The oldest period in the development of the territories of modern Donbass by people. The development by people of the territory of modern Donbass in the primitive era

· What ancient sites of ancient people were found in the territory of the Donetsk region?

In the territory of the Donetsk region there are priceless archaeological sites that tell not only about the first people who appeared here, but also reveal the stages of development of human civilization.

One of the most interesting monuments is parking   Paleolithic (Stone Age) gully

Breech   not far from Amvrosievka .

As you already know, opened this parking in 1935. Victor Evseev . In ancient times, a bison path passed along a ravine along which animals ascended from a watering hole to the steppe. For many years, mainly in the fall, our ancestors, hunting for bison and bison, ambushed here. The spears of hunters were equipped with horn and flint tips. Amvrosievsky bone   It is a unique monument, since it is the largest in the world.

Ø Historical dictionary

Parking–– a place of temporary stay of primitive people during the Stone Age.

No less interesting ancient sites were found by an expedition led by Dorothea Zweibel . In 1962-1965 two paleolithic sites near the village were excavated Antonovka   Maryinsky district, where bison bones and a lot of stone tools were worked on two sides.

In the years 1968-1970. parking was investigated

in the village Belokuzminovka   Konstantinovsky district. Archaeologists have found stone blanks (cores) and tools with serrated edges. And at the village Kurdyumovka , not far from Artyomovsk in the ancient layer at a depth of about 10 m, bones of bison and rhinoceros, flint scrapers and genital points were found.

Historians consider genius discovery

Mariupol burial ground,that was

discovered in 1930 on the left bank of the Kalmius river on the outskirts of Mariupol at

the construction of the Azovstal plant. This monument of the Neolithic era was investigated by an outstanding archaeologist. Nikolay Makarenko . The burial ground was a red pit, 28 m long and about 2 m wide, where there were 122 bones lying in four tiers. Flint knives, arrows, stone axes, ornaments from wild boar fangs, teeth and animal bones, and fragments of dishes were found in the burials.

The Mariupol burial ground was the patrimonial burial place of the cattle breeders community, whose members continued to remain together after death.

· What monuments of the Stone Age period on the territory of our region are known to you?

· What finds are most often found in them? How do they testify to the occupations of ancient people in our territory?

· Why did scientists conclude that people buried in the Mariupol cemetery were engaged in cattle breeding?

For the first time, people appeared on the territory of our region about 150 thousand years ago in the Middle Paleolithic era. The most ancient man - archanthropist(or Pithecanthropus) was distinguished by great physical strength and endurance. Archanthropists knew how to use fire, built primitive dwellings in the form of awnings from rain or barriers from the wind, made stone tools. The main occupation was hunting for large animals. An important place was occupied by the collection of edible plants. In mountainous conditions, archanthropes lived mainly in caves, in plains - on the banks of rivers and lakes. They hunted animals with the help of large-pointed wooden stakes, clubs and sometimes a peak with stone tips. For strength, the spearhead was burned at the stake. Archanthropes led a vagabond lifestyle and stayed for several days where they managed to get an animal. At the site of such camps remained fragmented bones of eaten animals, blunt stone tools and fragments of stone. During excavations, caves are found in the caves.

In Donbass, several camps of ancient people were found. All of them are located in river valleys near the sources of stone from which the tools were made. Finds on them are extremely few. Such camps in the open did not exist for very long. The rarity of ancient monuments is also due to their poor preservation. Traces of the activity of archanthropes were washed away by rain and river spills. You can find ancient stone tools only after special searches or by chance in coastal cliffs of rivers and beams, in the walls of clay quarries. Almost all the finds of stone tools of archanthropes in the Donbass come from high clay outcrops or from erosion of ancient rocks. The remains of the archanthropic camps have been preserved near the city of Amvrosievka on the banks of the Krynka River, not far from Artemovsk, in Makeyevka, in Izyum, near Lugansk, near the village of Kirov, Artyomovsky District. All these findings indicate a rare, but uniform population of the region.

About 100 thousand years ago, the archanthropists were replaced paleoanthropes(ancient people, or Neanderthals). Scientists believe that the bulk of the archanthropes and paleoanthropes came to Eastern Europe from the west. Paleoanthropes were more advanced ancestors of modern people. They knew how not only to maintain fire, but also to build it. Their speech was still undeveloped. At the same time, the paleoanthropists have their first ideological ideas, the custom of burying dead relatives. Paleoanthropes were well adapted to the harsh conditions of the ice age and successfully hunted bison, saiga, cave bears, mammoths, deer and other animals. Bones of deer, horses, and wolves were found in the parking areas of the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov. The main hunting weapons were flint-throwing javelins. Stone tools were made with great care. Scrapers, knives, pointed and other tools have various shapes. Most of them were intended for cutting carcasses of dead animals. Paleoanthropes knew how to make primitive clothes from animal skins and some wooden devices (spear shafts, knife handles, baskets, beater, etc.).

In the Donbass, several dozen parking sites of this time are known. In terms of size and quantity of household waste, they are much larger than the camps of archanthropes. In the years 1962-1965. archaeologists carefully excavated two ancient sites near the village of Antonovka, Maryinsky district. Bison bones and many tools processed on both sides were found here.

A man of a modern physical type first formed in the Middle East about 40 thousand years ago. He is called Homo Sapiens - a reasonable person. He is also called neoanthropus. This man possessed a developed speech, was able to plan his work for a long time. Art appears, religious beliefs. The appearance of modern man coincided with a new era - the Late Paleolithic (35-10 thousand years ago).

In the Late Paleolithic, the clan organization of society was finally formed. The clan included several families leading a joint household. The tribal village in the Late Paleolithic period consisted of 7-8 families and totaled 30-40 people. Marriages within a clan never occurred. To form a new family could only representatives of different clans. The genus belonged to hunting grounds, extracted animals, so each person depended on other residents of the village and could not live alone.

In the Late Paleolithic, the most severe glaciation occurred. At the beginning of this glaciation, the climate on the territory of our region resembled the climate of modern Yakutia. A man was forced to learn how to sew warm clothes and build homes. They were different in different territorial zones. People learned to build round houses - half dugouts - from the bones of mammoths.

People learned to chop flint in a new way and make long and thin plates from it. Scrapers, cutters, knives, inserts in tips and other tools were made of flint plates. Upon receipt of the plates formed prismatic nuclei. In the Slavyansk region, near the village of Sidorovo, an ancient workshop has been preserved, where people replenished stocks of flint raw materials, made nucleus and plate blanks from it. A similar workshop was found near the village of Novoklinovka in the Amvrosievsky district on the banks of the Krynka River. It arose near the chalk outlets. In 1935, the archaeologist-local historian V.M. Evseev in the Kazennaya beam near Amvrosievka found a very large cluster of bones of ancient bison, and next to it was a site of the Late Paleolithic era.

The last period of the Stone Age is called the Neolithic (VI-IV thousand years BC). In the Neolithic, the population increased so much that hunting game became scarce and there was a need to further cultivate the land, grow grain, and engage in cattle breeding. In addition, the productivity of agriculture and animal husbandry is much higher compared to hunting and gathering. Such a transition to new forms of economy is called the Neolithic or agrarian (i.e., agricultural) revolution.

Neolithic revolution   - A natural phenomenon in the economic and social (social) development of ancient societies. Its essence lies in the forced sharp intensification of labor aimed at overcoming the food crisis. Societies based on a producing economy are undergoing a deep and comprehensive restructuring: settling is taking place, house-building is developing, new cults and myths about the structure of the world are forming, shifts are taking place in the social structure. Many Neolithic tribes completely switched to new ways of providing themselves with food, while others (mainly in the forest zone) were still engaged in hunting and gathering. Agriculture and cattle breeding were developed primarily in warm areas, where there were conditions for growing crops and grazing, including in the south of Ukraine.

In the Neolithic people learned to sculpt and burn pottery. The first pots had a sharp or round bottom, richly ornamented with various impressions and stamps, drawn ornament. Pottery was widely used in connection with agriculture, as it was intended mainly for the preparation of various cereals from crushed grains of millet, barley and wheat.

The Neolithic population of Donbass practiced a mixed economy - hunting and gathering were combined with primitive agriculture. Tribes with such an economy settled mainly in the Seversky Donets Valley, as a very favorable natural environment has developed here.

Large tribes are formed in the Neolithic, uniting several large clans. The tribes controlled the territory on which their hunting grounds, cultivated plots, lakes, and thickets of edible plants were located. An alien tribe had no right to use these lands without the consent of the owners. Childbirth and tribe were ruled by the elders of the most respected people.

Most of the tribes lived in Podontsovye dnieper-Donetsk culture.   They were concentrated in the basin of the Seversky Donets, in the interfluve of the Dnieper and Don ( archaeological culture   denotes a large group of people - several tribes that lived in a certain territory, spoke the same language, led the same economy and built houses in the same way, made dishes, stone tools, etc.). At an early stage of the Dnieper-Donetsk culture, ceramics was still unknown.

In addition to the monuments of the Dnieper-Donetsk culture, in the Podontsovye there are sometimes villages more northern pit-comb culture   forest hunters. This name comes from the method of ornamentation of clay vessels.

A special branch of the economy of the Donetsk Mesolithic and Neolithic tribes was the manufacture of flint tools for their needs and especially for exchange. The flint lying in the chalk forms rich deposits along the right bank of the Donets River, along the valleys of the Krynka, Bakhmutka, Kazenny and Sukhoi Tortsov rivers. The growth of the Neolithic population, the increase in the size of tools and the widespread use of flint axes due to deforestation forced the ancient masters to develop new deposits of flint and organize its production. Flint pieces collected on the chalky slopes or extracted from the bowels of the earth were pre-processed here on the spot or nearby.

Usually workshops were visited in the warm season. On shuttles and wooden rafts, flint products were delivered to areas of long-term settlements. Some products were handed over to neighbors in exchange for their wealth. So flintlock guns from the Donetsk Ridge arrived in the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov, Dnieper and other areas.

At the end of the Neolithic, in the 4th millennium BC, a strong and large community lived in the area of \u200b\u200bmodern Mariupol. The community of this community was not found, but a tribal burial ground was discovered. Excavations were carried out under the guidance of the Kiev archaeologist N.E. Makarenko. The Mariupol burial ground was a long rectangular hole, in which there were 122 bones laid in four rows. Buried men and women were dressed in rich clothes, sheathed with bone beads, plates of fangs of wild boars. Those buried were accompanied by stone pendants, flint knives, animal fang necklaces, axes, arrows, and a stone drilled mace. All burials were densely covered with ocher.

Eneolithic   (copper - stone age) begins in the middle of the 4th millennium BC. and ends in the middle of III millennium BC. It was a time of complete transition to agriculture and animal husbandry. The producing forms of the economy supplanted hunting and gathering and left them a place for auxiliary methods of food production. In the southwestern regions of modern Ukraine and in Moldova, the famous Trypillian agricultural culture is formed in the Eneolithic. East of the Dnieper in the steppe and southern forest-steppe in the Eneolithic tribes lived, whose economy was based on cattle breeding, primarily on horse breeding. In the few Eneolithic settlements between the Dnieper and the Don, animal bones are found, of which more than 50% belong to horses. This is the oldest tamed horse in Europe. Judging by the details found, the reins of the horse were already used for riding.

A few more copper products (tesla axes, awls, jewelry) were valued very highly. Copper came from the Balkans through the tribes of Trypillian culture or from the North Caucasus. The main number of tools was still made of bone and flint. In Eneolithic, the Donetsk center of silicon processing reaches its peak. Old workshops continue to exist near the villages of Krasnoye and Belaya Gora, new ones appear at the village of V. Pustosh near Kramatorsk, near the villages of Malinovka and Rai-Aleksandrovka, Slavyansk region.

Ancient pit culture Donbass formed on the basis of local Eneolithic tribes. It dates from the XXV-XXI centuries. BC. Ancient pit settlements were found in the Don region, Dnieper and in the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov (near the village of Razdolnoye in the Starobeshevsky district). The ancient people were mainly engaged in cattle breeding, raised horses, bulls, goats, sheep, pigs. The bulk of the population migrated from one pasture to another. Herding was supplemented by agriculture. The proportion of agriculture was low. Anthropologically, the ancient pits were tall and well-built people. They were Indo-Europeans. The Indo-European community was formed in the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age and includes the ancestors of many modern peoples of Eurasia.

Indo-Europeans also include tribes catacomb culture.   The tribes of this culture were replaced by the ancient people and existed on the vast expanses of the Left-Bank Ukraine in the XX-XV centuries. BC. In the Azov region, the ancient pit and catacomb tribes coexisted for some time. The catacomb economy was in many ways the same as its predecessors. Life and lifestyle was just as shepherd's. Rare settlements are known only in the forest-steppe. One of them was found in Slavyanogorsk. Only steppe burials were preserved in the steppe. In the Donetsk region investigated about 500 catacomb graves. Especially a lot of them in the Slavic and Artyomovsk regions. By the funerary constructions and inventory, the social and property differentiation of society is clearly visible. Some warriors buried in the catacombs find special symbols of power in the form of drilled maces made of expensive imported stone. The graves of artisans, craftsmen, metallurgists, furriers, etc. are also distinguished.

In the XV century. BC. the situation in the steppe and forest-steppe is changing dramatically. From the distant Volga region, numerous Iranian-speaking tribes of the so-called came to the Left-Bank Ukraine and the Don region. carcass archaeological culture. They completely mastered the Donetsk lands. The economy of the logging society was based on integrated farming and livestock farming. Agriculture was mostly hoe. The main crop was barley. The animal husbandry of the felling tribes was mainly home-based. In the warm season, livestock grazed freely around the villages, in winter kept in pens or in people's homes. They bred mainly bulls and sheep. Some of the products were given by hunting and fishing. The cattle-breeding economy has determined the sedentary lifestyle of the Srub tribes. They lived in large villages located on the banks of rivers and beams. The dwellings looked like semi-dugouts and deepened into the ground by 1.0-1.2 meters.