ABOUT THE ARROWHEADS WITH “SIDE SPIKES”IN THE RANGE OF WEAPONS OF THE NORTH CAUCASUS POPULATION
 IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 2d – EARLY 1st MIL. BC

Abstract

The article examines the issue of emergence and development of the tradition of using bone and bronze arrowheads with the so-called "side spike" by the population of the Central and North-Eastern Caucasus. For this purpose, materials from household and funerary monuments are used. It was determined that initially arrowheads with the blades lowered down ("stingers») appeared on the territory of Transcaucasia at the end of the second millennium BC. The materials collected by the author demonstrate that during that period arrowheads with one or two additional side "spikes" on the handle were found exclusively on the territory of the North Caucasus. They were originally made of bone. Such findings are recorded on the territory of Dagestan. Later, this type of weapons was also manifested in individual samples of bronze in the form of so-called "flat arrowheads", the starting point of which has been territory of Transcaucasia. This type of arrowhead did not become popular among the population who lived in the Central and North-Eastern Caucasus. Later, the side spike was widely used only at the early stage of the "Scythian" period, initially on the two-bladed, and then on the three- and four-bladed arrowheads. However, the very idea of this type of weapons has initially appeared among the Caucasian tribes since the era of the developed Bronze Age, and maintained till the beginning of the first third of the first thousand BC.