ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRACES OF THE PRESENCE OF LYAKHS DISPLACED TO THE ROS RIVER. THE STATE OF RESEARCH

Abstract

The paper deals with the resettlement of the inhabitants of early medieval Poland to the territory of Rus’. The starting point is the mention contained in The Tale of Bygone Years, informing under the year 1031 about the transplant of the Lyakhs (inhabitants of the Piast state) to the Ros River, on the border of Rus’ and nomads. The paper outlines the discussion on this issue, as well as research perspectives. The latter seem particularly promising in relation to the settlement complex in Mykolayivka on Ros River, studied, among others, by M. Kuchera in the 1950s and 1980s. Based on the presence of ceramic material and metal ornaments with West Slavic analogies, the Ukrainian archaeologist put forward a hypothesis that the discovered cemetery and settlement there are the traces of a presence of the Lyakhs settled there in 1031. This hypothesis, although being repeated in the archaeological literature, has never been verified by typological and chronological analyses of artifacts as well as anthropological and laboratory analyses of human bones.
 In 2019, the Ukrainian-Polish archaeological expedition started a new project in Mykolayivka. The research covered, inter alia, a flat cemetery where two relatively well-preserved burials were discovered. In one of them there was a skeleton of an adult man, next to which the arrowheads and a ring were found. In the second grave, the skeletons of an adult woman and a child have been discovered. Numerous ornaments, including earrings, a lunula pendant, rings and several dozen metal, glass and stone beads were found there. In order to check the suitability of the bone material for specialized analyses, the skeletons were subjected to: radiocarbon, DNA, microscopic tooth enamel and stable isotope analysis. All the above-mentioned studies have shown that the state of preservation of the material from the cemetery in Mykolayivka allows for the use of a wide range of laboratory analyses. Thus, it can be useful for the verification of the above-mentioned hypothesis about the origin of the local inhabitants.