Barrow 11 of the “Garden” Group in the Lower Dniester Region and Contemporary “Mythmaking” About Scythian “Amazons”

Abstract

The article publishes and analyzes materials obtained during the study of the Scythian barrow 11 of the “Garden” group excavated in 2018 near village Glinoe, Slobodzeya district, on the left bank of the Lower Dniester, for the first time.The barrow was surrounded by a circular ditch and contained four burials – one infant and three female. The tools from the barrow are represented by knives, spindle-whorls, needle. The only piece of tableware was found and it was a wooden bowl. The adornments (a pair of earrings, two bead necklaces, one bead bracelet, two “elbow bracelets”) were also discovered. Earrings with conical bulges on one of the endings testify to the Thracian influence on the material culture of the Scythians of the North-West Black Sea region. All female graves contained mirrors. Two of them are identical, and both were laid under the body of the buried. One of the mirrors has handle aforethoughtly broken in antiquity. The cult objects are a pendant made of a dog’s tooth and a stone slab, the arrowheads are the only weapons. The barrow dates back to the second half (preferably the third quarter) of the 4th century BC. Finding a quiver set in the grave 4 of barrow 11 of Glinoe/”Garden” group made the authors to analyze the burials of the so-called Scythian “amazons” of the North Black Sea region. It turned out that many of them were attributed with flagrant violations of scientific methods as burials of women-warriors, which is nothing more than modern “myth-making”. As a result, the authors claim that an open-minded analysis allows us to distinguish three groups of Scythian burials with weapons: 1) containing weapons, placement of which reflects certain “ethnographic” features of the rite or the special status of buried; 2) containing arrowheads that may indicate hunting; 3) the burials of warriors with diverse and numerous weapons.