ARCHAEOLOGY EASTERN EUROPE General Description.—Eastern Europe includes the wide plain of European Russia, bounded by the Arctic ocean, the Urals, the Caucasus and the Black sea together with Rumania east of the Carpathians and Bulgaria north of the Balkans; the western boundary might find a better physical basis in the White sea, the lakes Onega, Ladoga and Ilmen, and then the Carpathians and the backbone of the Balkans peninsula. To the east there is no real boundary but the Urals and the Caspian. The history and archae ology of this territory are unintelligible, unless we call to mind that it is divided into belts running east and west and each char acterized by special vegetation, the product of its climate and soil. The northern belt of tundra hardly comes into archaeology ; below it runs the broad expanse of fir and spruce forests down to a line going east-north-east from Berdichev, by Kiev, Orel, Tula, across the junction of the Volga and Kama south of Kazan to the Urals, where it dips down almost to Orenburg. The next belt is of mixed deciduous trees and open ground, from Kishinev (Ch4inau) in Bessarabia to Saratov on the Volga, along it to Samara and across to be interrupted by the Ural woods. South of this is open steppe as far as the sea; as we go south and east the steppe gets more and more salt, so that most of the government of Astrakhan is desert.
The conifers grow on the area which was formerly glaciated; the subsoil to the south of this is loess, covered in the deciduous belt by the rich deposit known as chernozem, black-earth. All these belts are continued into Siberia except so far as the Ural forests interrupt them ; so the loess and the steppes appear in the west beyond the Carpathians. The Crimea is half of it steppe, but its mountains have a Mediterranean forest flora, like a piece of Greece. So the Caucasus with its southern flora is no part of Eastern Europe, but its fertile foot-hills with many rivers flowing into the Kuban and Terek are to be taken with the great plains to the north. And essentially it is all plain; the mountains are upon the boundaries, the only hills are either old moraines, or the low limestone ridge which without rising to any height deflects to the eastward the rivers Dnieper, Donets and Don. These rivers, with the Danube, the Pruth and the Dniester to the west and the Volga to the east, are the chief landmarks in the plain, but have never served as permanent frontier defences.
With such a structure the country offers in its northern forests and its southern mountains refuges in which backward tribes have maintained themselves almost undisturbed for untold ages, but the fertility of the middle strip of black earth has attracted set tlers, and the steppes below have been not so much a place for settlers as a corridor in which, as far as history goes back, tribe has succeeded to tribe, each holding it for less and less time, per haps as the woodlands in the steppe grew less, until by about the I 7th century the mutual raids of Muscovites, Cossacks and Tar tars had almost depopulated it. Most of these historical movements came from the East, but there have been enough from the north west to show that we must not assume the westward movement to be a universal law. From the south-east cultural influences have ascended the Volga or crossed the Ural steppe to the northern forests. From the south influences from Hither Asia penetrated through the Caucasus, and commercial settlers on the south coast, Ancient Greeks, Mediaeval Genoese and Western Europeans in modern times, have affected the southern part of our area.
Palaeolithic man appears in Eastern Europe in Mousterian times; in Russia he occurs just at the edge of the ice-sheet and his remains are buried under the loess. There have been reports of many sites, but few have been published adequately, and mere descriptions are not convincing as there is much difficulty in correlating forms found in this Eastern area with the sequences established in the west. To the Moustier time are referred types from Izyum near the great bend of the Donets, from Kiik-Koba and Volchi Grot near Simferopol in the Crimea, from Ilskaya just north of the Caucasus and from Afontova Gora near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. A good many sites are put down to the Madeleine period, but it is perhaps more correct to say that there was no true Madeleine period in Russia, only a continuation of Aurignac. Such may be mentioned at Kiev, Cyril St., where was a mammoth tusk with engravings representing some sort of creature, something like the woman from edmost in Moravia. From Mizin on the Desna came an ivory statuette of a woman, figures of birds and an ivory bracelet. The birds and the bracelet had upon them meanders and developed swastikas, the first known occurrence of these motives. At Kostenki in Voronezh was found a statuette rather like the Solutre work ; another late Aurignac site which must be mentioned is Hontsi or Gonts in Poltava. A skull like those of the Aurignac period was found at Podkumok near Pyatigorsk, north of the Caucasus, and bones at Kiik-Koba; a skull like that from Galley hill occurred at Undory in Simbirsk government. The latest palaeoliths come from Karacharovo near Murom, being found in the substance of the loess.
This Eastern Aurignac stretches into Siberia to Tomsk, Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk, and further to Shen-hsi in China. In Bulgaria palaeolithic finds occur at Malkata Peshtera in the Trnovo dis trict and on the Moravitsa farther west.
In Mesolithic times there was the so-called Littorina lake, a kind of greater Baltic and kitchen middens on the Russian shores of it, e.g., at Kolomtsy near Novgorod. The Tardenois microliths have been found in Poland, Lithuania, Southern Russia, on the kinghiz steppes north of the Caspian, and away into Siberia. Axes, not unlike the Campigny or the Nostvet types, occur in Olonets, about the Valdai waterparting and further south-east to Ryazan and the Oka. Thin butted axes and then the thick butted improvement stretch right across the north of Russia, and seem to point to Scandinavian affinities. To the same age belong bone harpoons and other bone points with inset flints, but these are not readily to be distinguished from neolithic ; finally pottery comes in, and shows we have reached the neolithic stage.
Mesolithic finds are reported from Bulgaria. But these small flints are still used by fish-eating Tartars in Siberia, so dates must be assigned with caution, especially as we do not know how far behindhand these out-of-the-way regions may have been. Through a great deal of the time when North Russia was still neolithic, the southern countries were using copper, perhaps even bronze.
The neolithic types of North Russia are mostly reflections of Scandinavian or German work; the most interesting and peculiar have the butt end of an axe worked in the shape of an animal's head, quite well done sometimes, and the love of this survived into the bronze age. Farther south on the Valdai plateau and on the Oka at Bologoe, Balakhna and Volosovo, stations with abundant flints, bone work and pottery have been investigated. The pottery has impressions made with a stick, or thumb nails, the maggot pattern, and that of grass woven work. Before the wheel was invented it was probably a great help to make a pot within a wooden mould lined with a mat, pull it out with the help of the mat and peel this off, leaving the perfect pot. This kind of ware goes right across by Irkutsk to Japan, and the flints are also similar. Neolithic stations have been well examined about Bakhmut and Izyum near the bend of the Donets.
The transition to metal in Eastern Europe offers various inter esting problems. The civilization of the black earth regions of South-west Russia, Podolia, Kiev, Poltava and Bessarabia, con tinuous with Galicia, Moldavia and Transylvania, and traceable through Bulgaria as far as Thessaly, seems to belong to Central Europe. It was contemporaneous with a very different life in the steppes and seems to have been destroyed by a western encroachment of steppe folk.
The great characteristic of the copper age in Eastern Europe is the occurrence not so much of objects in copper, which are mostly few and small, but of stone axes of usually admirable workmanship which in their details, e.g., in a kind of raised collar about the shaft hole, must evidently have been modelled upon metal originals. Axes such as these go right across from Jutland to North Russia, then to South Russia and the Kuban region, to Bessarabia, Bulgaria, and appear among the rich metal wares of Troy II. They are evidently connected with the central European type of Marschwitz.
In the far north this stone-age culture seems an extension of the Scandinavian, and something the same may be true in North Central Russia, where in cemeteries of the Fatyanovo type we find globular vases such as may be traced westward into North Germany. Two chance finds at Galich and Seyma appear to show that Mesopotamian influences were reaching even so far north and crossing those from Finland. On the middle Donets and everywhere south of the forests this period is marked by the occurrence of skeletons, associated with lumps of ochre or other red colour. This ritual again goes right across into North Ger many. Three phases of such tombs have been distinguished, pit graves, chambered pit graves and graves under wooden erec tions, and they seem to come in this order. On the open steppe the finds are very poor, but the size of the barrows argues that the dead men were great chiefs. In the Kiev regions red skele tons go with pottery, showing basket-like patterns, as at Yatskovitsa near Kiev. Elsewhere we have corded ware. A chance find at Borodino in Bessarabia yielded four wonderful axes in jade and serpentine, limestone mace-heads and silver looped spearheads and pin ; these objects had spirals upon them in gold plate. The work points to great progress in metal tech nique, and the things must have been mere insignia.
But it is along the north slope of the Caucasus that the red skeletons are accompanied by splendid grave goods which give some hope of dating them. Two barrows at Tsarevskaya con tained dolmens, divided into two chambers by a holed stone. One dolmen had a roof made of two stones with opposite slopes, which looks like a translation of a wooden structure into stone, and so may be independent of dolmens in Western Europe or elsewhere. One of them contained a globular pot just like those from Fatyanovo.
A barrow at Ulski on the Kuban river yielded alabaster long necked statuettes just like the well-known types from the Cyc lades, also a model of a hut, which looks as if it were meant to be put on a waggon, so the people were apparently waggon dwellers such as the Greeks knew in the steppes. The richest barrow, opened in the town of Maikop, contained a man, a woman and a servant, all sprinkled with red. The chief had about him the remains of a canopy, gold and silver sticks threaded through oxen, vessels in gold, stone and clay, mostly of globular form, with almost cylindrical necks, in copper one flat axe and one holed axe, an axe-adze, a dagger, and a head-dress with golden ribbons and rosettes. One of the vessels had beasts upon it, also a real landscape, another only beasts, and upon the canopy were sewn gold plaques shaped as lions and oxen. All these beasts are in a naïf peaceful manner as different as possible from, say, the vigour of Assyrian art, but curiously like the friezes of beasts from Ur, or the predynastic Egyptian work which seems under Asiatic influence. Moreover, the holed axe is identical in form with the gold axe from Ur. These resemblances cannot but mean some influence exercised by early Mesopotamia, but they do not help us to assign dates; we have no reason to suppose that we have at Ur, c. 3 Soo B.C., the earliest examples of such work, whereas beasts as a subject come back again and again into oriental art and we cannot readily distinguish each recurrence as differing from all others in style. As we get away from our timekeepers in Egypt and Mesopotamia, at each remove dating becomes more uncertain. A good many things point to the painted pottery of South-west Russia coming down to about 170o B.C. The red skeletons succeeded to it in that region, but no one can tell how long they had dominated the steppes to the east, and again there is nothing much to put between them and the Scythic culture which history ascribes to 700-20o B.C. Now these red skeletons look like the Indo-Europeans on their way to conquer Asia, whether coming from North Germany, as Tallgren and Kossinna would have it, or formed in South Russia, as Childe. They cannot well come from the north-west and be in the steppes in the third millennium, because the people in Jutland with similar axes and pottery only seem to belong to about 2200 B.C., about the date when battle-ax folk were ruling Troy II.
The first historical name in Southern Russia is that of the Cim merians, who are reported to have invaded Asia Minor in 784 B.C., and certainly appeared south of the Caucasus in Sargon's reign (7 2 2-706 B.c.) ; in Assyrian they are Gimirrai and in Genesis Gomer. Under Esarhaddon (681-669) we find the Scyths men tioned as available for use against the Cimmerians, so we may put the expulsion of the Cirn nerians from Southern Russia about 700 B.c. But of the Cimmerians archaeology can only say that objects which on other grounds belong to the time just preceding 70o B.C. may be assigned to the Cimmerians. It is not clear that they were anything but an earlier wave of Scyths, so that the most archaic "Scythic" things may be theirs, or again they may be part of the "red skeletons." One thing is certain: that the re semblances in name with Cimbri and Cymry are entirely illusory.
Mention must be made of the civilization best represented at Koban just north of the central Darial pass of the Caucasus, an early iron civilization (r ioo B.C. and subsequently) making great use of bronze and showing most remarkable coincidences with Hallstatt types, grafted as it would' appear upon a stock whose roots are south of the Caucasus; the European influence, if such there were, has left hardly any trace in the intervening steppe, and the Koban things do not journey west, save for perhaps a stray axe from Kerch or a bronze belt from near Kiev. Some influence from the west is marked by the few Hallstatt finds in Western Russia, antennae swords, fibulae and high-handled cups. Meanwhile in the Eastern Balkans the painted pottery people, whoever they were, were succeeded by tribes whom we may class as Thracians. Some of these began to pass over into Asia Minor by i soo or so B.C. and others followed c. moo and c. 700, but they seem to ha ye left little archaeological trace in Bulgaria.
In North-east Russia, upon the Kama, we find belated sur vivals of types known in Scandinavia (Malar axes) or in Southern Russia, and much use of stone continuing. In the steppes the coming of the Scythians means new light from Greek as well as Assyrian sources. (See SCYTHIA.) They seem to have come from very far East, with a culture formed under influences from Iran and Mesopotamia which they handed on to Siberia and even China. By about 30o B.C. they were giving way to a new wave of Eastern nomads, the Sarmatae, undoubtedly Iranians ; instead of the Scythian bow and dagger, they used long spears and swords and wore coats of mail; we can see their outfit upon frescoes and grave slabs of the Bosporan kingdom on the Straits of Kerch, and graves with similar equipment occur along the Kuban, and in the region south of Orenburg, and spread steadily westwards. They brought with them a new development of the beast style marked by a strong taste for bright-coloured stones, especially garnet and turquoise. This influence extended even to the northern backwaters. The bronze age in north Russia had passed into the Anan'ino culture on the Kama, with iron, bronze and stone all used together until about the Christian era. In it the peculiar taste for beast-headed axes lived on. Upon the Upper Yenisei round about Minusinsk, and later Krasnoyarsk, a bronze culture had developed almost in isolation since before i000 B.C. For the next soo years it was almost cut off, though a few western in fluences penetrated; in the last soo years B.c. it was strongly influenced by the Scythic beast style, not so much from Southern Russia as from some more easterly focus, and yet the antennae sword of Hallstatt seems first to have affected the Scythic dagger and then the Siberian. Apparently a Siberian invention is the curved knife with a ring on the end of the handle, which is regarded as the ancestor of the Chinese knife money.
The Sarmatian style went right across the north of Asia; specimens of it, both daggers and decorations, have been found in Korea in graves of about our era, and at the same date Mon golian graves north of Urga contained even textiles, with beast motives exactly like the gold work of Western Siberia (now preserved mostly in the Hermitage in Leningrad, but collected for Peter the Great), Southern Russia and even Hungary, into which the Sarmatians penetrated in the first centuries A.D.
But the current was not only westwards. La The finds in south Bulgaria begin about 30o B.C. and La Tene II. swords occur in Rumania, and so in Western Russia about Kiev both periods are represented ; this means the historical raids of the Kelts and later the Germanic Sciri and Bastarnae. These must have crossed the territory of the Getae and Daci, Thracian tribes whose well built settlements have been investigated by Parvan. With the extension of the Roman power to the Balkans the archaeological interest takes a new character as part of the archaeology of the Roman provinces rather than of Eastern Europe. In the same way the remains of the Greek cities along the Black sea dating from the 7th century B.C. are a province of Greek archaeology; we need only say that their interest for students of sculpture and archi tecture is small, but for ceramics not negligible, for painting quite important, and for textiles, woodwork and jewellery almost unrivalled.
Roman coin finds are common in Russia from just before A.D. Ioo until just after A.D. 200, and penetrate up to Scandinavia. The end of them coincides with the arrival of the Goths upon the Black sea. To these are assigned graves (not in barrows) contain ing wheel-made pots, silver fibulae, bronze buckles, bone combs, glass beads and vessels, and of course iron weapons. The fibulae develop from the La Tene II. type with recurved foot and assume the familiar cross-bow, five-knobbed, square-headed and other forms of Teutonic use. But their origin seems to be in South Russia. This is the Sarmatian taste developed by the half-Sarmatian craftsmen of the Bosporus, adopted by the Goths, spread by them all over Europe and handed on to the other Germanic tribes, together with a form of beast style that radically changed the earlier Germanic beast style, itself perhaps not free from Scythic influence. One section of the Goths pene trated the Caucasus, and their cemetery is at Rutkha on the northern slope ; others stuck in the Crimea and survived until the i 7th century. The richest Gothic cemetery is at Gurzuf ; similar things are found in the Balkans as far south as Chataldzha by Constantinople. A Gothic kingdom seems to have maintained itself upon the Dnieper until the middle of the 6th century, suc cumbing to the Avars, and there was another settlement upon the Oka.
Meanwhile the native Finnish cultures of the centre and north of Russia went on repeating old types, very much behind the times, and occasionally accepting and simplifying imported de signs, applying them to strange cast bronze figures in which the Scythic beast style survived in a degenerate form. These had some use in Shamanist cults, which also required great silver dishes imported from the south and paid for in furs. Hence it comes about that, besides Greco-Roman and Byzantine plate, the recesses of Perm have furnished the greater part of the sur viving specimens of Sassanian silver work. In Central Russia the people lived in fortified villages of the type called D'yakovo.
The Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries were forerunners of swarms of Asiatics, mostly of Turkish race, who passed along the corridor. Coming from the north-east they often divided the inhabitants and forced part into the Caucasus and part west wards; this happened to the Goths and to the Alans whose descendants survive in the Ossetes of the Central Caucasus, and later to the Magyars. To the Huns succeeded the Avars, fleeing from the Turks in the 6th century and the Bulgars in the 7th ; then came the Magyars in the 8th century, Finno-Ugrians under Turkish influence, of whom the Bulgars left some part of their nation to develop into a civilized state at the confluence of the Kama and Volga, where their buildings have lately been exca vated ; Khazars, Pechenegs, Cumans and finally the Tartars in the i 3 th century, each came in from the East and most were forced out to the west, Bulgars into the Balkans, the others into Hungary. Archaeologically we note these peoples by the de velopment of oriental metal work, especially in horse trappings buried in their barrows, and by great hoards of loot that they or their victims hid and never recovered, such as the Pereshchepina hoard amassed by an Avar chief, the Nagy Szent Miklos treasure with its Bulgar inscriptions, or the many hoards buried by the Russians at the coming of the Tartars.
Again, we must not forget the less catastrophic and more im portant western currents, above all the Slays, who must have been spreading from the Carpathian countries under the Gothic rule, but have left singularly little trace by which we can dis tinguish them from Finns ; certain semi-circular ear-rings, and particular pots are put down as Slavonic because of their western analogues. Most of the objects found in graves of settled people show a mixture of Scandinavian and Arab influence, and the Arab coins are most important, going up the Volga to Scandinavia. With the conversion of the Russians to Christianity their things become more interesting, and the ear-rings develop into the well known kolts often with enamel imitated from the Byzantine. In recent years much has been done to investigate the remains of pre-Mongol Russia. The Tatar invasion may be taken as the final point, but the Finns to the north continued till very recent times to bury with elaborate grave-goods after the ancient tra dition.