No 2 (2023)

The article focuses on clarifying the terms for the technology of “patch making”. The ambiguity in the use of some specific terms in the Russian archaeological literature prompted the author to attempt to systematize the terms that characterize this mode of pottery making. As a result, the following clarifications are proposed: 1) a patch as a construction element can be lumpy and coiled; 2) according to the methods of application, lumpy patch can be unsystematic, fan-shaped and ring-zonal, while coil patch making is most often spiral-shaped, ring-zonal or spiral-zonal one. The article provides a detailed substantiation of the author’s proposals. A stable connection between construction elements and the ways in which they are pressed up together often enables to do more rigorous and unambiguous definitions of the the technique of archaeological ceramics making.

Over the past four decades, in the taiga areas of the Surgut and Lower Ob River Region, six unique burial objects of the Early Iron Age with a large number of imported and local goods have been discovered: single graves, a hoard with shaman’s regalia and a burial of ittarma dolls personifying a group of warriors who died in a foreign land. The studied sites belonged to representatives of the local elite. No similar complexes of the Stone and Bronze Ages have been found. This testifies to the presence of social stratification in the Ugrian and Ugrian-Samoyedic society of the western area of the Kulayka cultural-historical community (KCHC) in the 1st–4th centuries BC. Meanwhile, the emergence in the region of bastion-tower fortresses, anthropomorphic copper figurines in helmets and “solar” crowns, as well as the find of an arrowhead of the “Kulayka culture type” in a dwelling of the Beloyarskaya culture suggest that the formation of the image of a warrior-leader-bogatyr-spirit and of the military, property-owing and cult elite separated from the ordinary community members started perhaps even earlier – around the middle of the 1st millennium BC. The main prerequisite for these phenomena, as well as for the appearance of iron products in the taiga communities of the Ob River Rregion in the absence of a producing economy (animal husbandry, agriculture), was the involvement of hunters-fishers in the north of Western Siberia into the Eurasian economy as regular suppliers of furs.

The article provides a preliminary general description of the results of archaeological studies in wet cultural layers in the Tainitsky Garden of the Moscow Kremlin in 2020. The materials collected during the excavations are of exceptional interest for studying the stratigraphy and chronology of cultural deposits in Podol (lower) area and provide a rare opportunity (for the case of the Kremlin) of dating individual structures dendrochronologically. Moreover, the material adds considerable new evidence on the culture of Moscow and the social image of the owners of the Kremlin estates of the 14th–15th centuries AD. The construction in the investigated section of the Podol area since the middle of the 14th century AD was dense and the size of the estates is unknown. The inventory of found artefacts of the period under consideration contains both everyday household objects common for urban use and items associated with a prestigious lifestyle and military activities. Estates of the middle – second half of the 14th century AD can be considered as part of the Kremlin households of Timofey Vasilyevich Velyaminov or his closest relatives.

Excavations in Jericho made it possible to reveal a notable complex of ferrous metallurgy. Archaeological evidence of iron smelting is represented by numerous slags, dozens of iron blooms, and three bloomery furnaces. They are localized mainly in the cultural layer surrounding the pottery kilns. The statistics of the finds indicate a fairly active production of iron in the Jericho workshop, where 59 small iron blooms and their fragments were found. The shape of whole blooms corresponds to a bowl-shaped depression in the lower part of small bloomery furnaces. The foundations of three similar structures were found, each of them located in the immediate vicinity of a pottery kiln. The chronology of iron production in Jericho corresponds to the time of functioning of the pottery workshop at the monastic-pilgrimage complex of the second half of the 6th – the first half of the 8th century. The archaeological context proves that ferrous metallurgy was an integral part of the production processes in the workshop throughout the entire period of its functioning. In addition, the multifunctionality of the production complex in Jericho is confirmed, which most likely provided for the vital needs of the inhabitants of a fairly large household in various types of ceramic vessels and bloomery iron throughout the late Byzantine and Umayyad periods of Palestine history.

The article discusses a new project for the archaeological study of ancient Nessana, a small settlement of the Byzantine and early Islamic period (5th–7th centuries AD), located in Southern Israel, in the southwestern part of the Negev desert. The heyday of the settlement is connected with its location: in the Byzantine period, Nessana became an important caravan junction on the way of the Christian pilgrimage from the Holy Land to Sinai, to the monastery of St. Catherine. Using all the economic benefits of pilgrimage, Nessana was turning into a large urbanized settlement with a population of about five thousand people, with numerous churches and caravanserais. Pilgrimage undoubtedly played an important role in the life of the settlement, which is clearly reflected in the evidence of papyri of the 5th–7th centuries AD found there in the 1930s. The favorable location of the site on the very edge of the desert, many churches, papyri, building inscriptions and pilgrimage graffiti in several languages, as well as an arid climate conducive to the preservation of organic materials, make Nessana a unique object for studying the archaeological problems of the early Christian pilgrimage. Despite intensive work carried out in Nessana by two archaeological expeditions, the stratigraphy of the site and its layout are still unclear. The article presents the preliminary results of the first season of fieldwork of the new Nessana expedition and considers a number of issues related to the further study of the site.

The paper presents a hoard of the early third-century BC Panticapaeum bronze coins, found during excavations at the Maeotian settlement of Tikhovsky 1, Krasnoarmeisky district of Krasnodar Territory, in 2021. The hoard contains 152 coins with “Pan / lion head, below sturgeon” bearing countermarks of a star and a bowcase. In the interfluve of the Kuban, Protoka and Angelinsky Erik, a group of Maeotian settlements is located, which is associated with a pattern of similar coin hoards concealed at the turn of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. These hoards indicate the easternmost border of the Bosporan kingdom and localize the Maeotian territories annexed during the Bosporan expansion to the east.

The corpus of texts on birch bark was replenished with another document found during excavations in the Kremlin of Pereyaslavl Ryazansky (modern Ryazan). The letter comes from the Vvedensky excavation site located in the southeastern part of the Kremlin. The stratigraphic dating of the find is the second half of the 15th century AD. Styluses and fragments of birchbark with drawings have already been found on the site. The letter was a piece of rolled birchbark with the upper and lower edges torn off centuries ago. The three surviving lines of the document produce a legible fragment of a literary text – a record of predictive meaning read under the year 6967 (1459) in ordinary paschal tables of the 15th century AD. The Ryazan birchbark letter is the clearest material evidence of the eschatological expectations that became widespread in Russian society in that period.