Archaeological Heritage of the Mariinsk Forest-Steppe in Russian Museums

Abstract

The article summarizes scattered data on the archaeological artifacts found in the forest-steppe of the Mariinsk area of Kuzbass and exhibited in various Russian museums. Kuzbass owes most of its archeological heritage to the Mariinsk forest-steppe. The present research made it possible to expand the source base for the corpus of archaeological sites in Kuzbass and introduce some new data about valuable artifacts from Kuzbass that are kept in museums all over Russia. The one and a half century of Mariinsk excavations can be divided into three periods. No items from the first period, i.e. the last quarter of XIX century, remained in Kuzbass museums. Artifacts from the second period are distributed between the Kuzbass State Museum of Local History, the Kemerovo State University Museum, and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Other archaeological collections from Mariinsk are to be found in the following museums: the State Historical Museum, the Hermitage, the museums of Archeology and Ethnography of Tomsk and Kemerovo State Universities, and the Museums of Local History of Kuzbass, Mariinsk, Leninsk-Kuznetskiy, and Tisul. The collections present a valuable source of new information about the history of Southern Siberia.