Materials for the Technology of Smithing Products of the Golden Horde Period in the Territory of Samara Region

Abstract

The article presents the results of metallographic studies of a collection of smithing products found on the Berezovka medieval Russian settlement, studied in the 1950s in the Shigony district of the Kuibyshev region. The site of the Golden Horde period was studied in 1950, 1952–1955 by A.E. Alikhova, a member of the Kuibyshev archaeological expedition. During the excavations on the settlement, the remains of ground and subterranean dwellings, ruins of furnaces with numerous iron metal slags were discovered, which indicates that the population was engaged in the production of iron and cast iron. In the early 1990s, Samara archaelogical expedition specialists got surface finds from the cultural layer of the settlement destroyed by the Kuibyshev reservoir. The results of metallographic analyses of the collection of smithing products from the Berezovka settlement complement the knowledge about the level of technical development of the population of the Middle Volga region in the Golden Horde period. The analyses were made in the archaeological laboratory of the Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University.

Keywords

• archaeology
• history of smithing
• middle volga region
• russian settlement