The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement to the Kievan Rus

252 Pages·1996·13.83 MB·English

by  Pavel Dolukhanov

The Early Slavs
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The
Early Slavs
Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement
to the Kievan Rus
Pavel M. Dolukhanov
~ ~~o~~~~n~~~up
LONDON AND NEWYORK
Firstpublished1996byAddisonWesleyLongmanLimited
Published2013byRoutledge
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ISBN13:978-0-582-23618-9(pbk)
BritishLibraryCataloguing-in-PublicationData
Acataloguerecordfor this bookisavailablefrom the British Library
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Dolukhanov,PavelMarkovich.
The early Slavs:EasternEurope from the initial settlementto the
Kievan Rus /PavelM. Dolukhanov.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographicalreferences andindex.
ISBN0-582-23627-4 (casebound).- ISBN0-582-23618-5 (pbk.)
1.Slavs- History.2. Europe, Eastern- History. 1.Title.
D]K27.D651996 95-45474
CIP
Contents
ListofIllustrations VlI
Preface IX
Transliteration ofCyrilic Names XlI
1. The Slavs and Archaeology in Russia 1
2. Geographical Setting 8
Geologyand landforms 8
Hydrology 13
Climate 14
Vegetation and soils 14
Populationandethnicgroups 18
3. The Initial Settlement 23
Palaeolithicbeginnings 23
The Last IceAge 29
The Mousterian 30
The UpperPalaeolithic 34
The Late Glacial 41
Early languages 44
4. Postglacial Farmers and Hunters 47
The Holocene 47
The Mesolithic 51
Early Neolithic 62
MiddleNeolithic 76
v
The EarlySlavs
5. The Beaker Folks 81
The Post-optimum 81
The CordedWare 82
The steppegroups 91
The Bronze Age 96
6. The Age of Change 109
The Iron Age 109
The northernhill-forts 113
The Cimmerians, Scythians, Greeks and ... 117
7. The Slavs, BaIts and Finns 137
8. The Slavsin Europe 146
Pax Romana 146
The Zarubintsy and Chernyakhovian 148
The rise of the Slavs 160
The Slavsin the north 167
9. The Vikings and the Rus 171
The Little Optimum 171
The Vikings in Europe 173
The Scandinavians andthe Slavs 177
The beginnings of Russian statehood 193
Conclusions 198
Glossary 201
Bibliography 210
Index 231
VI
List of Illustrations
Fig. 1. Tectoniczones 9
Fig. 2. Surface configurations 11
Fig. 3. Climate. MeanJanuarytemperature (CO) 15
Fig. 4. Vegetation 16
Fig. 5. Soils 19
Fig. 6. Languages and linguisticgroups 21
Fig. 7. The initialsettlement. Lower andMiddlePalaeolithicsites 27
Fig. 8. The UpperPalaeolithic 36
Fig. 9. UpperPalaeolithic 'dwelling'. Kostenki 11, stratum 1a 37
Fig. 10. Palaeolithic 'portable' artfrom Kostenki sites 40
Fig. 11. Late Glacialmigrations 44
Fig. 12. Climaticoscillations of the Holocene 48
Fig. 13. Figurines from Oleneostrovskicemeteries (Karelia andKola
peninsula) 54
Fig. 14. Voloshskicemetery 56
Fig. 15. Mesolithictools. (a)- SouthernUkraine; (b)- Estonia (Kunda) 59
Fig. 16. Mesolithicculturalgroupings in Eastern and CentralEurope 61
Fig. 17. Bug-Dniestian (a)andDniepr-Donetsian (b)ceramics 63
Fig. 18. Tripolian antlerandstone implements,ceramics and figurines 67
Fig. 19. Kolomiishchinasettlement(reconstruction) 68
Fig. 20. Eastern Europe in the Early Neolithic 74
Fig. 21. Pit-and-combpottery 76
Fig. 22. Eastern Europe in the Middle Neolithic 77
Fig. 23. Neolithic petroglyphs inKarelia 79
Fig. 24. EasternEurope inthe late Neolithic/earlyBronze Age 83
Fig. 25. FatyanovoWare 86
Fig. 26. Volosovo flint figurine 88
Fig. 27. Pit Graves (a), Catacomb Grave (b)and Timber Grave (c) 93
Fig. 28. Bronze Agefortified settlementat Kivukalns, Latvia 98
Fig. 29. Sosnitsianinventory 100
Vll
The EarlySlavs
Fig. 30. Seima-Turbinosites 104
Fig. 31. Seima-Turbinospearheads (upperrow) andaxes 105
Fig. 32. Cross-sectionof the Scythian 'royal' barrow. Tovstaya
Mogila,Ukraine 122
Fig. 33. Scythian 'animal' style 126
Fig. 34. Forest-steppe 'Scythian'groups 128
Fig. 35. Greekcolonies in the north Pontic area 130
Fig. 36. Eastern and Central Europe in the first millenniumBe 134
Fig. 37. Zarubintsy (1)and Chernyakhovian (2) 149
Fig. 38. Gothicwars 156
Fig. 39. The East European Plain in the first millenniumAD 161
Fig.40. Pottery, settlementand dwellings of Prague-Korchaktype 162
Fig.41. Pottery, settlementand dwellings of Prague- Pen'kovkatype 164
Fig.42. Long barrows andsopkis in the Novgorod district 166
Fig.43. Birka in the tenthcenturyAD (reconstruction) 175
Fig.44. Trade routes in Eastern Europe in the 9th-10thcenturiesAD 178
Fig.45. Volkhov in the Staroja Ladoga area 183
Fig.46. Archaeologicalsites in the Novgorodarea 185
Fig.47. The Old Kiev 192
V111
Preface
I am beginning this book with apologies, and.myfirst apology concerns the
title. The Slavs, as a distinct ethnicity, were first mentioned by Greek writers
only in the second century AD·whereas I begin my story with the initial
appearance of tool-making hominids in Russian territory, which occurred c.
500 thousandyears before that.
During the millennia which have left no written documents, the succeeding
generations of people who lived in the vast spaces of the Russian Plain could
hardly be described as belonging to any ethnic entity; they had no common
name, whether it was 'Slavs' or anything else. The same is true for large
groups of early humans in any other part of the world. Yet I am convinced
that Iam right in choosingthis time dimension for my story. The origins and
early development of peoples known as the Slavs could be rightly
understood only ifviewed from awide temporal perspective.
My second apology follows directly from the first. Having chosen to write a
wide panorama of Slavic pre- and proto-history, I necessarily transgressed
into areas lessfamiliar to me professionally.
At this moment, it is inevitable that I must say a few words about myself. I
was trained as a geomorphologist and Quaternarygeologist at the University
of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in Russia (formerly the USSR).
Immediately after graduating in 1960, I joined the staff of the Leningrad
Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Since then I
have conducted palaeoenvironmental and geochronological investigations of
archaeological sitesin more or lessall parts of the former USSR. These studies
were mainly concerned with Mesolithic and Neolithic Age sites and pivoted
around the problem of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. I was especially
interested in the study of the emergence of agriculture and stock-breeding in
their environmental context, and in the various social, cultural and linguistic
implications of this. Yet, being one of the few environmental scientists
directly involved in archaeology, Iwas obliged from time to time to work on
IX