Soviet Archaeologists Research Articles

Plant use from the grinding stones’ viewpoint: Phytolith analyses from Aeneolithic Monjukli Depe, Turkmenistan

[Resesarch Article]Recent archaeological examinations include an increasing amount of natural science analyses. They are often carried out by external specialists and their results are often accepted by archaeologists without question. This may lead to incomplete integration of the results into an archaeological context. One of those methods, increasingly employed in the field of archaeology, is phytolith analysis. Phytoliths, microscopic silica bodies from genera-specific plant cells, allow searching for traces of plant material in archaeological contexts where methods based on macroscopic analysis have reached their limits. This paper combines natural science approaches with archaeological data by examining the social life of artefacts via phytolith analyses that can provide data to precisely determine the interpretation and variety of grinding stones, which are often misinterpreted. In this pilot study, the analyses confirmed the macroscopic observations for grinding plant material in some cases, but also opened new areas of study such as mineral-related activities, possible use of wooden implements and the connection between the different archaeological and botanical information. The analysed objects are grinding stones from Monjukli Depe, a small village in modern southern Turkmenistan that was occupied in the Neolithic and Aeneolithic periods. The site was excavated in the 1960s by Soviet archaeologists and restudied since 2010 by a team from the Free University Berlin.

«Я очень интересуюсь Вашими работами»: к истории взаимоотношений М.П. Грязнова и Г. Мергарта

The letters of M.P. Gryaznov, addressed to the Austrian and German archaeologist, the author of basic work «The Bronze Age on the Yenisei» Gero v. Merhart, lift the veil from the international contacts of the archaeologists of the Ethnographical department of the State Russian Museum. M.P. Gryaznov was the last of the soviet archaeologists, who corresponded with G. Merhart. In 1930 their promising dialogue was interrupted. It remains to regret, that the policy and the time separated these remarkable scientists, whose team-work could give a lot for the archaeology of the Northern Asia.

Christianization of Kiev: facts against myths

East Slavic archaic culture turned out to be much more complicated than domestic researchers have already imagined in the 20th century. Modern scholars have opened up new complex aspects that require considerable attention from researchers from various scientific fields. So, after the discovery by Soviet archaeologists BO Timoshchuk and IP Rusanova in the 80-90 years of the XX century. in Western Ukraine, the great Eastern Slavic pagan temple complexes, ancient settlements, sanctuaries and holy sites became evident the fact that Eastern Slavs had a developed pagan worldview and a complex religious system not only in the pre-Christian age, but also in the early Christian era.

Osteological Studies of Archaeological Materials from Jurchen Sites in Russia

Osteological Studies of Archaeological Materials from Jurchen Sites in Russia Alexander Kim The history of the Jurchen studies in Russia is more than a century and a half old. In the course of their development of it as a subdiscipline, Russian scholars of Jurchen studies have produced a number of interesting and valuable publications that have combined the use of written sources with the study of the archeological sites. However, for a long time, these scholars paid little attention to bone remains. Only in the 1970s did Russian specialists begin to study osteological materials intensively and this research has yielded a great deal of information about agriculture and other cultural practices of the Jurchen as well as Bohai peoples. Despite this fact, the findings of osteological studies in the Russian Far East remain practically unknown in the Western academic world, largely because Russian scholars have not commonly published in English. The Jurchen (Chinese reading: 女真 / 女真 Russian: чжурчжэни, Korean: 여진) tribes inhabited areas of the modern Russian Far East (southern part), North Korea and North and Central China from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. The Jurchen established several states, the most powerful of which were the Jin Empire (The Golden Empire) (金) (1115–1234) and Qing Empire (清) (1644–1912). The influence that the Jurchen tribal confederations of both periods—but especially the latter—came to exert on the course of the history of China has been well documented. The study in Russia of the Jurchen and Bohai peoples began in the period 1820–1850 when Nikita Bichurin (Archimandrite Iakinf) (Никита Бичурин (архимандрит Иакинф), Viacheslav Gorskij (Вячеслав Горский) and Vasilii Vasil’ev (Василий Васильев) translated several Manchurian, Chinese and Korean texts about the Jin Empire. Yet, despite finding many Jurchen sites [End Page 335] (more than 200), partially excavating them, analyzing many archaeological materials, and publishing many field reports, Russian and early Soviet archaeologists did not originally pay much attention to osteological materials. The first works on osteological studies were published by Ernestina Vital’evna Alekseeva (Эрнестина Витальевна Алексеева), Vladislav Innokent’evich Boldin (Владислав Иннокентьевич Болдин) and Lyudmila Efimovna Semenichenko (Людмила Ефимовна Семениченко) only in the 1980s. In these works, Soviet scholars considered fragments of bones of animals which had been found in Shajginskoe and Novogordeevskoe sites.1 Certainly, Russian archaeologists had already excavated some dozens Jurchen sites, but can not research osteological materials from these sites. Shavkunov, Boldin and Semenichenko studied archaeology, but the major area of study by Alekseeva was paleozoology. Osteological studies of materials from the Shajginskoe site Dmitrij L’vovich Ivanov (Дмитрий Львович Иванов), the Russian engineer, discovered the Shaiginskoe site in 1891. For a long time, Russian and Soviet archaeological specialists paid the site itself scant attention. It was only in the period 1962–1993 that an archaeological expedition led by Ernst Vladimirovich Shavkunov (Эрнст Владимирович Шавкунов) excavated it. Recently, Russian archeologists have occasionally returned to this site to conduct additional research. From the time of its discovery, Soviet specialists long believed that Shajginskoe site had been a Jin town. Only since the 1990s, after work done by A. L. Ivliev,2 have Russian scholars reconsidered the conditions at this site and thus been able to confirm that Shajginskoe was a town of Dong Xia, the Russian Far East. Moreover, Russian archaeologists identified almost all Jurchen sites in the Primorye region as towns of Dong Xia.3 The length of the earthen wall discovered at the Shajginskoe site is around 3,600 meters, with the wall height varying from between 0.5 to 5 meters. The walled town had three gates and two towers which protected the central gate. The central gate was additionally defended by a C-shaped fortification construction, built in front of it. This site produced rich archeological materials, [End Page 336] for example, silver accrediting plate, many evidences of developed agriculture (remains of grains, wheat, barley, soya bean, several kinds of millet, horned cattle, horse and pig breeding and also hunting, fishing and taiga crafts). During a period of seventeen years in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet archaeologists intensively excavated 200 dwellings, seven palace-type buildings, and so forth4 at the Shajginskoe site and unearthed many bones. Therefore, E.V. Shavkunov asked paleozoologist E.V. Alekseeva for help in the researching of bone remains. Alekseeva indentified many osteological materials which gave information about the agricultural activity of the...

Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization: Soviet Excavations in Northern Iraq

Between 1969 and 1980, Soviet archaeologists conducted excavations of Mesopotamian villages occupied from pre-agricultural times through the beginnings of early civilization. This volume brings together translations of Russian articles along with new work.

Western and Russian Historiography: Recent Views, edited by Henry Kozicki, St Martin's Press, New York, 1993

This collection illustrates the transition occurring in Russian historiography from a government-directed monolith to a more diverse discipline looking to internationalize and gain new directions. Although focused upon a Russian perspective, the volume includes discussions of issues such as history as science and history as narra­tive that are of major concern to many Western historians. Readers interested in a more Western focus on these and related topics should see another volume by the same editor and publisher, Developments in Modem Historiography (1993). Although neither the history of archaeology or even the history of science is a topic in this volume a reader interested in these areas is led to wonder how this great political/intellectual change will effect archaeology. The history of Soviet archaeology is virtually unKnown in the West and I am uncertain if the topic was pursued very much in the former Soviet Union. A brief, politically-correct, post-Stalinist summary is provided by Mongait (1961), but the book by Miller (1956) provides a more likely and more distressing view of Stalinist archaeology, including the observation that Soviet archaeologists had life-spans one-half that of their bourgeois counterparts!

A Bibliography of Soviet Studies of the Ancient Cultures of Latin America

The study in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the earliest history of native Latin Americans falls into two distinct periods. The first, associated with an interest in the ancient Mexican and Peruvian civilizations, can be divided into two stages: the 1920s to the early 1940s, when Soviet scholars first acquainted themselves with antiquities from the region and used them for historical parallels; and the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Soviet historians turned to an analysis of Latin American materials. The second period went through three stages: the first, from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, mainly was dominated by Yury Knorozov, who was engaged in deciphering the language of the Maya, and Rostislav Kinzhalov, who studied their art and culture. During the second stage, the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, more scholars and research institutions undertook studies of the early cultures of Latin America. The thematic range became wider as well, covering—besides Mesoamerica and the central Andean region—the Intermediate region and the Caribbean. The third stage, which started in the late 1970s and continues to the present day, witnesses ethnographers and archaeologists pooling their efforts in studying the region. There were several conferences in which specialists engaged in various fields of Latin American studies participated. Their contacts with foreign colleagues became wider; Soviet archaeologists and ethnologists took part in fieldwork in Latin America. The primary aims today are to introduce Soviet readers to archaeological materials from a number of cultural-historical regions (such as the southern fringes of Mesoamerica, Amazonia, the southern Andes, etc.), to detail Soviet studies of cultural complexes and historical processes in ancient America, and to compare them to the processes that took place in the Old World, with the aim of establishing shared historical “laws” and patterns.

Soviet archaeology in the steppe zone: Introduction

The steppe region, the temperate grassland of the Asian land-mass that runs the thousands of kilometres practically from the coast of the Atlantic to the coast of the Pacific, is one of the great zones of human settlement. It offers archaeology on the large scale, where local adaptations link to a grander picture. Most of the steppe falls in the Soviet Union and is studied by Soviet archaeologists, much of whose work is inaccessible to those many of us who have no Russian.The steppe is novel in a second way also, for Soviet archaeology has a distinctive flavour in its ideas and how it works with them; there are concerns and terminologies that do not quite correspond with the common concepts of west European scholars.

Siberian Paleolithic Archaeology: Approaches and Analytic Methods [and Comments and Replies

This paper examines the approaches and methods of Soviet archaeologists dealing with the Siberian Paleolithic and with the problem of early man in Siberia and the Far East.

The First Farmers in Turkmenia

The early farming culture of Southern Turkmenistan, widely known since the work of R. Pumpelly at Anau, has been systematically studied during the last decade by Soviet archaeologists. Excavation of the major settlement of this culture, Namazga Tepe, has made it possible to propose a new stratigraphy (Namazga periods I-VI). The Namazga III period fills the gap between Anau II and Anau III, and has its closest analogies on Iranian sites such as Sialk III, 4-7, and Hissar IB to IIA; it is now possible to revise the synchronization of sites in Turkmenia and Iran proposed by McCown. (See table on p. 212).

Microlithic Sites in the Asiatic USSR

AbstractMicrolithic cultures of the steppe and desert zone of Asia include the Kel'teminar of the Aral Sea region and comparable cultures in Kazakhstan, Turkmenia, Trans-Baikal, Mongolia and China. This microlithic industry is characterized not by the size of the tools, but by the use of blades rather than flakes for the manufacture of stone tools. The prismatic core, often small and pencil-shaped, is very common; bifacial retouch is rare. The microliths are consistently found in association with pottery and bifacially worked projectile points of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of the third and second millennia B.C. The tendency of Soviet archaeologists to seek the ethnic affiliations of archaeological complexes may explain the considerable regional variation in pottery and stone tool inventories, but adjustment to environment is a more likely explanation for the wide-spread occurrence of the basic features of the microlithic industry. A way of life based on migratory hunting of small game and collecting developed as a result of refinements in missile weapons which included the bow and arrow. These developments can be correlated with the introduction of the microlithic blade technology. This way of life and the use of microliths survived in the steppe and desert areas, but in the regions to the south where farming developed the microliths were rapidly replaced by heavy tools such as hoes and pestles, and in the northern forests harpoons, fishhooks, and heavy wood-working tools indicate a shift to a more sedentary life based on intensive fishing. The widespread microlithic survivals in northern Asia demonstrate similar subsistence patterns in similar ecological zones rather than basic ethnic unity. Suggestions concerning origins, historical and cultural ties, and possible population movements are gradually emerging from detailed studies of the boundaries between the microlithic zone and the pottery and forest areas as well as from broader comparative analyses.

Neolithic Dwellings in the Forest Zone of the European Part of the U.S.S.R.

The hypothesis that in Neolithic times men lived for the most part in pit-dwellings is fairly widely distributed in archaeological literature. Thus, for example, W. Radig from 188 neolithic sites examined in Germany up to 1930 listed 109 as having pit-dwellings (Grubenwohnungen), an additional sixteen having pit-dwellings with a cone-shaped covering (Grubenwohnungen mit schrägen Pfostenlöchern), eight with vertical walls (Grubenwohnungen mit senkrechten Pfostenlöchern) and two of mixed type. This hypothesis was also widely held among Soviet archaeologists who often described their discoveries of pit-dwellings in their accounts of excavations of neolithic sites. A completely contrary opinion has been put forward by G. Childe in relation to neolithic dwellings in the temperate zone of Europe.

5. Soviet Archaeologists and the War.

5. Soviet Archaeologists and the War.

Results of Soviet Investigations in Siberia, 1940-1941

This report contains some9 of the important results obtained by Soviet archaeologists during the latter part of 1940 and the first part of 1941. Despite the War, books, scientific journals, and manuscripts have been received from the U.S.S.R. as recently as February, 1942. The authors wish to express their gratitude to President Kemenev of the Society for the Promotion of Cultural Relations with Foreigners (VOKS) and to the Soviet archaeologists from Murmansk to Yerevan and from Tripolje to Kamchatka who have furnished us with the information contained in this and in our previous articles.10