The stone inventory on the Neolithic settlement Evstyunikha I (Middle Trans-Ural)

The place of the Evstyuninsky type ceramics in the early Neolithic materials of the Middle Trans-Ural has been one of the problem areas of interest to the Ural archeologists until today. The Evstyuninsky type of Neolithic ceramics is presented in the archeological literature of the Urals fairly good. But it is still unknown what kind of stone products accompanies ceramics of this type. This paper fills this gap. The site is situated 300 meters from the village Evstyunikha, which nowadays is a northern outskirt of the Nizhny Tagil (Sverdlovsk Region). The collection of finds contains more than 9000 items. Among them there are about 6000 fragments of ceramic and 3500 stone products. The complex is very indiscrete – 96% of ceramics refers to the Neolithic. The rest of the ceramics is presented by materials of later epochs. The use of stone tools in them was already limited. The full cycle of stone processing is presented at the site. The technology of splitting was used for obtaining knife-shaped plates from the butt nucleuses. They used large plates of 2–4 cm width and small ones of 0,5–1,0 cm width as well. In addition to the plates tiles processed by bilateral edge retouch were also widely used. Flat retouch was very rarely used – it was used for producing of arrowheads only. A large percentage (nearly 70%) of products with tile cork indicates the use of the local mineral raw. 77% of all products are made of siliceous slate. Then there are volcanotectonic sandstone products and products made of light grey layered siliceous rock – 6,5% each. Milky quartz and multi-colored jasper artifacts are 2% each. 6% are accounted for the other types of mineral raw (flint, chalcedony, slate carbonaceous, light grey slate, grey quartz, alevrotuf, sandstone, granodiorite, quartzite, serpentinite).