«Back to the Future»: the main historiographical themes and topical problems of the Neolithic of the Urals

The following paper deals with some problems of Trans-Urals Neolithic which are associated with the formation and development of basic cultural and chronological concepts. Three stages in conceptual historiography are identified. The first one refers to the mid-second half of the 20th century and is associated with the formation of the first cultogenesis schemes of the late Trans-Urals Stone Age by V.N. Chernetsov, O.N. Bader and L.Ya. Krizhevskaya. At the second stage at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 21st century their ideas were revised by V.T. Kovaleva in the framework of a two-stage and two-line concept. At the same time the hypothesis of V.A. Zakh was developed. Later V.S. Mosin proposed a socio-cultural scheme for the formation of an integrated society in the Neolithic Trans-Urals. The third – the modern stage – began approximately in the second decade of the 21st century when natural scientific data growth forced to reconsider a number of established ideas about the chronology and typology of Neolithic ceramics and ornamental traditions. At the regional level there was a return to the «classical» three-term periodization; there was a trend towards regionalization of research to clarify the notions of local variants and the chronological position of material complexes, specifics of historical and cultural processes. It is concluded that it is necessary to form a new research paradigm by synthesizing middle-level theories with empirical generalizations.