DONETSK CENTER OF FLINT PROCESSING IN THE STONE AGE – CHALCOLITHIC

Abstract

Because of specifics of geological history, in geographical borders of Eastern Europe several large areas of flint deposits of the Cretaceous and Carboniferous periods were formed. In these areas in the Stone Age and the Chalcolithic, the centers for production and preprocessing of flint were created. The centers had complex structure, which depended on nature of distribution in space of geological sources of flint. The largest centers appeared in the basin of Middle Dniester, in the Western Volhynia, in the Western Belarus, in the basin of Desna and in Donbas. The Donetsk center of a flint processing had been created on the Middle Paleolithic and existed until the Chalcolithic. The bloom of the Donetsk center is dated back to the late Neolithic – the Chalcolithic. One can notice a connection between centers of a flint processing and development of cultural processes in Eastern Europe. There is an obvious conjugacy of the large production centers to the centers of intensive economic and social development of human collectives in primitive time. The article is devoted to the analyses of the framework of the Eastern European centers of flint processing from Stone Age to Chalcolithic.