MOSCOW, 13 Apr. A significant achievement of Russian archaeologists was the study of the cultures of ancient tribes that more than one and a half thousand years ago lived in the territories of today's Kaluga, Oryol and Tula regions of Russia. Employees of the Tula archaeological expedition for more than 30 years of work have collected facts and hypotheses about these cultures. Aleksey Vorontsov, scientific secretary of the Kulikovo Pole State Museum-Reserve, spoke about the scientists' work.
— Aleksey Mikhailovich, what discoveries of Tula archaeologists do you consider the most striking?
— The most important discoveries are – traces of previously unknown peoples that show us previously unknown pages of pre-literate history.
My colleague Evgeny Vasilyevich Stolyarov discovered a completely new group of monuments of the Upa-2 type. These finds refer to people who lived here in the forest, around the 2nd century BC — 1st century AD. For a long time it was believed that they left a very meager material culture — a few shards, bones, small iron objects. The new finds have shown a completely different picture. .html» data->
So we found a page of history that no one knew about, traces of an archaeological culture, which, together with related cultures, occupies a vast territory with the Desenie and the upper Dnieper. Then, very warlike forest-steppe people, who were under the influence of the Sarmatian culture, invaded the territory of the Oka-Don watershed. And this completely new world came, which was established for 150 years — historically a very long period of time.
We managed to discover the transition from one era to another, which took place with military conflicts, fires and left a significant release of finds. In general, for archaeologists, fires and storming of villages leave the most striking traces, because a lot remains in the ground, and in ordinary life people are thrifty and don’t scatter their property just like that.
I managed to find traces of the inhabitants of a new era — a group of monuments like Novo-Kleymenovo. These were people associated with the Sarmatian world, who came from the forest-steppe to the forest zone on the territory of the present Tula region around the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. They remained here long enough, at least until the middle of the 3rd century or even a little longer. This is a completely different world, the existence of which we did not even suspect. Separate finds were made earlier, they just did not add up to such a phenomenon.
Then there was a new change of population and the Moshchin culture appeared, which is not perceived so unambiguously. The process of its appearance has now sparkled with different colors, it is opening up to us only now.
May 5, 2022, 09:00 «https://ria.ru/20220505/orel-1786750766.html» data->
— Who were Moshchintsy?
— These were representatives of one of the peoples who did not survive to the present. They disappeared. You can imagine peoples in the form of a bush with a bunch of branches. One of the branched branches of this bush, which has survived to this day, is the Slavs. We now call another, related, branch the Balts. And between them there were still branches that disappeared. One of them is the bearers of the Moshchin culture. They adjoin both the Slavs and the Balts. What language they had, we, in principle, do not know, and it is impossible to establish this. You cannot even do a DNA analysis of their remains, since the carriers of this culture burned their dead, and the DNA was not preserved.
— The book «Archaeology of the Oka-Don Watershed», published under your editorship, published by the State Museum-Reserve «Kulikovo Pole», speaks of jewelry with enamels that belong to the Moshchin culture.
— Jewelry with Eastern European champlevé enamels appear in the second half of the 2nd century on the so-called monuments of the late Zarubintsy circle, which appear after the death of the Zarubintsy culture on the Dnieper in the middle of the 1st century.
In this environment, champlevé enamels arise, in parallel they arise in the Baltic states, that is, on a vast territory. The peak of the development of this style is around the 3rd century. At this time, the Moschin culture was just emerging. Her enamels exist in the 3rd century, this has been proven. /kulikovo_pole-1832251031.html» data->
Then cultural changes begin, a new fashion appears. In some places, the fashion for enamel remains, and in others it disappears. We understand that this happened at the beginning of the 4th century. Now in the Dnieper region there are some finds that can be attributed to the early Hun times. As you know, the Hunnic time is the beginning of the era of migration of peoples, from the last third of the 4th century to the beginning of the 5th century. must be shared. There is the early Slavic world — many kindred peoples that have existed since antiquity, but these people did not call themselves Slavs.
The Slavs as a large community that appears in written sources is a phenomenon of the era of the Great Migration of Nations. But that doesn't mean they came down from the stars. It's just a cultural transformation. They settled on a vast territory — this is not only Eastern Europe, but also part of modern Germany, the Balkans, Asia Minor.
These people came to the territory of the modern Tula region, as we now imagine, around the 8th century, and left bright monuments that speak of a significant settlement of the region. Further their culture develops, then it is replaced by the Old Russian culture. /arkheologicheskie_nakhodki-1758558251.html» data->
The very first traces that we recorded date back to the 8th century, but so far we have very little evidence about this time. Our colleague Alexander Kolokolov is now successfully working on this topic.
We know the Moshchinskaya culture until the middle of the 7th century, and we have material evidence that some part of its bearers left their traces in the culture as early as the 9th century Slavs, and then their assimilation took place.
As we know, by the time of the changes associated with the arrival of the Slavs to the Oka, carriers of the Moshchin culture lived in its upper reaches, and Oka Finns lived on the middle Oka, carriers of the culture of the Ryazan-Oka burial grounds. And closer to the Volga, we know the ancient Mordovian monuments. Thus, part of this «ancient Oka» world has disappeared over the centuries, and part has remained — the Mordovians still live on their land.