Development of ancient cultures and paleoenvironment during the Eneolithic Period and the Early Bronze Age in the Southe
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(2020) 12:241
ORIGINAL PAPER
Development of ancient cultures and paleoenvironment during the Eneolithic Period and the Early Bronze Age in the Southern Cis-Urals steppe (Russia) N. L. Morgunova 1 & O. S. Khokhlova 2 Received: 31 March 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Multidisciplinary research undertaken on archeological sites in the Southern Cis-Urals steppe resulted in the identification of six distinct ‘chronosections’, i.e., chronological intervals within the period of the 5th–3rd millennium BC. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction showed that the first half of this period was predominately arid, whereas the second half was humid. The arid phase, which included chronosections I, II (the Samara culture of the Middle and Late Eneolithic Period) and III (the early stage of the Pit-Grave culture of the Early Bronze Age), was characterized by a sharply continental paleoclimate that was drier than the modern climate within the study area. During the arid phase, there were profound changes in the occupations of the indigenous ancient people, e.g. cattle farming of the Samara culture changed to nomadic herding of cattle at the early stage of the Pit-Grave culture, which was associated with the construction of burial mounds. The humid phase (chronosections IV, V and VI corresponding to advanced and late stages of the Pit-Grave culture of the Early Bronze Age) was wetter and less continental than the modern climate within the study area. Keywords Eneolithic . Samara culture . Pit-Grave culture . Chronosections . Paleosols . Paleoenvironmental reconstruction
Introduction Multidisciplinary studies on archeological sites give much more information than the traditional archeological survey. To reconstruct the paleoenvironmental conditions of the development of the ancient cultures, to date the archeological events, to study the technological skills in pottery, the organic components in burials, anthropological features of an ancient population, etc., it is necessary to use approaches from different natural sciences. It is especially important to get the most information during study sites of archeological cultures for which the writing sources are absent. Among them, there are obviously the cultures of the Eneolithic Period and the Early Bronze Age. The steppe Chalcolithic (Eneolithic) and the PitGrave (Yamnaya) culture that developed on its basis have an
* O. S. Khokhlova [email protected] 1
Orenburg State Pedagogical University, Orenburg, Russia
2
Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushchino, Russia
extensive history of study Merpert 1974; Ecsedy 1979; Vasyl’ev 1981; Gimbutas 1997; Ivanova 2005; Morgunova 2014). In the vast territory of the Yamnaya culture setting, hundreds of sites, mainly burial mounds (kurgans), have been studied. However, interdisciplinary research was mostly sporadic: there are detailed paleoenvironmental reconstructions for the Eneolithic Period and the Early
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