vessels is usually decorated with imprints of a twisted cord. It is believed that individual elements of the Belkachi culture do not have common roots with the local Early Neolithic culture.

The Late Neolithic (II millennium BC) in this region of Siberia has been studied from the sites of the Ymyyakhtakh culture (the Ymyyakhtakh site and others), whose tribes led the life of semi-sedentary hunters and fishermen. There were often several small camps around the settlements. The population lived in ground dwellings such as a hut or a plague. Work sites were opened in the settlements, where primary processing of stone tools made of chalcedony, slate, and jade was carried out. From hunting weapons, arrowheads and spearheads, knives, as well as stone sinkers for fishing nets are found in large numbers. The use of all known techniques for making stone tools is noted. The Ymyyakhtakh culture is characterized by ovoid and spherical ceramics with so-called waffle prints on the surface.

Neolithic Far East

Neolithic cultures in the Amur region, Primorye and northeast Asia were discovered relatively recently. Their discovery and study is mainly associated with the work of academicians A.P. Okladnikov and A.P. Derevianko.

The Far East represents a peculiar area of ​​Neolithic cultures. Four Neolithic cultures are known in the Amur basin: Novopetrovskaya, Gromatukhinskaya, Osinoozerskaya and Lower Amur. Novopetrovskaya culture was studied as a result of excavations of settlements near the village. Konstantinovka and Novopetrovka I, III. The settlements were located on cape-like ledges of floodplain terraces. The dwellings were semi-underground, rectangular in plan. In the center of the dwelling there was a hearth, around which there were pillars that supported the conical roof. Almost all stone products were made from knife-like plates, so large, wedge-shaped cores with a transverse impact platform, specific scraper cores, or Gobi cores are often found in settlements. Among the stone products are side and end scrapers, chisels for working wood and bone, lamellar arrowheads and darts slightly trimmed along the edge. Chopping and striking tools are represented by carefully polished adzes, axes and hoes. The ceramics of the settlements is insignificant, probably, it was just beginning to enter into everyday life. Novopetrovsk culture retains the features inherent in the Mesolithic. From the previous time, it is distinguished by the ability to grind stone and make pottery. This culture is the earliest period of the Far Eastern Neolithic and dates back to the 5th millennium BC.

The tribes of the Gromatukha culture also lived on the Amur in the Neolithic (according to the settlement explored on the Gromatukha River, a tributary of the Zeya). Known settlements near the village. Sergeevka, Kumary, near the station. Arga and elsewhere. The life and economy of the tribes of this culture differed from Novopetrovsk. They led a semi-nomadic lifestyle, engaged in hunting and fishing, and mastered other methods of stone processing. The stone tools of the Gromatukha culture were mostly made of oblong river pebbles split along the length, one side of which was not processed at all, while the other was processed with rough chips. So did adzes, large scrapers, spearheads and darts. Small prismatic and conical cores were also found on the settlements. From the knife-like plates removed from them, arrowheads, slightly retouched, punctures and knives were made. Pottery of the Gromatukha culture is characteristic of forest cultures. The most common were vessels with textile and false textile ornamentation, spatula impressions and comb ornamentation. The culture dates back to the second half of the 5th-4th millennium BC. e.

At the end of the III millennium BC. e. in the basin of the Middle Amur, the oldest agricultural culture in the Russian Far East, called the Osinoozersky, developed. Its settlements were located on the shores of Lake Osinovsky and on the banks of the Belaya and Zeya rivers. Tools were made mainly from flakes chipped from the nodule of flint and chalcedony. Arrowheads, liners, piercings and scrapers, stone hoes and grain grinders were found. The tribes of the Osinoozero culture led a settled way of life. People lived in large semi-underground dwellings. Millet grains were found in the hearth of one of the dwellings on the shore of the lake. Indirect evidence of the existence of agriculture are fragments of the bottoms of clay vessels with numerous holes for steaming grains and steaming food.

At the end of the Neolithic, a natural division of labor took place among the tribes of the Far East: some began to engage in agriculture, others - fishing, hunting and gathering, which determined the features of their development in the future.

At the beginning of the II millennium BC. e. settlements of the so-called Lower Amur culture spread over the vast expanse of the Far East. They are known over a large area of ​​the river basin. Amur. A well-studied monument is a settlement near the village. Condon north of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The village consisted of many rather deep semi-dugouts, round in plan, on the walls of which the indentations from the pillars are clearly visible. The settlement abounds in oval cross-section polished adzes, axes, arrowheads of various shapes made from both flakes and knife-like plates, various sinkers, chippers, anvils and wringers for working tools. The vessels were flat-bottomed, decorated with ornaments. Ornamental motifs are different: here is a large mesh of rhombuses, the so-called Amur braid, a fine mesh similar to a textile ornament, complex interweaving of zigzags, beautiful spirals and images of masks. It is noteworthy that the motifs of this ornament still live in the art of the Amur Nanais. In one of the dwellings, a sculptural image of a girl was found. A small figurine skillfully sculpted from clay subtly conveys the features of the ancient ancestor of the modern Nanais and other peoples of the Far East.

Fishing has been the main occupation of the inhabitants of the Amur since ancient times. Stone sinkers for nets and baubles are often found in settlements. These baubles, the oldest in the world, are made in the form of concave jade plates with a hole at one end for tying to a fishing line. The topography of the Neolithic settlements - the mouths of the rivers, the banks of the tributaries, where the fish entered - also testifies to the paramount importance of fishing.

In Primorye, the Zaisanov culture belongs to the Neolithic. In the cultural layers of the settlements located on the coastal terraces and hills, there are stone grinders, sandstone polishers, triangular knives made of wide knife-like plates, arrowheads processed on both sides. Chopping tools are also known - axes and adzes with a carefully polished working part. People lived in shallow rectangular semi-dugouts. The inventory contains many fragments of vessels decorated with incised ornaments in the form of triangles, cord and nail prints. The Zaisanovskaya culture was studied based on the materials of the settlements Oleniy I-III, Siniy Gai, near the village. Zaisanovka, Kirovskoe and in other places. The monuments testify to the sedentary nature of the population, which was engaged in fishing, hunting, probably, agriculture and pig breeding. Certain connections between the bearers of the Zaisanov culture and the Neolithic culture of Japan are noted. Materials from the later layers of the settlements of the Zaisanov culture suggest the existence of a producing economy.

The northern part of Primorye was included in the zone of influence of the Lower Amur Neolithic. The Neolithic materials of the Russian Far East cannot be considered within the framework of modern state borders, without taking into account data on Northeast China (Manchuria), Mongolia and Korea. Excavated by Chinese archaeologists on the shore of the lake. Malaya Khanka settlement and burial ground yes

dated by the IV millennium BC. e. Household pits with fish bones, burials were found here, and in top layer- the remains of dugouts. There are products made of plates, polished slate products, harpoons, spears, insert knives, picks made of deer antler, identical to the materials of Blue Guy I. Ceramics from the burial ground are distinguished by their diversity, which is close in composition to Kondon ceramics. Similar complexes are known in China in the Shenyang region (Chengqi and others). On the Liaodong Peninsula, several settlements and shell mounds are known, which are combined into a peculiar group of the Dongbei Neolithic. Opened in the mainland of Manchuria
a monument to Anazhi, the materials of which have analogues with the Novopetrovsk culture. Comb-toothed Neolithic pottery is widely represented in the Neolithic sites of North Korea - Sopohang, Gunsan, Chhodo. The lower layers of the multilayered settlement of Sopokhan are similar to the Zaisanov materials in Primorye. The connection with the seaside monuments can also be traced in the later Neolithic layers of Sopokhan and Gunsan. Row common features indicates that within the geographical region of the basin of the Amur and Greater Khingan rivers and the coasts of the Japan and Yellow Seas in the period of the 5th-4th millennium BC. e. there was a certain unity of cultures, which was distinguished by similar ceramics and stone processing techniques, combining the use of slate stone and the technique of making plates, the presence of axes, adzes, knives and tools from horn and bone of similar types.

Recently, Neolithic sites have been discovered and studied in Chukotka, Kamchatka and about. Sakhalin. For the periodization of the monuments of Northeast Asia, of exceptional importance are the multi-layered settlements explored on Lake Ushkovskoe, where the early, middle and late Neolithic layers and layers of the surviving Neolithic are distinguished. These are the monuments of Klychi, Kultuk, Avacha, Oira, etc. Here they lived in extensive (up to 10 mm in diameter) round dugouts, in the center of which there was a large hearth, and along the edges - small hearths. The stone inventory of the settlements is represented by scrapers, adzes, knives, arrowheads, knife-like plates and flakes.

On Sakhalin in the Neolithic, the Imchinskaya Neolithic culture developed, studied from the settlements of Imchi II, Nogliki I in the northern part of Sakhalin and from the settlement of Takoy II in the south, dating back to the 3rd-2nd millennium BC. e. Characteristic are conical cores, correct form knife plates. At the same time, there are also large chopping polished tools. Ceramic thin-walled pot-shaped flat-bottomed vessels are decorated with comb-stamp impressions. People lived in semi-dugouts of a rounded shape. Based on the Sakhalin Neolithic in the 1st millennium BC. e. Okhotsk culture arose and quickly spread in Northern Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands, which in a number of places lasted for a long time.

neolithic art

Neolithic art is a significant cultural and historical phenomenon. It is varied and highly developed. Neolithic art is represented by ornaments on ceramic vessels, small sculptures (figures of animals, birds and people) and rock carvings.

On the rocky shores of rivers and lakes facing south, whole galleries of rock art were created in the Neolithic. The earliest of them arose at the very beginning of the Holocene. Now rock carvings are widely known on all continents where people lived. In Europe, accumulations of rock carvings are known in Sweden and Norway (Boguslen, Tannum), in Northern Italy (Velkamonika), in Portugal and Spain, in North Africa(Tassili) and in the south in South Africa, on the Arabian Peninsula. There are many rock carvings in India and Pakistan, they are in China, Korea and Japan. On the American continent monuments of rock art are known in Canada, USA, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. There are quite a few of them found in Australia. Many of them have been opened in recent decades. They indicate that rock art is an important universal cultural phenomenon.

Rock carvings, or petroglyphs, have been found in various places in Russia and the CIS countries, almost everywhere where Neolithic hunters and fishermen lived and where there was a stone: in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, Siberia, the Urals, the Far North and the Far East. They reflected the features of the historical development of large territorial communities of North-Eastern Europe, modern Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the Urals, the forest belt of Siberia, Altai, the upper reaches of the Yenisei, Eastern Siberia, the Amur region and North-East Asia. In each of these regions, petroglyphs have a unique appearance. So, for example, a separate group of images is represented by the Amur and Ussuri petroglyphs, where the main plot is the image of monstrous masks with ears, snakes and solar disks. The drawings most characteristic of the Neolithic of the Far East were found near the village. Sakachi-Alyan on the banks of the Amur. They reflect the originality of the local culture of the ancestors of the modern Tungus-Manchurian tribes. At the northeastern tip of the Asian continent, writings of ancient sea animal hunters have been found.

Neolithic rock paintings of the taiga and forest-steppe zone of Siberia make up a huge original area. These include the famous images at the village. Shishkino and Suruktakh-Khaya sanctuary on the river. Lena, inscriptions of stone islands on the Angara, rock carvings near the village. Ust-Pisanaya on the river. Tom. The Neolithic hunters of the Siberian taiga mostly depicted animals and, above all, the owner of the Siberian taiga - the elk, which was the main object of hunting. It should be noted that the image of the animal is conveyed with extraordinary accuracy: the massive front part of the body with a typical hump, soft puffy lips, and thin graceful legs were carefully drawn. The petroglyphs of taiga Siberia are similar in subject matter and technique to the rock carvings in the north of the European part of Russia. Petroglyphs are found in the area of ​​Lake Onega (on the rocky capes Besov Nos and Peri Nos) and on the coast of the White Sea.

On the Onega coast, on the rocks of Besov Nos, deer, anthropomorphic figurines with animal heads, people skiing, waterfowl, among which swans with long, gracefully curved necks stand out, a gigantic fish - most likely a catfish, symbols of the Sun and the Moon and a huge humanoid figure , personifying the patron spirit of a successful hunt or, possibly, a mythical ancestor. rock art known on the White Sea, in the lower reaches of the river. Vyg. Here, more than 300 drawings were found at the Besovy Sledkov: chains of bare footprints, a herd of elks driven by a hunter on skis, swans, seals. In Zalavruga, deer, boats, groups of skiers, scenes of hunting for a sea animal are carved.

In Central Asia and Kazakhstan, complexes of images were found in the mountains - Tamgaly in Kazakhstan and Saimaly-Tash in Kyrgyzstan. The rock carvings of Mongolia and the Altai Mountains - Kolbak-Tash, Elangash and others - are close in plot to them. A large number of rock paintings have been discovered on the territory of the Mongolian Altai. The main object of creativity among the Neolithic tribes living here were mountain goats and rams, hunters armed with bows and arrows.

Of great interest are the petroglyphs of the Caucasus. Perhaps the most valuable among them are rock carvings in Kobystan on the Absheron Peninsula. There are a lot of drawings here, they are different in time - from the earliest Mesolithic to medieval images of riders and camel caravans scratched with a knife. The earliest were made in the Neolithic. This is a whole panel of dancing men, contour images of bulls, herds of horses and archers.

Rock art, in which large groups of animals and solar signs are represented, is known in the gorges of Dagestan.

Petroglyphic art: - images on the Shishkinsky rocks; 2-4 - a hunting scene (Zalavruga) on the White Sea; 5 petroglyphs of Lake Onega

Rock art, originating in the Neolithic, continued to exist in subsequent archaeological periods, and in some mountainous areas it survives to the present. At the same time, it should be noted the fundamental difference between rock art and Paleolithic cave painting, ancient art. First of all, this is the art of another era, not only historical, but also natural: Paleolithic painting is the art of the Pleistocene, the Ice Age, and rock art is the art of the Holocene, our natural era. The difference is that the art of open spaces is designed for entertainment, emotional perception and information content. This is an important materialized element of spiritual culture, constituting a single whole with the natural environment, mythology and epic, which originated in the Neolithic. In the Neolithic, drawing techniques and characteristic foundations developed artistic style.

There were two main techniques for performing images - with red ocher and by knocking out a contour on the surface of a stone. There are fewer pictures. The drawings were beaten out with a hard stone. With the help of embossing, a certain relief of the pattern was achieved: for example, the eyes of an elk, nostrils, and a cut of the mouth were left bulging. Sometimes, by knocking out, they showed the backbone and insides of the beast. In the technique of drawing, there were certain techniques that were the same everywhere. The features of the artistic style is a planar profile image of animals. They are all in the same plane, without foreground and background, as in the pictures. Human figures were most often depicted from the front, with their heads turned in profile. The drawings were out of proportion; next to a small elk, a disproportionately large person could be depicted.

All these techniques are important as a fact that characterizes the artistic features of this art, as its regularity, which we meet everywhere: in the north and south of Europe, in Siberia and Central Asia. Approximately to the same time, the ancient Yenisei images on papyri date back, where it would be possible to depict the foreground and background of the picture, the action, but this is not the case. On papyri, there are the same planar, mostly profile drawings. This means that the point is something else, obviously, in the system of perception and artistic transmission of the image, characteristic of a person of that time, wherever he lived - in Siberia, Europe or on the banks of the Nile.

A feature of rock art is the combination of conventionality, even schematism, with realism in the manner of depiction. Rock art is inherently different from modern art. The meaning of this art is very deep, and the images are endowed with significant content: they depict legends, traditions and myths about the origin of the family, about ancestors, about the structure of the Universe, actors which were mythological characters. Often, the drawings are clearly narrative in nature - these are animal breeding scenes, hunting pictures, or simply individual images of birds, animals, and fish. In general, petroglyphs reflect not only the spiritual, but also the material life of people.

In separate drawings and story groups the themes that worried the Neolithic hunters and were connected with their daily life are traced. They seem to have frozen for millennia in the writings, giving them a deep inner meaning. Two motifs - scenes of animal breeding and hunting, on which the well-being of the tribal team largely depended - are present

Neolithic sculpture of the European North, the Urals and Siberia:
Shigirsky peat bog; 2 - Siberia; 3-6 - north of European Russia; 7-Pskov region;
8-11 - Siberia

in many writings. The first is embodied in the ingenuous images of animal mating, when an anthropomorphic creature with the body of a man and the head of an animal participates in the fertilization of an animal female.

The second theme was conveyed more widely - a successful hunt. Interesting scenes hunts are depicted in Kobystan, Zalavrug, in the Urals, on the banks of the Tom, Angara and Lena. On the White Sea and in Chukotka, the drawings depict hunting for big fish and a sea animal from boats with the help of harpoons. The inscriptions show all methods of hunting, in particular mass, collective - driven hunting. In the Urals, in Siberia and other places, you can see scenes of another mass method of hunting - pokol. It was widespread in antiquity. During the mass seasonal crossing of animals across the rivers, hunters ambushed and killed animals that came ashore.

Rock drawings were not applied for posterity, they served the people of that time, that archaeological era. They are not the same. There were probably three functional groups of monuments: a sacred drawing, a sacred stone, and a natural sanctuary. Perhaps, initially, the places of petroglyphs were associated with a sacred image. For the forest territory of Eurasia, this is an elk, a deer; for the mountainous regions of Asia, the Caucasus - a mountain sheep, a goat; elsewhere the symbols were other animals. In a number of cases, the stone itself, sacred as a natural phenomenon, was of no less importance. Drawings were applied to it, magical actions were performed near it. The third function is a natural sanctuary. As a rule, this is a piece of nature, rocks with a large number of images from different eras.

These were the cult centers of the Neolithic tribes. Drawings could be applied during generic holidays. At the foot of the rocks during the holidays must have been made magical rites, mysteries were played out associated with the cults of ancestors, a sacred animal or the Sun, under the rays of which all nature comes to life - legends were formed. An integral part of such holidays was the creation of drawings in which people captured their understanding of the world around them.

On the Neolithic monuments of the North, the Urals, Siberia, there are small sculptural images of an elk or elk heads, snakes, a bear and a man. They are very realistic and are made of stone, wood, bone, horn and clay in a different manner. Compared to animal figurines, images of people are more schematic, but they also show a desire to emphasize certain details, such as gender.

Three-dimensional images are represented by sculptures of small forms, conveying a stylized image of an animal, usually an elk or a bear; images of applied art and amulets. Probably, in the Neolithic, many household items were decorated with stylized images of animals, birds, and fish. This is evidenced by wooden ladles and other items found in peat sites. Neolithic man adorned himself with pendants, stripes of teeth, fangs of animals, amulets depicting animals. As a rule, they had holes for fastening.

In the Neolithic there is a true flowering of ornamental art. It can be assumed that the ornament accompanied the life of the Neolithic man. He decorated clothes, probably, and dwellings, household items. However, archeology remains only ornamented pottery and some bone objects. Any ornament combines artistry, rhythm and informativeness. In modern life, these functions do not play any significant role. In ancient times it was different. The basis of the ornament is always a sign, and rhythmically repeating the same signs (figures) make up the ornamental field. Technically, the ornament was applied to ceramics in three ways: by imprint or stamp, inscription and paint (painted ornament). The ornament richly adorns Neolithic ceramics and is an important indicator of its belonging to one or another cultural community. Neolithic ornamentation on ceramics is diverse in terms of subjects and techniques. All the laws of ornamentation were used: the exact rhythmic placement of the pattern, the alternation of ornamental zones, the symmetry in the outline of equilateral triangles and rhombuses. Sometimes waterfowl are schematically depicted on the vessels. However, the basis of the Neolithic ornament is slanted or wavy lines, there are triangles, squares, circles, depressions (pits), comb and rope impressions. Alternating these elements, the Neolithic man obtained a complex, harmonious and elegant pattern, indicating his high artistic taste.

Literature

Brodyansky D.L. Introduction to Far Eastern archeology. Vladivostok, 1987.
Bryusov A.Ya. Essays on the history of the tribes of the European part of the USSR in the Neolithic era. M., 1952.
Georgievskaya G.M. Kitoi culture of the Baikal region. Novosibirsk, 1989.
Goryunova O. I. Serov burials in the Olkhon region. Novosibirsk, 1997.
Goryunova O.I. Ancient burial grounds of the Baikal region. Irkutsk, 2002.
Grishin Yu.S. Problems of periodization of the Neolithic and Eneolithic of the Baikal and Transbaikal regions. M., 2000.
Gurina N.N. Ancient history of the north-west of the European part of the USSR. M., L., 1961.
Danilenko V.N. Neolithic of Ukraine. Kyiv, 1969.
Derevyanko A.P. Novopetrovskaya culture of the Middle Amur. Novosibirsk, 1970.
Dikov N.N. Archaeological sites of Kamchatka, Chukotka and Upper Kolyma. M., 1977.
Surveys on the Mesolithic and Neolithic of the USSR. M., L., 1983.
Isaenko V.F. Neolithic of Pripyat Polissya. Minsk, 1976.
Krizhevskaya L.Ya. Neolithic of the Southern Urals. M., 1968.
Matyushin G.N. Ecological crises and their role in the change of cultures of the Stone Age // Nature and man. M., 1988.
Neolithic of Northern Europe // Archeology of the USSR. M., 1996.
Neprina V.I. Neolithic Pit-Comb Ware in Ukraine. Kyiv, 1976.
Okladnikov A.P. Petroglyphs of Angara. M., L., 1966.
Okladnikov A.P., Derevianko A.P. Gromatukhinskaya culture. Novosibirsk, 1977.
Okladnikov A.P., Derevianko A.P. The distant past of Primorye and the Amur region. Vladivostok, 1973.
Okladnikov A.P., Martynov A.I. Treasures of Tomsk petroglyphs. M., 1972.
Oshibkina S.V. Neolithic of Eastern Prionezhye. M., 1978.
Paleolithic and Neolithic. L., 1986.
Problems of studying the stone age of the Volga-Kama. Izhevsk, 1984.
Savvateev Yu.A. Zalavruga. L., 1977.
Starkov V.F. Mesolithic and Neolithic of the forest Trans-Urals. M., 1980.
Foss M.E. Ancient history of the north of the European part of the USSR. M., 1952. A

On this day:

• Birthdays
• 1826 Was born Johannes Overbeck- German archaeologist, specialist in ancient archeology.
• 1851 Was born Alexey Parfyonovich Sapunov- historian, archaeologist and local historian, professor, one of the initiators of the creation of the Vitebsk Scientific Archival Commission, the Vitebsk branch of the Moscow Archaeological Institute, the Vitebsk Church Archaeological Museum.
• Days of death
• 1882 Died Viktor Konstantinovich Saveliev- Russian archaeologist and numismatist, who collected a significant collection of coins.

Neolithic Ural

the final stage of the Stone Age. (VI-IV millennium BC) coincided with the warm and humid Atlantic period. The optimal ratio of heat and moisture determined the highest flourishing of the flora and fauna of the U. Forest spaces occupied a significant part of the forest-steppe and tundra zones of the U. In the South. W. the border between the forest and the steppe reached a position close to the modern.

In N., the technology of making pottery and shir was mastered. such methods of stone processing as grinding, sawing, drilling spread. Us. U. widely used rich natural resources, especially a variety of rocks. Along with flint and jasper, quartz, quartzite, granite, layered rocks - talc, slate, greenstone rock, as well as ornamental stones - chalcedony, rock crystal, etc. were used. Raw materials were mined in the main. on a surface. To the South U. research. flint-processing workshops - Ust-Yuryuzanskaya, Uchalinskaya, Karagaily I, Sintashta, located at the exits of raw materials.

The lamellar industry prevailed in the stone processing technique, the range of stone tools increased, especially for woodworking: axes, adzes, chisels, chisels, which in many ways. facilitated the processing of tree trunks for building housing, vehicles (boats, sledges, skis, sleds), household items.

Fishing and hunting in the conditions of the emerging tech. equipment and favorable geogr. environments remained the most. rational activities. Only to the south. on the outskirts of the forest-steppe zone (modern Orenb. region,) live-in is being developed. Bones of domestic animals (small, cattle, horses) were found in the Neolithic layer of the Ivanovo site (Tok River).

Diff. geogr. conditions U. (steppe, forest-steppe, taiga) determined the specifics of the cultural genesis of Yuzh., Wed. and Sev. districts of U. In the steppe and forest-steppe zones of the interfluve of the Volga and U.L.N. Morgunova, the Volga-ur. Neolithic culture, formed on the main. local Mesolithic. Naib. studied Ivanovo site. Ceramics of early N. is divided into two groups. In the first incl. pointed-bottomed, sometimes with a thorn-like bottom vessels, unornamented or with a rare incised ornament. In the second - round-bottomed vessels with a flattened bottom and incised-pricked ornament. Late N. is made up of complexes with pottery ornamented with a comb stamp. In the collections, along with stone, many others. bone products: piercings, awls, harpoons, arrowheads.

Volgo-ur. the culture was included in the circle of the southern Neolithic cultures of the Caspian-Black Sea area, within which, already in N., a transition was made to the producing forms of x-va. In late N., contacts with the forest (Kama) settlement probably increased, as evidenced by the lat. distribution of comb ornamentation on ceramics of the Volga-Ur. and farm cultures.

In the Kama region, the problem of the genesis and early N. remains debatable. O.N. Bader singled out the Kama Neolithic culture on the territory. Wed The Kama region, which has gone through two stages in its development: Borovoozersky (Borovoye Lake I) and Khutorskaya (Khutorskaya camp). A.Kh. Khalikov mem. with comb and pricked ornamentation of ceramics of the Lower and Middle. The Kama region was united into a single Volga-Kama culture. I.V. Kalinina, based on the study of ceramics, came to the conclusion that there were two independent cultures: the Volga-Kama culture with pricked ornamentation of dishes and the Kama culture with comb ornamentation. A.A. Vybornov identified three stages of development in the Kama culture, and V.P. Denisov and L.A. Nagovitsyn united the memory. Kama Neolithic with comb ornaments on ceramics - Lake Borovoe I, Khutorskaya, Kryazhskaya sites, etc. - into a single farm culture, synchronous with the Poludensky one in the Trans-Urals. The Khutorskaya site became a kind of standard for the culture of Kama N..

Fundamentals of understanding Zaur. Neolithic antiquities were laid by V.N. Chernetsov, who singled out three stages of the Eastern. culture. The development of his ideas was continued by O.N. Bader and V.F. Starkov. VT Kovaleva proposed a new concept for the Middle Zaur. N. with two bases. lines of development - autochthonous (Kozlovsko-Poludenskaya) and migratory (Koshkinsko-Boborykinskaya) with two stages of development: early - Kozlovskaya and Koshkinskaya cultures and late - Poludenskaya and Boborykinskaya. The proposed scheme is also not final. Discussions continue about the genesis, periodization of the Zaur. N. (for example, about the location of the Sosnovoostrovsky complexes).

Neolithic South. W. pl. studied for years by L.Ya. Krizhevskaya, who placed him in a large ethno-cult. South Ur.-Kazakhstan community. On memory. South Ur. N., she convincingly showed the high level of ancient mining, which stood out as an independent type of activity precisely in this era. Us. this territory, with the exception of the south. districts, continues to preserve the hunting and fishing way.

In N., the population density has increased, and spaces have been developed, especially in the north. districts of U. (Sumpanya group of memorials). Hunters and fishermen have created a kind of mat. culture, religion, art, examples of which Izv. according to archeology sources (graphic images on vessels and household items, rock paintings, etc.). The formation and development of U. culture in N. did not occur in isolation, but during fasting. contacts with us. south region There were also migrations. On Wednesday. The Trans-Urals formed an array with prickly incised ornaments on ceramics, which was part of the circle of Proto-Indo-European cultures. community. Cultures with pit-comb ornaments on ceramics had a certain impact on the N. Kama region, especially in the region of the North. U. and Prikamye. Adaptation and migration processes, interactions were a kind of mechanism for the formation and transformation of the Neolithic cultures of the region.

Lit.: Chernetsov V.N. On the question of the composition of the Ural Neolithic // History, archeology and ethnography of Central Asia. M., 1968; Bader O.N. Ural Neolith // MIA, 1970. No. 166; Starkov V.F. Mesolithic and Neolithic of the forest Trans-Urals. M., 1980; Kovaleva V.T. Neolithic of the Middle Trans-Urals. Textbook for the special course. Sverdlovsk, 1989; Neolithic monuments of the Urals. Sverdlovsk, 1991.

Kovaleva V.T.

Ural Historical Encyclopedia. — Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History and Archeology. Yekaterinburg: Academbook. Ch. ed. V. V. Alekseev. 2000 .

Paleolithic of the Urals Paleolithic of the Urals (ancient stone Age) epoch in archaeol. periodization (2.5 million - about 10 thousand years ago). P. is subdivided into early (2.5 million - about 200 thousand years ago), cf. (about 200 thousand - about 40 thousand years ago) and late, or upper (about 40 thousand - about 10 thousand years ago). On U. it is known apprx. 50 memory

The Eneolithic of the Urals The Eneolithic of the Urals is a transitional era between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. c., occupied III - possibly early. II millennium BC, coincided with the transition from the Atlantic to the Subboreal period, from the climatic optimum of the Holocene to the cool and heterogeneous in humidity, the first two phases of the Subboreal. At this time at

Stone Age Stone Age see: Paleolithic of the Urals, Mesolithic of the Urals, Neolithic of the Urals. Ural Historical Encyclopedia. — Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History and Archeology. Yekaterinburg: Academic book. Ch. ed. V. V. Alekseev. 2000.

In the Middle Volga region and in the Kama region lived tribes of the Volga-Kama culture, very close to the East Ural (or Ob-Ural). Usually both cultures are considered together, they are united in the "Ural Neolithic".

Time The Ural Neolithic lies between 4000-1800 BC. BC e. As everywhere in the forest zone, parking lots are located at the edge of water bodies, and rectangular semi-dugouts were dwellings. Vessels with a rounded or sharp bottom are decorated with a comb-striated ornament (vertical wavy stripes applied with a comb stamp); there is no pitting ornament here. Bone harpoons are frequent. The arrows are also made of bone and have a biconical shape.

in the parking lot Strelka near Nizhny Tagil in the Gorbunovsky peat bog, beautiful wood products were found, apparently common in the Urals in the Neolithic period. These are sledge runners, oars (which means there were also boats), buckets with handles in the form of bird heads, vessels, apparently ritual ones, in the form of an elk figurine, etc. The importance of finding skis should be especially emphasized: after all, they made possible hunting, which was the main occupation population in winter.

K ser. III-beginning II millennium BC. e. include the Neolithic settlements of the Northern Ob similar to the Urals. They are located in lakeside areas, usually on capes. Huge dugouts served as dwellings, sometimes up to 600 square meters. m. Chipped and polished chisels, knives, arrows, later axes are common. The main occupation was fishing. Vessels initially ovoid, later flat-bottomed. On the river Tom is known for rock paintings depicting men squatting in a dance, as well as a bear, a wolf, a crane, ducks and other animals.

Neolithic Baikal region divided into three cultures. The earliest of them is represented by cemeteries Isakov type IV - beg. III thousand BC e. Isakov burials are found in small groups of 5-6 graves. In the flint industry, large stone scrapers. Microliths were often used as spearheads. Some items are made from mammoth ivory. Jewelry was made from the bones and teeth of wild animals. The vessels are semi-ovoid. Hunting equipment is common in the graves - spears, bows, quivers, arrows, knives. Hunting for taiga animals prevailed, fishing was of some importance.

Settlements and burial grounds Serov culture belong to the III millennium BC. e. The processing of stone, bone, and the manufacture of dishes reached great perfection. Following the polishing of the stone, drilling. Products made of green jade were widely distributed. Clothing was sewn from skins; awls and needles were found in bone cases. Spears, bows, arrows and daggers are common in graves. The Serov bow is remarkable, the elasticity of which was increased by horn overlays. Such a bow sent the arrow further and with more force than a bow without lining. The economy includes hunting and fishing. Harpoons and fishhooks were also used. Bows, arrows, spears, adzes are found in female burials, as well as in male ones.

Name the third culture of the Angara (or Baikal) Neolithic was given by the Kitoi burial ground (mid III - early II thousand BC e.). The graves are enclosed with bones sprinkled with ocher. Fishing hooks are found with the buried. Fish were caught not only with hooks, there were also nets. Fishing dominates. Adzes and knives made of green jade are frequent. In the Kitoi burial grounds, for the first time, one can note the heterogeneity of burials in terms of the quantity and quality of inventory. Poor burials are usually located on the periphery of the cemetery. Jade, which is abundant in the Baikal region, was the basis of the wealth of local tribes - this stone and products from it were widely distributed as a result of the exchange.

At a time when Neolithic technology dominated in the Baikal region, some tribes had already discovered metallurgy..

Neolithic art in the Urals. Here, too, there are rock paintings, but applied with paint. Moose, birds, people, solar signs are depicted. Drawings contour, rather than silhouette ones, and they are accompanied by combinations of ornament. Flint figurines are rare here, and wooden sculpture is well known thanks to finds in peat bogs, where huge crude idols and elegant wooden vessels in the form of birds and animals were found (Shigirsky and Gorbunovsky peat bogs).

Neolithic art in Siberia: on the Middle Yenisei, Angara and Upper Lena. There, in the Late Neolithic period, stone figurines of fish and rock paintings with the same subjects were made. Some are painted, others are engraved. There are fewer compositions and figures of people here.

The Stone Age of the Urals ends neolithic - new stone age(VI-IV millennium BC). By that time, a warm and humid climate had been established in the Urals ( Atlantic). The scientists were "told" about this by the results of the analysis of the remains of plants of that era. Imagine that deciduous forests at that time grew near the city of Nizhny Tagil!

At that time, numerous peoples lived in the Urals. Archaeologists have only "touched" the history of some of them. If you "fly" in the Neolithic over the Urals, we will see how diverse the life of the Urals at this time. At the northern seas, people were then fed by hunting for marine animals. To the south, in the tundra and forest zone - hunting and fishing in different proportions. In different vegetation zones, their appearance was different. In the south of the Urals, it is in the new stone age that, along with hunting and fishing, ancient cattle breeding(not all archaeologists agree with this thesis). So, the history of animal husbandry in the Urals goes back at least seven thousand years.

It is to the Neolithic that scientists attribute the division of the previously single language that existed among various peoples in the Ural zone, a distant ancestor of the modern ones spoken by some Ural peoples - Mansi, Khanty, Komi, Udmurts, into separate related languages. Language learners - linguists- call them Finno-Ugric, and the language family to which they belong - Ural .

As in the Mesolithic, for the Neolithic period of the history of the Urals, archaeologists identify a number of cultures: Kama - for the Middle Urals, East Urals and South Urals (Chebarkul) for the Trans-Urals. It is hardly worth seeing behind these cultures only three ancient peoples. There were probably many more of them within each of the three vast areas mentioned, but these peoples were similar to each other. People, as before, settled in tribal communities

The peoples of the Kama culture of the forest Urals

The forest Urals in the new Stone Age was inhabited by settled peoples who made up the Kama culture. Their life was provided mainly by fishing and flowed in well-equipped settlements. For the arrangement of settlements, they tried to choose places where small streams flowed into larger ones. In well-built semi-dugouts, often a large family of several generations of close relatives lived. As an example of such a parking lot, we give a parking lot Khutorskaya(district of the city of Berezniki). AT log houses of that era, deepened into the ground, we will not meet any windows or doors. They will appear many centuries later. Doors were replaced by canopies made of skins, or wooden shields. But, the smoke from the open hearths went out into a light-smoke hole specially arranged in the roof, which in bad weather was also thrown over with a canopy. It should be noted that, going hunting or fishing, Neolithic people, as in the Mesolithic, lived at the stopping places in light pointed huts covered with skins or layers of birch bark.

Fish were caught in a variety of ways: nets, tops, on a bait, they hit with harpoons and arrows from boats or at specially constructed dams at the mouths of streams and rivulets. It was also prepared in the same diverse way, storing it for future use. Hunting was also of great importance. And the hunters got the game in different ways. The usual was winter hunting on skis using light sleds and drags. Depending on the type of animal, certain types of arrowheads, stone or bone, were used to hunt it.

Hunter-fishermen of the East Ural culture

The Middle Trans-Urals and the adjacent forest regions of Western Siberia in the Neolithic were inhabited by communities of hunters - fishermen of the East Ural culture, who lived, depending on the time of year, either in long-term settlements on flowing lakes rich in fish, or in seasonal hunting camps in hunting areas. The excavations of such Neolithic settlements as Poludenka I near the city of Nizhny Tagil, Kozlov Cape I near the city of Tyumen are widely known.

The houses, the remains of which were excavated here by archaeologists, can be imagined as semi-dugouts. Their construction began with the digging of a foundation pit. Then, along its edges, a log frame of the future dwelling was installed, a central pillar or pillars were dug in, on which the roof structure was attached. Roofs and walls were covered with birch bark, animal skins or bark. Sometimes the dwelling consisted not of one, but of two rooms connected by a passage. Smoke from open hearths was drawn out through a light-smoke window in the roof.

Burials of the inhabitants of the Trans-Urals of the end of the Stone Age are extremely rare. Most of them are open in caves and grottoes of the mountain-forest Middle and Southern Urals: on the river. Chusovaya (in the grotto on the Rain Stone), on the river. Yuryuzan (in the Buranovskaya cave and others), on the river. Sim (in a grotto near the Stone Ring near the village of Serpievka), as well as on one of the islands of the Argazinsky reservoir. All these burials are similar in several respects. The vast majority of the buried were placed in the grave in an extended position, on their backs. The clothes of the buried were adorned with polished stone pendants made of soft rocks with holes for attaching to clothes, as well as beads made from shells of river mollusks. Sometimes traces of red ocher sprinkling are visible in the graves. The well-known Ural archaeologist Yu.B. Serikov believes that shamans are buried in these burials. Why? Archaeologists unanimously believe that among the forest peoples of the Urals in the Stone Age, a burial rite dominated, which did not involve the burial of the body of the deceased to the earth. And only outstanding people, as shamans were considered, were buried in the ground. And the decorations of clothes from these burials are very similar to those of the shamans of later times.

The appearance of domestic animals in the steppes

Significant changes took place in the life of the inhabitants of the steppes and forest-steppes of the Southern Urals (South Ural (Chebarkul) culture) during the Neolithic period. The fact is that in the excavations of the local Stone Age sites, archaeologists found bones of ... domestic animals. This means that for the first time in the history of the Southern Urals, we can talk about the penetration of domestic animals here and the skills of caring for them. Since the Neolithic in the Urals, as, indeed, in a number of other regions of Eurasia, the history of coexistence and confrontation of two directions in the development of ancient societies begins. Hunter-fisher-gatherers were compelled by nature to live in harmony with her, not taking too much from her, so as not to perish in the future themselves. Cattle breeders, on the contrary, gradually, not in the Neolithic, but later, will begin to exterminate nature, nullifying the steppe vegetation by immoderate grazing of overgrown herds . It should be noted that only horses were found in the wild in the steppes in the Ural region. The ancestral home of all the rest, according to experts, is located far to the south - in Transcaucasia, in Asia Minor, and they ended up in the south of the Urals as a result of a multi-stage exchange. Not everything is still clear to scientists in the problem of ancient animal husbandry. But we'll get back to thinking about it. But everything related to the most ancient animal husbandry applies only to the inhabitants of the steppes and, only in part, the forest-steppes of the Southern Urals. For other peoples, life was built as before, on the basis of hunting, fishing and gathering, as was the case with their predecessors. Widely known are excavations of Neolithic sites and stone processing workshops in the Bashkir Trans-Urals (Sabakty III site), on lakes near the Ilmen Mountains (Latochka site) and even on the shores of high-mountain lakes such as Zyuratkul (Stone Cape site). Some scholars argue that the inhabitants of the Southern Urals already in the Neolithic ... exchanged stone raw materials for the items they needed from their neighbors, and mining was one of the main economic activities. This opinion is confirmed by the finds of objects from the South Ural jasper at Neolithic sites located hundreds of kilometers to the north and east of the deposits. But with their neighbors in the Southern Urals (the territory of modern Bashkiria), they did not maintain such ties. The Ural Mountains at that time here, apparently, were still a serious obstacle to the relationship of peoples living on opposite sides of the mountain ranges.

Sites of the Neolithic period in the Southern Trans-Urals

In the new Stone Age (Neolithic) (VI-IV millennium BC) and in the Copper-Stone Age (Eneolithic) (III millennium BC), the banks of the rivers and lakes of the Southern Urals were already firmly settled groups of hunters and fishermen. Their numerous sites have already been partly explored. So it was found out that near the modern village of Streletskoye in the Troitsky district in the Copper-Stone Age, people mined raw materials for the manufacture of stone tools from surface outcrops, and in the Putilovskaya Zaimka tract (between the villages of Streletskoye and Stepnoe), people lived in both the new stone and copper -stone ages. Thousands of various stone tools, hundreds of fragments of ceramic vessels, the remains of copper-smelting products are now carefully studied by archaeologist Vadim Sergeevich Mosin.

Ancient Ural potters

It was in the Neolithic that our distant predecessors made a very important discovery. About 7 thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the Urals, like most other peoples of Eurasia, for the first time began to use pottery baked on fire, that is, ceramics, in everyday life. Many millennia before that, in order to warm or boil water, stones were heated on a fire and then lowered into a leather bucket of water. The invention of ceramics multiplied the possibilities of ancient culinary specialists and had a beneficial effect on the health of our distant predecessors. Cooked food is better absorbed by the human body. The invention of ceramics deserves attention also because this is one of the first artificial materials on the planet created by man. The oldest clay vessels were made from clay with certain properties, or more precisely, from specially prepared clay dough. To do this, certain impurities were added to the main raw material - clay - sand, crushed pebbles, crushed pieces of the walls of old vessels, finely worn talc, pieces of shell valves of river mollusks, but first of all - bird droppings. This was done in order to obtain dishes with predetermined properties. The peculiarity of ancient pottery is that pottery knowledge was not transmitted in writing, and potters did not hear about physics, chemistry and other necessary sciences. They just experimented a lot with clay and the results of the experiments were passed down from generation to generation. Scientists believe that pottery was women's business and teaching his skills is part of raising girls.

Why do scientists need fragments of ancient pottery?

Ancient pottery is very important for archaeologists for another reason. The fact is that each of the ancient peoples had their own ideas about how to prepare clay dough, what impurities and in what quantity to add, how to sculpt vessels and decorate them, how to burn them. Therefore, for an archaeologist, fragments of ancient ceramics are a welcome find. After all, they allow you to determine what kind of people lived here and when.

It is assumed that the earliest potters used plaits or ribbons made of clay. At first, the end of the tourniquet was folded into a spiral - a "button". Then, with the same tourniquet in a spiral, the potter brought out the walls of the future vessel to the top. At the same time, the spirals of the bundle tightly stuck together with each other. The bundles could be fastened to each other in other ways. The walls of the vessels were smoothed and rubbed with special tools. Then the vessel was decorated with special tools. The vessels were thoroughly dried and then fired. Archaeologists believe that the firing was then carried out on an open fire. First, the vessels were placed along the edges of the fire pit, then gradually moved closer and closer to the fire, in order to finally find themselves among the burning coals for several hours. The most ancient vessels of the Ural peoples, made in the described way, resembled a huge egg, which has a neatly cut blunt end, with a rounded or sharp bottom. They varied in size. In everyday life, such vessels were placed in holes dug in the ground or on circular arrangements of stones. For people of the end of the Stone Age, hunters or fishermen who often changed their campsite, this was convenient. Only in the Trans-Urals, among people who came there from the south, from the steppes of Kazakhstan or the Caspian region, who belonged to the Babarykin culture, already in the Neolithic ceramic vessels had a flat bottom.

The magical power of the ornament

Already in the Neolithic, the ceramics of the population of different regions of the Urals differed primarily in ornamentation and the method of its application. Thus, the oldest clay vessels in the Middle Kama region were ornamented with comb stamps and special rods, which were used to make rows of recesses in the walls; in the Middle and Southern Trans-Urals, vessels in the Neolithic were ornamented by drawing the end of a stick.

It should be noted that the ancient pottery in itself was not just the manufacture of vessels. This was magic in itself, since soft clay, under the influence of fire, became hard, like a stone, and the creators of the vessels could only explain this with the participation of spirits or deities. And the drawings on Neolithic ceramics are not so much decoration as magic, protecting the contents of the vessel from the machinations of evil forces.

What are the rock “piranitsy” silent about?

Not only ceramics and its ornaments tell us about the rich spiritual world of the Neolithic Urals. As the treasures of the ancient Ural cultures, you need to understand the rock paintings - "scribes" in the shrines of that time. By the Neolithic, the tradition to use caves as sanctuaries almost completely disappears, in any case, to perform rituals in them that involve drawing drawings. Sanctuaries have moved to the banks of rivers and lakes, where half-washed drawings of that time are still visible on flat sections of rocks. They, as before, were made with ocher. But the content of the drawings has changed compared to more ancient times. On the inscriptions of the Middle Urals, the drawings of animals and, above all, the elk, the largest inhabitant of the forests and the desired prey, come to the fore. But the elk and other animals depicted on the rocks of the sanctuaries, apparently, were drawn not just as hunting prey. The people of the forest then did not separate themselves from the nature of which they were a part. Moreover, they considered certain animals to be their progenitors - totems and organized festivals in their honour. Scientists claim that the ancient hunters of Siberia considered the elk to be the embodiment of the Sun on Earth, and the Sun is both warmth and fertility and light. But, these are only assumptions that are very difficult to both verify and disprove. The South Urals of the Stone Age preferred to draw images of roe deer and, especially, people in various poses on the rocks of their sanctuaries. Dozens of sanctuaries with rock paintings. Some of them acted intermittently for several thousand years, starting from the Middle or New Stone Age. Let us cite for example the famous Written Stone on the Vishera River, the Irbitsky Written Stone, the Zmiev Stone on the Tagil River.

You, of course, are tormented by the question: "How can you talk about the time the drawing was created if there is no date written by the artist next to it?" Archaeologists use different methods of establishing the time of drawing drawings, of which the most common is the method of dating drawings on ancient things found in an excavation under a rock with drawings. Let's visit one of the ancient Ural sanctuaries. You already know that in ancient times people believed that all living things and objects that can be touched have a "soul". You can't see her. After the death of a person, his soul moves into another, not yet born person. It was believed that for some time the soul was free from the body. Our distant predecessors believed that during this period of time the soul should have a haven. They made it in the form of a bird from various materials (leather, wood), and later, with the advent of metals, from copper. The image of this bird for some time was kept in a special place - in the sanctuary. One of these sanctuaries was found at the beginning of our century on Lake Bolshiye Allaki, in the north of the Chelyabinsk region. Later it turned out that there were several such sanctuaries on this lake. locals These places are called Stone Tents. Over the millennia, winds and rains have given these granite rocks a fantastic look. As if the ancient wizards worked here for a long, long time. Seven - five thousand years ago, drawings first appeared on the surface of these rocks. They were made with natural paint - ocher. The images are varied. Scientists were surprised by one of the groups of drawings. Under the rocky "visor" was a line of dancing men in strange headdresses, equipped with antennae, as it were, outgrowths. But most likely these are schematically depicted horns of animals - the patrons of this community. Similar headdresses (often shamanic) were also supplied with masks by other ancient peoples of Siberia. Scientists believe that here, in the ancient sanctuary near Lake Bolshie Allaki, shaman-priests portrayed their ancestors, powerful shamans, who, together with their descendants, seemed to be dancing a magical dance, helping them to achieve prosperity in business, to protect themselves from the machinations of evil spirits. Near the rocks of the sanctuary at the beginning of this century, the already mentioned "idol" was found in the form of an image of a bird made of copper - the receptacle of someone's soul. At the rocks of the sanctuary, archaeologists laid an excavation and removed stone knives, stone and bronze arrowheads from it. Judging by them, the sanctuary operated intermittently for several millennia. By the way, excavations under the rock with drawings gave another unexpected result. Most of the arrowheads had characteristic damage to the point, leaving no doubt that they shot at the rock with drawings from the side of the lake. Remember the Perforated Stone on Chusovaya. The rite is the same and this coincidence, of course, cannot be called an accident.

For a long time, shaman tambourines have not sounded near the rocks on the Big Allaks. The long-distant descendants of the creators of this and dozens of similar sanctuaries live thousands of kilometers from the sanctuary in the Big Allaks. But the drawings on the ancient rocks still tell us about the unknown and mysterious life thousands of years before our days.

Archaeologists also judge the spiritual world of the Urals at the end of the Stone Age by the sculptures of animals made of stone. An interesting discovery archaeologist Yu.B. Serikov are miniature sculptures from the sites of the Middle Trans-Urals, which he attributed to the end of the Stone Age, made on ... flint flakes, worked out by retouching. They often depict the heads of animals (moose, bears, beavers), birds and people.

Some conclusions on the section:

· The Neolithic period of the ancient history of the Urals basically coincides with the Atlantic period of climatic history.

· The Urals in the Neolithic was inhabited by the carriers of several archaeological cultures, which were part of two cultural communities. This was facilitated by the proximity of languages ​​(the formation of the Finno-Ugric linguistic community), living in conditions of similar landscapes, the autochthonous nature of the vast majority of Neolithic cultures, excluding the Boborykin culture in the Trans-Urals; the existence of a way of life that took shape in the Mesolithic.

New features in the life of the Neolithic Urals are associated with the appearance of ancient ceramics in their lives, with changes in the technology of making stone tools (changes in the parameters of blades - blanks for making tools, gradual replacement of lamellar oridia with tools on flakes; the spread of double-sided retouched and polished tools).

· The Urals in the Neolithic continued to be a region dominated by a complex appropriating economy. The appearance of traces of ancient cattle breeding on the southern borders of the region has not yet been fully documented.

· The Neolithic monuments of the Urals contain more information, in comparison with the Mesolithic, about the spiritual world of the ancient inhabitants of the Urals. These are the oldest burials in the Urals, interpreted as shamanic, and various types of sanctuaries (paintings, the drawings of which testify to the existence of cults of game animals), the magical content of ornaments on ceramics and bone products, and flint sculpture.

Ural in the Eneolithic

Mines of an ancient monster

The life of the majority of the Neolithic Urals - the life of hunters - fishermen, was further development traditions laid down in the preceding Mesolithic era. However, at the turn of IV-III millennium BC. signs of a new era appear in the south of the Urals, which scientists call copper-stone age - eneolithic, that is, the time when for the first time in its history the skills of extracting copper ores, obtaining metal and making various objects from it penetrate into the Ural region. You probably already know that 300 years ago iron, cast iron, copper, smelted from Ural ores at Ural factories, for the first time helped the Russian army become invincible. Since then, almost any Uralian knows about the Demidovs - a whole dynasty of breeders. But few people know that Russian breeders inherited from the ancient inhabitants of the Urals ... ore deposits. Almost all factories of that time worked on ore from deposits discovered by "wonderful mines"- traces of ancient mining. Russian miners marked them all over the Urals. Here is what the talented traveler I.P. Falk wrote about 230 years ago about ancient mining in the Orenburg region: “The entire hilly country between the Kargaly streams ... is full of collapsed mines of ancient Chud and abandoned mining, which consisted for the most part or in. .. pits ... or in decent mountain mines, with adits, drifts." Modern scientists believe that ancient miners mined at least a million tons of copper ore here. 16O years ago, the historian P.A. Slovtsov wrote about the traces of ancient mining operations in the north of the modern Chelyabinsk and south of the Sverdlovsk regions, according to scientists-travelers: "At the opening of the Gumeshevsky mine (near the modern city of Polevskoy). and recesses, and in them a half-burnt torch stuck into the wall, a mitten and a bag made of elk skin, pickles, a hammer, and the like, made of copper.In 1770 ... a round hat with a sable band was found in the same mine ... At the junction of the Bagaryk and Sinara rivers, ancient mines were noticed on the left bank of the latter. Some of these copper deposits were developed only in antiquity. Archaeologists are still finding careers left over from them. One of these quarries was recently studied by scientists near the village of Zingeisky in the Kizilsky district of the Chelyabinsk region. In 2012, a quarry for the extraction of copper-bearing minerals was opened near the village. Katenino on the river. Karataly-Ayat. A whole “necklace” of ancient copper deposits was discovered in the 20th century in Eastern Bashkiria: Nikolskoye, Tash-Kazgan, Bakr-Uzyak, etc. In the Orenburg region, this is the Ishkininsky mine, ancient mines in the Yelenovsky district, on the river. Ushkatta. Dozens of copper mines of the ancient inhabitants of the Southern Urals were discovered in Mugodzhary. Archaeologists have already begun their systematic study. Even more ancient mines have been destroyed by later miners in the last 300 years. Ancient miners and metallurgists of the Middle Trans-Urals, the Southern Urals received copper from minerals containing this metal - pale green malachite and bright blue azurite. The oldest metallurgists of the Middle Urals are from the so-called cuprous sandstones of the Upper and Middle Kama regions.

The pioneers of metallurgy

If you think that these minerals are everywhere, you are wrong. The ancient peoples neighboring the Urals did not have their own metal. So the Ural Mountains have become truly a pantry full of treasures for the ancient Urals. The "malachite-azurite belt" of deposits stretching along the eastern spurs of the South Ural mountains was noticed by people more than 5,000 years ago and had a great influence on their lives. Here it must be said that this discovery was not made by local hunters and fishermen. The fact is that at the time described, in the steppes of Eurasia from the Dnieper to Southern Siberia, a warm and humid climate favorable for cattle breeding was established. The valleys of the steppe rivers of the Orenburg region and the foothills of the Ural Mountains with numerous rivers and streams became the homeland of the tribes of the most ancient pastoralists who advanced here from the Volga region, who, unlike the local South Ural tribes, already lived in the Bronze Age, led a mobile (nomadic?) lifestyle, moving with herds from pasture to pasture along a route strictly defined for each tribal community throughout the year. They only waited out the winter time at seasonal winter settlements. Archaeologists call them, for the way the dead tribesmen are buried in soil pits, ancient pit tribes. The people of the ancient pit culture of the Volga-Ural region were anthropologically similar to modern Europeans and, unlike other Uralic peoples, according to scientists, they spoke a language that belonged to the so-called Indo-European language family. The ancient pit tribes preferred to breed small cattle and horses, which are more suitable for moving from pasture to pasture, and, moreover, are able to forage themselves in winter, shoveling snow down to last year's grass. The most ancient pastoralists of the Orenburg region were the first in the Ural region to build sod-earth tomb structures - barrows. And the oldest wagons in the Ural region appeared with them. Archaeologists have studied quite a lot of ancient pit burial grounds in the Orenburg region (Boldyrevsky, Tamar-Utkul, Gerasimovka, Uvak and others) and, observing and comparing the size of the mounds, the appearance and degree of "wealth" of the things that accompanied the buried, concluded that the society of the most ancient pastoralists had already knew inequality. This is not surprising. The struggle for pastures in an unstable climate with its periodic droughts and other problems inevitably led to the formation of large military-political alliances, which alone could defend the rights and protect individual pastoral families and clans from enemies. Perhaps one of the leaders of the ancient pit tribes owned a stone hammer with a sculpted image of a horse's head, accidentally found in the Orenburg region. The very mobile nature of their life assumed frequent contacts with neighbors and, as a result, the exchange of various cultural achievements and technical discoveries.

Archaeologists are convinced that the ancient pit tribes borrowed the knowledge of metallurgy and copper metalworking from the population of the Caucasus region. Why exactly among the Caucasian tribes? The fact is that the metal products of the ancient pit pastoralists of the Southern Cis-Urals are the same as in the Caucasus, but they appeared there earlier.

Some part of yesterday's nomads "settled" on the ground in the foothills of the Southern Urals. Now this place is located 50 km north of Orenburg, along the river Kargaly. Here are located gigantic in area (500 sq. km) ancient developments of copper ores (mines and quarries), which were intermittently developed from the Copper-Stone Age to the 19th century. The ancient pit metallurgists and blacksmiths were so skilled that they could make objects in which one part was copper and the other meteoric iron. The well-known scientist - archeologist and historian of metallurgy - E.N.

It is interesting that to the east of the territory occupied by ancient pit herders, in Northern Kazakhstan lived actually back in the stone age the descendants of the local population are the bearers of aboriginal Tersek, Surtandin and Botai archaeological cultures. It would seem that they, with such neighbors as the Yamnaya tribes, should also have well-developed copper metallurgy. However, copper objects and traces of copper smelting are practically not known at their settlements. Archaeologists think that these peoples who lived here before, who spoke the Ugric languages, and the newcomers - the ancient pit tribes, became irreconcilable enemies and practically did not communicate.

Neighbors of the ancient pit tribes

To the north of the ancient pit pastoralists, the entire Urals was occupied for the most part by hunting and fishing peoples - descendants of local Neolithic predecessors. Scientists identify in the forest-steppes and forests of the Urals quite a lot of small-sized cultures attributed to the Copper-Stone Age (Surtandinskaya in the Southern Trans-Urals, Agidelskaya in the Southern Urals, Garinskaya and Novoilinskaya in the forest Kama region, Lipchinskaya in the Middle Trans-Urals and others). The way of life here is not very different from the previous period. The population of the Agidel and Surtandin cultures of the Southern Urals, along with hunting, was also engaged in cattle breeding. You ask, how do scientists distinguish the Eneolithic settlements and burial grounds from the Neolithic ones? The fact is that by the time of the Eneolithic, certain changes had taken place in pottery (in the form and ornamentation of vessels), in the methods of making stone tools and their types. Yes, and changes are also visible in the structure of settlements. In addition, there is a special method for comparing the time of existence of several archaeological cultures. It is called stratigraphic. Its essence lies in the fact that layers with finds of a later time in settlements are usually located above the older ones. Rare burial monuments of the Eneolithic cultures of the Urals are known on the territory of modern Bashkiria (Kara-Yakupovsky burial ground on the Dema River, Mullino burial ground on the Ik River and some others). Reflecting on their materials, archaeologists argue about the connections of the Eneolithic population of Bashkiria with more western territories, primarily with the Volga region.

From the south, from the steppes, from areas inhabited by pit tribes, metal penetrated to the population of the southern part of the Ural forests in the Copper-Stone Age only in the form of individual products as a result of the exchange. into new ones). With the appearance in the steppes of the Southern Urals of numerous, well-organized, mobile pastoral tribes, the population of the forest-steppes and the southern part of the forests of the Urals then, for millennia, constantly experienced their pressure and influence.

Some summary of the section:

· In the Eneolithic period, the population of the Urals entered approximately at the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. It ended in the steppe zone of the Urals in different times: in the Orenburg region, in connection with the migration of pit pastoral tribes from the Volga region, around the 25th century. BC.; in the South Ural steppes - about the 20th century. BC. In the forest belt, the transition to the Bronze Age occurred even later - in the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BC.

· The second important conclusion can be that in the Eneolithic era, without exception, all the archaeological cultures of the Urals and Northern Kazakhstan continued to build their lives on the basis of a complex appropriating economy, in which hunting and fishing were combined in different proportions for different cultures.

· Important changes occurred at this time in the technique of stone processing. With varying degrees of speed in different regions of the Urals, the lamellar industry was replaced by the flake industry, when most tools were made on flakes - flattened pieces of ornamental rocks of the required size. Two-sided retouching, polished woodworking tools, tools on slate tiles are widely used.

· Ceramic production has undergone, in comparison with the Neolithic of the Urals, certain changes. In most of the Ural region, round-bottomed or sharp-bottomed earthenware, decorated with impressions of comb stamps, is widespread.

In the area along the eastern slopes of the Urals and in the steppes of Kazakhstan during this period, a community of related cultures was formed, which received various names (trans-Ural - North-Kazakhstan or the community of cultures of "geometric ceramics") but united both by a similar set of types of stone tools, and, which is especially important, a very similar appearance of ceramic dishes.

· Scientists believe that the area between the Aral-Caspian and the Trans-Urals in the III millennium BC. was occupied by the population who spoke dialects of the Finno-Ugric parent language. Moreover, linguists believe that it was in the Eneolithic that the collapse of the Finno-Ugric proto-language into the Finnish and Ugric branches took place.

· important event, which occurred in the Eneolithic era can be considered the first direct contact of the Ural Prafin-Ugric peoples with the Indo-European population in the person of the bearers of the most ancient cattle-breeding ancient pit culture in the Ural zone, with which not only cattle breeding skills, but also metallurgical knowledge were brought to the Urals, the development of the oldest copper deposits began , first of all, Kargalinsky in the Orenburg region, Tash-Kazgan and Bakr-Uzyak in the Southern Trans-Urals. It should be noted that the Proto-Finno-Ugric peoples of the Urals, who lived simultaneously in the Eneolithic, and the Yamnaya tribes of the Orenburg region, who had already entered the Bronze Age, began to communicate with each other about metal during this period. Local Eneolithic cultures most likely played in this communication the role of a metal-consuming periphery, in comparison with the metal-producing pit Orenburg region.

Ural in the Bronze Age

From the first centuries of the III millennium BC. and until the 7th century BC. the ancient peoples of the Urals lived in bronze age, that is, for more than a thousand years, the main material for the manufacture of tools and weapons was an alloy of copper with other metals, mainly with tin, called bronze.

The Bronze Age in different parts of the Urals came at different times. In the Orenburg steppes (ancient pit culture) - from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. In the Southern Trans-Urals - only from the end of the 3rd millennium BC; in the forest belt of the Urals - in the first centuries of the II millennium BC.

Nature and life of people in the Urals in the Bronze Age

The life of people in the Bronze Age, as before, strongly depended on natural and climatic conditions and their changes. The data of various sciences for the steppes of Northern Kazakhstan and the Southern Trans-Urals indicate that in the second half of the 3rd - in the 2nd millennium BC. the climate has changed several times. The last centuries of the 3rd and, especially, the turn of the 3rd–2nd millennium BC. were marked by severe drought, which caused long-distance and massive migrations of destitute pastoral tribes. An optimally humid and warm climate was established only about 3600 years ago. For several centuries, tribes of pastoralists-shepherds flourished along the banks of the rivers of the steppes of the Southern Trans-Urals. Alakul culture. The watersheds between the river valleys were covered with lush grasses. But, in the middle of the II millennium BC. in the steppes of Kazakhstan, a long-term drought broke out again and from the disaster area in all directions, including the southern Trans-Urals, crowds of tribes rapidly losing livestock again poured. Later, a strong drop in the level of groundwater was recorded by archaeologists in the sites of the Southern Trans-Urals in the last centuries of the 2nd - early 1st millennium BC. (according to the height of the sites of settlements of that time relative to the current water level in the rivers). They are so low that now it is impossible to dig them out, because water will pour into the excavation. In the first half of the 1st millennium BC. gradually became damp again. By the last centuries of the 1st millennium BC. a dry climate re-established. Of course, what has been said cannot be applied to the inhabitants of the mountain valleys and even the foothills of the Urals with their numerous microclimates. But when scientists explain the reasons for the movements of the forest peoples of the river basin. Ob at the end of the Bronze Age, one of them is called a significant humidification of the climate, which drove the inhabitants of the taiga open spaces to the south of the Urals.

The peoples of the Urals in the Bronze Age, depending on the natural environment, led completely different image life. In the remote taiga regions, as in past eras, hunters-fishermen lived. In the south of the forest zone of the Urals, the economy of the population combined both hunting, fishing, and cattle breeding, which had penetrated here by that time from the steppes. The steppe tribes of the Southern Urals during almost the entire period of this period were engaged exclusively in cattle breeding. Only at the end of the Bronze Age did traces of agriculture appear on the settlements of the South Urals.

The Urals of the Bronze Age for the first time thoroughly disturbed the deposits of metal ores. In the Bronze Age alone, from 1 million to 3 million tons of copper ore were mined at the previously mentioned Kargaly mines in the Orenburg region! Smelted about 200,000 tons of copper. This required a special organization of societies engaged in metallurgy and metalworking. But more on that later.

New peoples come to the Urals

The Bronze Age is the first epoch in the history of the Urals when archaeologists can confidently talk about the migration of large groups of newcomers here from different regions. Moreover, traces of migrations were noted not only in the steppe regions of the Urals, but also in forest regions.

For most of the steppes and forest-steppes of the Southern Trans-Urals and Northern Kazakhstan, the Bronze Age is history. large group tribes named by archaeologists Andronov. The history of the Andronovo tribes includes the tribes of the Alakul, Fedorov and Alekseev archaeological cultures who lived relatively successively in time. Their appearance was preceded by a brief but very vivid history of a relatively small group of people who moved here from the steppes between the Volga and the Urals. Archaeologists have called the remains of their life "monuments of the Sintashta type."

Mysterious settlements

Since the 1980s of the twentieth century, archaeologists have been studying ancient settlements fortified with ditches and defensive walls in the steppes of the Southern Urals. They are attributed to the time of the Bronze Age between 4100-3800 years from our days. The excavations of a settlement and a burial ground on the Sintashta River in the south of the Chelyabinsk Region gained particular fame at that time. The archaeologists were helped a lot ... by experts in deciphering pictures taken from an airplane. And geologists have similar pictures for all regions of the Southern Urals. It was their instruments that made it possible for the first time in our century to see a country that seemed to be forever lost in centuries, the population of which had a strange habit of living exclusively behind defensive walls. To date, 23 such settlements are known. They are located in a strip from north to south along the eastern foothills of the Southern Urals: from the Ui River to the north of the Orenburg region. One of them - Arkaim, has gained worldwide fame.

These people came from the west to the Southern Trans-Urals at the turn of the III-II millennium BC. in. We will never know what they called themselves. Scientists gave these remnants of ancient cultures a code name - "Sintashta monuments" - according to the first Sintashta settlement and burial ground discovered in our steppes, which is in the modern Bredinsky district, on the banks of the river. Syntasts. The name of the river, by the way, is translated from Kazakh as “Mogilnaya”.

The Sintashta people brought to the Southern Trans-Urals a new way of life, fundamentally different from the one that existed here: the skills of developed pastoral cattle breeding, the construction of complex wooden and earthen fortified settlements, a new procedure for arranging family cemeteries (burial grounds), and most importantly, a new level of metallurgical knowledge and metal production in general . The fortified settlement of this time is known to archaeologists near the village. Chernorechye in the Troitsky district, at the confluence with the river. wow r. Black. The site, bounded by defensive walls and ditches, is rectangular in plan. Along the inner edge of the defensive walls there are "arrays" of rooms separated by backfill walls. Ancient builders, in order to strengthen the defense system, cut the edge of the settlement site facing the Chernaya River, making it steeper. Nearby there was enough space for arranging a cemetery, but the inhabitants of Chernorechensky preferred to establish it ... on the opposite bank of the Chernaya River, which, you see, is more inconvenient and laborious when it comes to organizing burials, funeral rites, etc. Scientists see in this fact a reflection of beliefs, according to which this and the other worlds should be separated by a water barrier, as later among the ancient Greeks or Romans.

Archaeologists of the Chelyabinsk State Pedagogical Institute in the 1980s studied in this burial ground, conditionally named after the nearby oxbow river. Chernoy "Crooked Lake", four mounds, and under them more than 50 Sintashta burials and graves of a slightly later and associated with the "Sintashta" "Alakul" culture. The excavations of the burial ground yielded shocking results for archaeologists. The remains of several chariots placed in wooden, sometimes two-story, tombs, 11 horn cheek pieces - cheekpieces - details of the bridle of chariot horses, bronze daggers, a spearhead, various decorations, about 200 ceramic vessels - all these remnants of a life that disappeared long ago began to be actively studied by scientists of various specialties : archaeologists, archeozoologists, anthropologists, historians of metallurgy and many others. The results of the study are presented in a voluminous book published in 2003 and now known to specialists in various countries of the world - from Finland to the USA. So, the "Trinity" chariots of the Bronze Age are now known far beyond the borders of Russia.

Riddles of a circle and a rectangle

Even the first excavations revealed that most of the Sintashta settlements were settled and rebuilt at least twice. Often, after the destruction of the Sintashta settlements, similar ones were built in their place. The objects left in them convinced scientists that the rectangular settlements had already been built by the Alakul people.

Sintashta and Alakul are considered ancestors and descendants. There are many common features in the arrangement of their settlements. Each of them was built according to a predetermined plan. A variety of building materials were used: wood, stone, clay, earth. In the ditches of these settlements there were passages to the gates. The walls themselves were arranged in different ways. Wooden or adobe structures were used as their frame. Then these frames were covered with earth. Houses were built along the walls from the inside. It is more fair to call them rooms, because they did not stand apart from each other. They were separated by filling walls, and connected by passages in these walls. The premises were covered with a common roof. If the fortifications of the settlement outlined a rounded area in terms of plan, then the premises were built trapezoidal. They were also located in a circle along the wall or in two circles with an unbuilt area in the center. If the fortifications limited a rectangular area, then two rows rectangular rooms were attached from the inside along the long walls. Between them was the main street. If the rows of rooms were oriented along short walls, then there were several streets. For the construction of each of these premises, a shallow pit was torn off. Along its edges, vertical posts were dug in, which held the horizontal logs of the walls. From the premises it was possible to go out to the inner street. The exits had no steps and looked like not steep climbs. The floors were made of wood, the walls in the residential part, perhaps, were plastered. The roof over these rooms, most likely, was flat, with an inclination towards the interior of the settlement. It is hardly possible to imagine a room without light windows in the roof, light partitions dividing the room into compartments. It is assumed that a large family of several generations of close relatives lived in each room. According to preliminary estimates, several hundred people lived in such settlements.

Why do archaeologists believe that these settlements were built according to a preliminary plan? Here are some of the evidence. The dimensions of the premises within the same settlement are almost the same. The wells that were in each room are each in a strictly marked place, and if you stand in front of one of them, all the wells will be on the same line. This is possible only if the line of wells was marked out before the construction of the walls.

For various reasons and at different times, these fortified settlements were abandoned by people. Arkaim, for example, fell into disrepair shortly after construction.

Signs of ancient witchcraft

On other settlements that existed longer, there were traces ordinary life. The people who lived here at that time were engaged in cattle breeding. Their herds included large and small cattle, horses. Thousands of pet bones confirm this. Fragments of ceramics, bone and stone products tell about the life that was common for the steppe peoples of that time. But until now, the spirit of witchcraft hovers over the ruins of these settlements. Digging up the Ustye settlement, similar to Arkaim, scientists came across strange accumulations of bones of domestic animals. Imagine 12 skulls of cows, horses and sheep, laid under the floor in a deep hole in a circle. The inner space of the circle was filled with densely packed leg bones of the same animals. Of course, we have before us an altar, the remains of a ritual meal of the inhabitants of the settlement, and the bones belonged to sacrificial animals. According to ancient beliefs, the gods also invisibly participated in this meal. Similar altars are numerous and have a different appearance. This may be a dog buried in front of the entrance to the premises. Inside the premises, near the entrances, under the floors, burials of children were found. These are also the remains of rites, during which certain children, under certain conditions, were to be buried here.

Settlements of metallurgists

One circumstance surprised archaeologists while studying the mysterious fortified settlements: a huge number of finds related to metallurgy and bronze processing: pieces of malachite and azurite, metallurgical slags, metal ingots, blanks and various ready-made tools: fragments of ore grinders, stone pestles and hammers different sizes, ceramic lyachki and other items. In all the rooms next to the wells, they constantly found rounded calculations of calcined stones. Sometimes a groove went from them to the wells. It turned out that these were the remains of furnaces, where they not only cooked food, but also smelted metal. In this case, the furnace was loaded with charcoal. An ingot or a portion of ore ready for melting was also placed there. To achieve the required temperature, air was blown into the furnace using a special fur, connected to the furnace with a clay or wooden tube - a nozzle. Air could also enter the furnace from the well. Yes, from the well! Archaeologists and historians of metallurgy have found that, under certain conditions, this was possible due to the difference in temperature at the surface of the water in the well and above.

So, in each room - a metallurgical furnace. Ancient craftsmen knew how to forge bronze objects, cast them in stone or ceramic molds, and weld them. In the cemeteries excavated near these settlements, individual burials of metallurgists were found. Ancient mines have also been found in the vicinity of these settlements. Geologists compared the ore extracted from them with samples of ore from the settlements. In composition, they were very close.

So already about 4,000 years ago on Southern Urals there lived peoples, one of the main occupations of which, in addition to cattle breeding, was metallurgy and bronze processing. The oldest of them, the Sintashta people, still continue to amaze archaeologists. Remember, we have already said that any ancient people had their own "face" (in a certain way they equipped housing and graves, used clay vessels of the same shape and ornament, and so on)? The Sintashta people, the inhabitants of the fortified settlements, seem to have decided to laugh at the archaeologists! The ornaments of their pottery intertwined features of several peoples. Some scholars explain this by the fact that the described settlements were left by peoples with different ceramics who moved from west to east at that time. But there is another assumption. The fact is that the ancient metallurgists and blacksmiths passed on the secrets of their craft by inheritance, from generation to generation. Scientists who studied how blacksmiths live and work among peoples whose way of life until recently was close to the ancient one found that blacksmiths even preferred to take wives from the families of blacksmiths of neighboring peoples so that the secrets of the craft would not become known to the uninitiated. Having moved to live in her husband's settlement, the wife continued to make pottery, as was customary among the women of her people.

Perhaps this explains the variety of ornaments on dishes from mysterious settlements?

Craft and magic

Do you know the difference between craft and magic? Let's think together. Of course, magic implies the power of a sorcerer over someone or something, involves communication with spirits, gods. It was magic that ancient metallurgy and metalworking were in the eyes of contemporaries. Indeed, how calm can one be about the transformation of a green stone into a molten "sun" and then into golden bronze! Of course, this is sheer magic, sorcery. This is how the blacksmiths-casters were perceived by the peoples who until relatively recently lived a life similar to the life of ancient people. Ancient metallurgists considered metal to be a "child", born from the marriage of a metallurgical furnace with air, which was forced into it with the help of bellows. Tools, especially casting molds and nozzles (clay or wooden pipes that connected furs with a furnace), were also considered magical and, of course, living, equal participants in witchcraft. Excavating fortified settlements of the early Bronze Age in the Southern Trans-Urals, archaeologists never cease to be surprised that among the numerous traces of work with ore and metal, there are almost no casting molds and nozzles. According to excavations in other places, it is known that ancient masters buried broken molds and other accessories of metallurgy like people. Finds of similar "treasures", consisting of fragments of casting molds of the Bronze Age, are known on one of the lakes within the city of Chelyabinsk. Scientists believe that already in this era, craftsmen could create various types of bronze: one composition for making weapons, the other for jewelry. What are these "savages"! This is now at our disposal and books and instruments. The knowledge of the ancient predecessors was acquired in the course of numerous experiments, turning into a ritual. Even then the fiery craft was impossible without weights and measures, without knowledge of proportions. This was reflected not only in appearance objects of that time, but also in the correctness of the outlines of the settlements in general, the severity of internal development. Of course, defensive fortifications were primarily used to protect settlements from enemies. But they also had another purpose: to play the role of a kind of magical feature, a boundary that separated the world of sorcerers-metallurgists from ordinary people who looked at them with fear and worship.

South Ural masters of the Bronze Age not only made bronze objects, but also participated in expeditions to neighboring and very distant peoples. How do we know about this? The fact is that they left the graves of their relatives far from their native places, in foreign cemeteries from Western Siberia to the Don region. Why should these graves be considered the graves of the South Urals? Each people buried their dead relatives in their own way, and archaeologists, seeing their almost complete resemblance to the South Urals, decided that these people came there from the South Urals.

The fate of the Sintashta people

Where did the fortified settlements of master metallurgists come from? It is most likely that from the steppes of the present Orenburg region, about 4,000 years ago, a people moved to the Southern Urals, possessing the secrets of the fiery craft. The aliens found "pantries" of copper ores here and, together with the local peoples, began to develop them.

About 3800 years ago, the construction of fortified settlements of metallurgists - blacksmiths stopped and was not resumed in the Bronze Age. For some reason, they were no longer needed. No, the fire craft has not disappeared. It just became different. It is unlikely that scientists will come to the same opinion, discussing the reasons for the cessation of the construction of these settlements. But it's worth thinking about. And finally, there are other points of view regarding the purpose of the fortified settlements of the Bronze Age in the Southern Urals. Don't be surprised to meet them. Try to compare opinions and accept someone else's point of view. Archaeologists believe that the Sintashta society was a society of equals, which did not exclude the power of leaders, although there is no unanimity of opinion among scientists on this issue. Sintashta not only created a unique society of sorcerers - metallurgists and blacksmiths. They were among the first peoples in the steppes of Eurasia, who created a light wooden two-wheeled chariot drawn by two horses. They also invented the original harness for chariot horses. Its central part was horn plates (discs or segments) - cheek pieces with one or more holes and spikes on one side. The spikes were attached to the horse's lips. The cheek pads connected to the bridle straps and reins made it possible to strictly control a pair of horses at the same time.

The burial mounds of the Sintashta people, which amaze with the incredible richness and complexity of the structures of the graves, are often located on the opposite coast from the settlement. Why not the "river of the dead" so well known from the myths of various ancient peoples?

At a time when the Sintashta people conquered from a few local hunting and fishing tribes the rich in copper deposits of the Southern Trans-Urals in the forest-steppes of modern Bashkiria, other conquerors who came from the west, from the Volga region, were already living abashevskaya culture. Until now, scientists cannot definitely say where they came from in the Volga region and for what purpose. An archaeologist from Ufa, V.S. Gorbunov, believes that the Abashevo tribes come from Central Europe, and they came to the Southern Urals through the forest-steppes all for the same metal as the Sintashta people. They passed through the Volga region so quickly that they did not even leave settlements - only burial mounds, under which they were buried in graves in an unusual position - on their backs, with their legs raised at the knees, the buried Abashevites.

In the Southern Urals, they settled down thoroughly. Well-known are their settlements with abundant traces of both cattle breeding and bronze metallurgy (Beregovskie settlements, Tyubyak settlement and others) and burial grounds, where, in addition to the buried themselves, richly ornamented ceramics, unusual for these places, were found.

The Abashevites not only neighbored with the Sintashta people, but also actively mixed with them, or rather were absorbed by them. Abashev time in the Southern Urals did not last long.

Sintashta very seriously influenced the process of formation of several large archaeological cultures of the Bronze Age in the steppes of the Southern Trans-Urals and Kazakhstan, in particular, several Alakul cultures at once, united by researchers into the Alakul cultural and historical community. Dozens of settlements and burial grounds of this archaeological culture are known to scientists in the steppes and forest-steppes of our region. And now, along the banks of the Karataly-Ayat River in the Varna region, in the vicinity of the villages of Kulevchi, Katenino, near the modern villages of the Kartalinsky region (Vishnevka, Krasny Yar), you can see the ruins of Bronze Age settlements - pits of buildings that have swamped over millennia, located then in the "street" along coast, then a disorderly, at first glance, group. Of the settlements of the Alakul culture, the settlement tentatively named "Kulevchi III" and located 9 km east of the modern village of the same name has been most fully studied. Here, archaeologists Gennady Borisovich Zdanovich and Nikolai Borisovich Vinogradov studied the remains of several buildings. The remains of smelting furnaces, a large number of metal (copper and bronze) tools (axes, adzes, saws, awls, etc.), weapons (battle axes, daggers), jewelry, blanks for the manufacture of various items were found in the premises . Scientists were surprised by the burials under the floors of the premises of parts of the carcasses of sacrificial animals and several children's burials - a reflection of the beliefs of ancient pastoralists.

The study of the materials of this settlement in various scientific centers of our country showed that most of the stone tools found in the settlement were associated with the production of metal

Archaeologists also began to study the Alakul settlement near the village. Kinzerskoe on the river. Uvelka in Troitsky district. We know the remains of similar, but not excavated settlements on the shore of Lake Travyanoe, near the village. Bulanovo; next to the village Berezovsky; in the vicinity of the village Petrovsky on the river. Uy in the Oktyabrsky district.

People of the Alakul culture built a wooden tomb for a deceased relative, in which they laid the body of the deceased on the left side in a “worship position” - with arms bent at the elbows and legs bent at the knees, head to the west, east or south. The deceased relative was accompanied by various (depending on age and gender) objects, tools, and decorations. Small earthworks over individual graves, collapsing, eventually closed, forming a single mound, as it seems now.

Archaeologists were pleased with the results of excavations of the Bronze Age burial ground near the village. Podgorny in the west of the Troitsky district, conventionally called "Priplodny Log". Archaeologist Tatyana Sergeevna Malyutina unearthed 14 burial mounds here with sometimes complex intra-grave structures built of stone. The existence of the burial ground is associated with several archaeological cultures (“Alakul”, “Fedorovskaya” and “Fedorov-Cherkaskulskaya”) of the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. You will be surprised, but within the city of Troitsk, on the site of a cottage village under construction, in the 1990s, archaeologists Vladimir Petrovich Kostyukov and Andrey Vladimirovich Epimakhov unearthed a burial ground of the Bronze Age. Another burial ground, in the vicinity of the village. Miass (Krasnoarmeisky district) on the left bank of the Miass River, was named Miass and was studied by archaeologists from Sverdlovsk (as Yekaterinburg used to be called) under the guidance of the famous archaeologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir Fedorovich Gening in the late 1960s. Initially, the burial ground was a group of earthen mounds - kurgans. Under them there were about 70 burials in wooden tombs, log cabins, covered with wood, very badly destroyed by robbers in antiquity. Archaeologists, however, got about 90 clay vessels characteristic of the Alakul, Fedorov and Srubnaya cultures, as well as rare bronze jewelry in fragments, faience beads and a bronze awl.

Cattle breeders-shepherds lived in the steppes of the Southern Trans-Urals throughout the Bronze Age. The face of pastoralism has changed under the strong influence of climate change, but it continued to be the basis of the economy. Traces of farming before recent centuries II millennium BC no.

Log Tribes of the Urals

Almost the entire Bronze Age on the territory of the steppes of the Orenburg region, steppes and forest-steppes of modern Bashkiria is connected with their history. Hundreds of log settlements and cemeteries have been discovered and studied here by several generations of scientists. It turned out that the Srubny tribes of the Southern Urals and the Alakul people of the Southern Trans-Urals, who lived at the same time, are very similar to each other (in their appearance, language, cattle breeding and bronze metallurgy, culture), but this similarity is far from complete. If in the buildings of the Srubny and Andronovo tribes one can find many common features, then their funeral rites differ greatly. For example, the Srubny tribes buried the dead on their side, crouched, with their heads always to the north, and the Alakul people (the most ancient of the Andronovites) - with their heads mainly to the west. The pottery of both is very different. But in relation to metallurgy, they are similar. It was the Srubny tribes who in the Bronze Age owned the famous Kargaly mines and smelted there during the Bronze Age the huge amount of metal cited above. The archaeologist E.N. Chernykh unearthed a settlement of log metallurgists-miners with a picture of ancient life, very unlike the life of log cattle breeders, but very close to that which was just described for the Sintashta people of the Southern Trans-Urals.

The mysterious funeral rite of the "Fedorovites"

Most likely, from the Kazakh steppes, not earlier than the 15th century BC. people of the Fedorov archaeological culture appeared in the Southern Trans-Urals. By the way, the “Fedorov culture” got its name from the famous Fedorov burial ground, studied by the founder of the South Ural archeology, Doctor of Historical Sciences Konstantin Vladimirovich Salnikov, at the western border of the modern Krasnoarmeysky district, in the territory of the village of Fedorovka, which is on the river. Miass. The Fedorov population was driven out of the Kazakh steppes by terrible changes in nature - the drying up of the climate, which made pastoral life impossible there. Although archaeologists still do not agree on the place of birth and its time. The South Ural Alakul tribes and the alien Fedorov tribes were related and quickly merged into one culture.

The remains of the settlement of this time - near the village. Stone River on the river. Wow, archaeologist Andrey Vladimirovich Epimakhov investigated. He unearthed here two buildings slightly sunken into the ground, the inhabitants of which lived in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC.

Unlike the Alakul people, who buried the bodies of the dead in festive clothes, the Fedorovites preferred to ... burn them on a funeral pyre, the ashes were carefully collected, sewn into a three-dimensional image of a person made for the occasion and buried along with things in a grave so vast, as if it had been prepared was for the burial of the body of the deceased. In the Bronze Age of the Southern Urals, the ceramics of the Fedorov culture, along with the Abashev culture, were the most richly ornamented, and the shape of their vessels resembled a tulip flower. What is especially interesting is that among the Fedorovites this dish was considered ritual, and in everyday life they used another, less elegant one. This little story about the Fedorov tribes reflects only one point of view. There are others. If you meet them, do not be surprised and try to match.

The ruins of the settlements of the first farmers in the South Urals

The history of the population closes the Bronze Age of the steppes of the Southern Urals Alekseevskaya culture. The settlements and cemeteries of the final stage of the Bronze Age in the Southern Trans-Urals are poorly studied. Even before the excavations, archaeologists well identify the ruins of Alekseevsky settlements along the banks of our steppe rivers. The fact is that the Alekseyevites, who lived in a period of very dry climate and the resulting decrease in the water level in the rivers, had a tradition of arranging dwellings that could rather be called underground. Huge, spacious, almost the entire height of the walls, they were hidden in deep pits. The walls and floor were lined with wood. The roof lined with sod layers rested on one side on the edges of the pit, on the other - on vertical pillars in the central part of the building. The roof necessarily had a light-smoke window, which also served as an emergency exit. On the walls there were beds for sleeping, niches-recesses for household utensils. Often, a covered corridor led from the house directly to the river bank. The owners were comfortable.

One of the mysteries of the Alekseevsky culture is the almost complete absence of burials. Known burials can be listed on the fingers. Scientists don't understand this yet. Perhaps the reason must be sought in changes in cattle breeding. If the earlier ancient South Ural peoples of the Bronze Age had it shepherd, domestic, then in the Alekseev time, herds, consisting mainly of horses and small cattle, begin to be driven away in the summer to distant pastures rich in grass, where they stayed until the cold weather. Maybe it is worth looking for Alekseevsky graves on these pastures? In fact, very few burials from this period are known. An interesting mound, explored near the village. Beloklyuchevka by archaeologist Vladimir Petrovich Kostyukov. Two burial pits were hidden under a small earthen mound. The people buried in them were laid in graves in crouched poses with modest, in comparison with previous times, grave goods. Above one of the graves, made of stone slabs, there is a schematic representation of a wagon. The burial mound, studied at the end of the 20th century by the archaeologist Vadim Alexandrovich Buldashov, at the fork in the road connecting the village, dates back to the same time. Karakulskoye, the village of Uysko-Chebarkulskaya and the village of Kamyshnoye, in the Oktyabrsky district. In shallow grave pits there were bones of people buried in a position strongly crouched on their side with modest grave goods (clay vessels, jewelry).

At the end of II - beginning of I millennium BC. the inhabitants of our places became participants in a process that was grandiose in its consequences - the transition from a settled pastoral life, so characteristic of the entire 2nd millennium BC, to a new way of life - nomadism. Scientists believe that it was the natural and climatic conditions that were unfavorable for the previous economy that caused the transition to nomadic life.

At the same time, the “Alekseyevtsy” were one of the first peoples of the Urals, in the monuments of which traces of the most ancient agriculture were found. During excavations of their settlements, not only agricultural tools are found, but also grains of wheat. So agriculture in the Urals is at least five thousand years old.

Forest peoples of the Middle Trans-Urals

In the southern part of the forests of the Middle Trans-Urals at the beginning of the Bronze Age, at the turn of the 3rd-2nd millennia BC, the history of the population of the Ayat culture proceeded - the descendants of the local inhabitants of the mountain-forest Urals at the end of the Stone Age. They, like their ancestors, lived in settlements consisting of small semi-underground buildings, were engaged in hunting and fishing, used stone and bone tools.

In the first centuries of the II millennium BC. ayat culture has changed Koptyakovskaya culture. Finds at the Koptyakov settlements testify not only to hunting and fishing

Similar information.

Abstract on the topic "Neolith of the Urals and Siberia"

Introduction

Neolithic - the last period of the Stone Age. Solid chronological framework It is difficult to indicate the Neolithic, since it began at different times in different territories. The beginning refers almost everywhere to the end of the 7th millennium BC.

Having settled in the Mesolithic era, people found themselves in different climatic conditions, apparently, this explains the diversity of Neolithic cultures.

In the Neolithic in the northern hemisphere, nature acquires the following appearance: tundra spread along the shores of the Arctic Ocean, forest-tundra went south, a strip of forests stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean, south of which lay forest-steppes and steppes. In each plant zone, a corresponding animal world developed.

Changes in the mode of production, called the Neolithic revolution, are associated with the Neolithic, which consisted in the transition from an appropriating type of economy to a productive one - agriculture and cattle breeding. The driving factors of the transition to a productive economy can be considered:

1) the crisis of the appropriating economy (the old methods of obtaining food could no longer provide it in sufficient quantities);

2) demographic changes (significant increase in population); 3) the accumulation by a person of rational experience, empirical ideas about the nutritional value of plant and meat foods, about certain qualities of certain plants and animals.

But the Neolithic revolution did not take place in the entire territory.

In the Neolithic, two large zones of economy developed: the area of ​​cultures of the producing economy and the vast zone of the appropriating economy, within which various types of complex economy arose, strongly associated with specific natural and geographical conditions. The following vast Neolithic communities are distinguished, which in turn are divided into areas of individual cultures:

1) south of the European part of Russia (steppe and forest-steppe regions, Crimea); 2) the Caucasus and Transcaucasia;

3) south of Central Asia; 4) the north of Central Asia and Kazakhstan;

5) forest strip of the European part of Russia;

6) Ural and Western Siberia;

7) Baikal-East Siberian;

8) Yakutia and Northeast Asia;

9) Far East (Amur and Primorye).

Within each of these zones, features of the development of technology inherent only to it, features of ceramics and ornamentation were outlined. Consider the features of the material culture of the Neolithic of the Urals and Western Siberia.

Neolithic Ural

The Neolithic of the Urals is represented by the Gorbunovskaya culture of the end of the 4th - the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. The name was given to her by the Gorbunovsky peat bog near Nizhny Tagil. Many sites lie in peat, which preserves bone and wood. The Neolithic culture of the Urals arose on the basis of the Mesolithic. In the early stages of this culture, microliths were preserved, a typical Mesolithic stone processing technique: most of the tools were made using inserted knife-like plates. There are two main areas: the Neolithic of the Southern Urals and the Neolithic of the forest Middle and Northern Urals.

The Neolithic of the Southern Urals was significantly influenced by the southern Celtminar settlements, the Neolithic cultures of the Aral Sea and Transcaspian regions, from which the ability to make pottery (and some ornamental motifs) was borrowed, as well as to make flint jagged arrowheads. The Southern Urals is also an interesting zone. Even in the Mesolithic, the penetration into the Southern Urals of the population from the Southern Caspian region was noted - carriers of microlithic technology and a manufacturing economy.

The Neolithic community of the forested Middle and Northern Urals is divided into two historical and cultural regions: the Eastern Ural (or Ob-Ural) and the Western Ural (or Kama-Volga). There is much in common between them. Settlements are common on the shores of lakes and on ledges of floodplain terraces. People lived in semi-dugouts of a rectangular shape, were engaged in hunting and fishing. A feature of the Neolithic culture of the Urals are round-bottomed or round-conical earthenware vessels, decorated with a jagged (comb-shaped) ornament. Bone harpoons and arrowheads were widely used. The Neolithic culture of the Urals is characterized by cult places and petroglyphs.

The West Ural Neolithic is associated with the local Mesolithic and the influence of cultures located to the west of the Urals. In its development, the local Neolithic culture went through three stages. The early Borovoozersky stage also belongs to the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. The most typical site is the Borovoye Lake I site near Perm. It is characterized by earthenware, close to an ovoid shape and decorated with a comb-toothed ornament, leaf-shaped arrowheads, curved retouched knives. The second - the farm stage was studied in the settlements of Khutorskoye near Bereznyakov in the Bor tract on the river. Chusova and others, dating back to the III millennium BC. At this time, grinding axes-adzes appeared, items made of knife-like plates almost disappeared, and patterns on vessels became more diverse. This stage is characterized by long quadrangular semi-dugout houses with hearths in the center and niches along the walls, 25-30 people lived in them. The third stage - Cherkashinsky dates back to the end of the III - the beginning of the II millennium BC. During this period, the shape of the dishes changed: cylindrical, convex-bottomed vessels decorated with “walking comb” patterns or in the form of a lattice became characteristic. At the end of the period, the first copper products appeared.

The Eastern Urals also went through three stages. The first - Kozlovsky - stage was studied on the basis of the earliest settlement on Andreevsky Lake. This stage is characterized by large, slightly narrowed upward vessels with a rounded conical bottom. The ornament covered the entire surface, including the bottom. It was applied with a narrow stick, by drawing on wet clay with periodic spraying. The flint inventory retained its Mesolithic appearance: most of the tools were made of knife-like plates, and arrowheads of the Celtminar type with a tooth at the point were common.

The second stage - Poludensky - dates back to the end of the 4th - the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. It includes the settlements of Strelka, Poludenka I in the basin of the river. Chusovoy, Shaitanka I near Yekaterinburg. The dishes retained a semi-ovoid shape. The ornament in the form of wavy drawn lines and belts of hatched triangles was widely used. Grinding axes-adzes with side protrusions for fastening and horn hoes with a ledge appeared. Unique wood products, sled skids, buckets with bird heads on handles, and idols belong to this time. People lived in semi-dugout dwellings, the basis of which was a log cabin.

The third stage is called Sosnovoostrovsky after the settlement of Sosnovy Ostrov. This stage is characterized by a comb ornament with bulges - the so-called pearls, formed from impressions from the inside of the vessel, and sculptural images made of clay. People lived in large, almost square dugouts with an area of ​​\u200b\u200babout 100 square meters. m.

The Urals, with the expanses adjoining it from the east and west, in the Neolithic was the territory of the formation of the Finno-Ugric ethnic community - the oldest foundation of the Finno-Ugric peoples.

The Neolithic differs from the previous era in a higher level
in the development of productive forces: all the basic methods are applied
stone processing, new methods of housing construction are being mastered, were
earthenware, weaving were invented.
The population of the Urals made the most of the rich natural
resources, especially various types of stone. Along with silicon and
jasper used quartz, quartzite, granite; layered rocks - tufopor-
firit, slate, talc, as well as ornamental stones - chalcedony, mountain
crystal, etc. Raw materials were mined mainly on the surface. Appear
workshops, which are in the nature of seasonal parking, the main task of their
The inhabitants were the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture of tools. On the South
Ural explored Ust-Yuryuzan flint
Neolithic workshop, which provided extensive material for a comprehensive
characteristics of the stone industry. There are also known
other flint workshops: Uchalinskoe, Karagaily I, Sin-
Tashta, located at the exits of raw materials. As a rule, on them
semi-finished products were produced, which were then delivered to various
regions of the Urals.
The presence of raw materials in some tribes and its absence in others were
a real prerequisite for the development of exchange, which entailed
expansion of production, division of labor, its specialization. Stone-working workshops are evidence of the emergence of a special branch of the economy - the extraction and processing of stone.
The lamellar industry dominated the stone processing technique,
in some areas it was combined with the manufacture of tools from flakes
(Northern and Middle Trans-Urals). The most typical way
secondary processing was squeezing retouching, which by that time had reached
great perfection. New techniques are spreading widely
stone processing: grinding, sawing, drilling.

The assortment of stone tools, especially hunting ones, is increasing. There are new tools for woodworking: axes, adzes, chisels, chisels. The Neolithic ax greatly facilitated the processing of tree trunks for the construction of dwellings, various means of transportation: boats, sledges, skis, sleds, the remains of which were found in the peat bog settlements of the Middle Trans-Urals.
Many household items were made from wood.
The construction of dwellings, which was of particular importance, is being improved
in harsh climatic conditions of the Northern and Middle Urals. People
created an artificial environment for themselves not only for shelter, but also as
place for certain types of production activities. Main
semi-dugout becomes a type of dwelling of the Neolithic era in the Urals.
Along with single large dwellings, settlements appear,
consisting of several dwellings. All of them were located along the banks of the rivers and
lakes.
One of the most significant innovations of that time is
earthenware, which allowed for improved methods of cooking and
expand the range of food products.