Barrows in action. Late Neolithic and Middle Bronze Age Barrow Landscapes in the Upper Dniester Basin, Ukraine

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this article is to view the spatial distribution of Upper Dniester Basin’s (Western Ukraine) barrows and to interpret their location principles. These monuments were often situated on the flattened summits of watershed ridges or hills. It appeared also that some of them were located on upper parts of gentle slopes of not more than 8° of inclination. Mounds appear within linear and group-linear arrangements and were rarely observed as clusters, while more specific adjustments to their location were dependant on local terrain morphology. Barrow alignments run along the elevated ridges, while clustered groups were situated in places where erosive indentations or denudation cavities prevented barrows from stretching in a linear pattern. It can be noted that during the spatial development of barrow alignments, more attention was paid to the intervisibility between the mounds, than to their visibility from other places in the landscape. The potential of observing at least one of the following groups of tumuli from every embankment indicates the direction of movement within the framework of the barrow landscape, perhaps augmented in the past by the presence of paths or “roads”. Examples of analogous or similar, in a certain sense even universal, practices in shaping barrow landscapes were documented also from various parts of Eurasia. Therefore, it is argued these traits were shared by all “barrow societies” and their origins can be traced to the steppe zone. Specific and repeatable patterns of barrow arrangements are a manifestation of certain knowledge and skills, transmitted over generations and immortalized in the landscape that symbolized the incorporation of territory by “barrow societies”. Characteristic mound alignments became a cultural code or institution, as it were – an instrument of familiarising previously unknown landscapes, facilitating movement and simultaneously expressing continuity of kin-lineages.