Weapons of the Mutyn Cemetery

Abstract

The necropolis of the turn of the era near Mutyn village of the Krolevets district (Sumy Region) was explored by the Left-bank Ukraine expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in spring 2010. The Mutyn cemetery is a unique site in several respects, both for Eastern and Central Europe. All the 14 graves, urn cremations, obviously belonged to professional warriors of a high rank. Every burial was accompanied by a representative set of weapons (a bended sword and a spearhead, a shield umbo, a helmet and etc.), as well as the warrior’s equipment (spurs, fragments of sword-belts, fibulae). Several ceremonial ceramic urn vessels look like tableware from the local sites of the Kharivka type, combining the Zarubyntsi culture and Central European features in such cultures, such as Przeworsk and Oksywie on the territory of Poland. The synchronism of the graves is possibly the evidence that these warriors were killed in one of the battles. Although cremations in urns of imported metal vessels, accompanied with weapons, are known in the Przeworsk and Oksywie cultures, similar cemeteries of warriors are not known there. Nevertheless, the Mutyn cemetery is unique because it consists of only warriors’ graves from the final stage of the pre-Roman period and, moreover, it was located on the eastern extremity of the area occupied by cultures under the La Tène influence. A weaponry complex, which constited mainly of the inventory of each burial from the Mutyn cemetery has close analogies in Germanic cultures of Central Europe marked as instances of significant Celtic influence. Such La Tène features include imported double-edged swords, several spearheads, helmets and metal vessels used as urns. At the same time, typical for Germanic antiquities are single-edge swords, shield umbos, some types of spearheads, spurs and etc.