A late stage of Dnepr-Don Babyne culture.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the presentation, characterization and evaluation of late stage monuments, especially burial grounds, of the Dnepr-Don Babyne Culture (DDBC). The small number and inexpressiveness of these monuments objectively caused the researchers' insufficient attention to them, compared with the numerous and vivid complexes of the early period, which are sometimes mistakenly perceived as a standard for the entire Babyne Cultural Circle. A method is proposed for separating the complexes of the late DDBC from the similar burials of the Dnepr-Prut Babyne Culture (DPBC), which is relevant for the borderline for both cultures of the Lower Dnieper region.

A significantly lower level of kurgan building in the period of late DDBC (ІІІ period) was discovered, compared with the early period, however much larger, in comparison with DPBC. The main type of funerary construction of the late DDBK is the pits, in each fifth of them there is a wooden frame. The dead were laid in the abbreviated poses on the left (93,7%) or occasionally right (6,3%) side, with a variable position of the hands and orientation of the head to the eastern sector.

More than half of the burials (64,5%) contain a few funeral equipment, including the so-called bone “buckles” of late types – with small lateral hole (40% of graves), small-volume ceramic vessels (23,6%), and rare/single finds of wooden vessels, astragals, small bronze ware, flint/quartz flakes, bone awls, flint arrowheads (the weapon of murder?), stone models of wheels.

A series of settlements are known, which can be reliably attributed as late sites of the DDBC based on the finds of late types of bone buckles on them. The fact that almost all Babyne’s Cultural Area settlements, which have chronological markers, refer to the late stage, suggest that at this stage of development the Babyne’s population became more sedentary, whereas at an early stage it led a more mobile lifestyle. These conclusions correlate with the data of paleoclimatology, per which at the early stage of post-Catacomb cultures, incl. Babyne, there is a phase of a great ecological catastrophe with aridization and continentalization of the climate, while the late stage of these cultures corresponds to the mitigation and humidification of the climate.

The method of cartography established the area of the late DDBK, which significantly decreased, in comparison with the previous period ІІ, and occupied the region of the Dnieper-Don Interfluve with the highest concentration of sites in the Azov-Donets-Dnieper watershed. Such territorial-chronological dynamics of the cultural area is explained by ecological causes and the migration of the Babyne’s population and their neighbors, in particular the Don-Volga Abashevo Culture’s tribes and their successors – the Pokrovsk Zrubna Culture’s tribes.