«Шерстяной путь» эпохи поздней бронзы: культурный, хронологический и географический контексты

Abstract

Innovative technologies for new products and consumption, a secondary product revolution, have dramatically changed the course of the Bronze Age economic transformations. Changes included introduction of an innovative technology of wool production and it’s spread among the Northern Eurasia population during 3000–2000 BC. Sophisticated methods of studying the ancient wool textile obtained from the Bronze Age sites of Northern Eurasia, i.e. technological analyses, radiocarbon dating, and the identification of the isotope signature preserved in the wool textile, made it possible not only to discuss the time the wool fiber appeared in the Bronze Age textile production and to determine the cultural context and areas but also to discuss a new hypothesis on the formation of so called Wool Road in early 2nd millennium BC – a route that connected the foothills, forest-steppe, and forest regions of Eastern Europe in the West and South Siberia and China in the East. The discovery of wool textiles and their radiocarbon dating clearly defines the spread of the innovative textile strategies out of the Near East from the South to the North, then from the North Caucasus Piedmont areas from the West to the East. The author suggests that one of the ways the wool textile spread to west was from the southern steppe region of Eastern Europe via the Black Sea steppes.