Археология евразийских степей (Apr 2022)
Cultural Transformation in the Upper Volga Region During the Early Iron Age
Abstract
The author discusses the issues related to the interaction of two largest cultural areas of the Early Iron Age in the Upper Volga basin – the Ananyino Cultural and Historical Area and the Textile Ceramics Area. In the 6th century BC, a highly mobile population of the Vyatka–Vetluga culture of the Ananyino Cultural and Historical area appeared on the banks of the Upper Volga, whose cultural impulse in the west of the region has been recorded in the basin of the Mologa and Sheksna rivers. The contacts of the carriers of the Ananyino traditions of the Vyatka–Vetluga culture with the textile world led to the appearance of hybrid ceramics in the settlements. A population was formed as a result of cultural changes, which combined local (textile) and Ananyino features in its material culture. The social–cultural transformation in the Upper Volga region was finished by the 5th century BC, and hybrid ware of the “Vatazhka type” spread across the settlements, whose “popularity” had not ceased until the 3rd/2nd centuries BC, when the tradition of ornamenting ceramics with cord prints became notably simpler and eventually disappeared. The custom of decorating ceramics with textile prints, which strongly rooted in the Upper Volga region, survived until the turn of Millennium, possibly even the beginning of the 1st Millennium AD. The paper also introduces into scientific discourse the materials of new sites with ceramics of the Vyatka–Vetluga culture of the Ananyino Cultural and Historical Area and textile ceramics, which presently are among the westernmost known settlements with hybrid ceramic complexes in the Upper Volga basin (Eski, Bezhetsk, Cherepovetskoe, Nifantovo II, III, “Dom Okhotnika 1”), and are of great importance for assessing the cultural situation in the region.
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