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R ADIOCARBON , Vol 51, Nr 2, 2009, p 783–793

THE SPREAD OF THE NEOLITHIC IN THE SOUTH EAST EUROPEAN PLAIN:

RADIOCARBON CHRONOLOGY, SUBSISTENCE, AND ENVIRONMENT

Pavel M Dolukhanov 1 • Anvar Shukurov 2 Kate Davison 2 Graeme Sarson 2 Natalia P

Gerasimenko 3 Galina A Pashkevich 4 Aleksandr A Vybornov 5 Nikolai N Kovalyukh 6

V V Skripkin 6 Ganna I Zaitseva 7 Tatiana V Sapelko 8

ABSTRACT. Newly available radiocarbon dates show the early signs of pottery-making in the North Caspian area, the Mid-

dle-Lower Volga, and the Lower Don at 8–7 kyr cal BC. Stable settlements, as indicated by “coeval subsamples,” are recog-

nized in the Middle-Lower Volga (Yelshanian) at 6.8 kyr cal BC and the Caspian Lowland at about 6 kyr cal BC. The ages of

the Strumel-Gostyatin, Surskian, and Bug-Dniesterian sites are in the range of 6.6–4.5 kyr BC, overlapping with early farming

entities (Star Ë evo-Körös-Cri ∫ and Linear Pottery), whose influence is perceptible in archaeological materials. Likewise, the

14 C-dated pollen data show that the spread of early pottery-making coincided with increased precipitation throughout the for-

est-steppe area.

INTRODUCTION

Recently available radiocarbon dates show that the early pottery-making communities in the steppe

and boreal areas of eastern Europe started spreading at an early date, comparable to and even pre-

ceding in age to the early farming communities in southeastern Europe. In most of these cases, the

subsistence pattern remained essentially Mesolithic with little or no evidence of farming or stock-

breeding. Yet the appearance of pottery-making signaled the appearance of attributes of complex

societies, such as sedentism, increased population density, intensive food procurement, technologi-

cal innovations, development of exchange networks (which in some cases included their agricultural

neighbors), social differentiation, and territorial control. Consequently, the current project, among

other objectives, was focused on: (1) improved 14 C-based and statistically tested chronologies of

early pottery sites in the south East European Plain; (2) detailed assessment of the environments of

early pottery-making sites; and (3) developing a mathematically robust model of the transition to the

Neolithic using the aforementioned data.

METHODS

We us e 14 C data sets for the early Neolithic cultures of the southern steppe zone of eastern Europe

(Figure 1). Some of the dates (for the Bug-Dniesterian, Surskian, Dnieper-Donietz, Azov-Dniepe-

rian, and Donetsian cultures) have been published by Kotova (2002, 2003), whereas newly obtained

dates (for the Yelshanian, North Caspian, Rakushechyj Yar, and Strumel-Gastyatin cultures) are

published in Dolukhanov et al. (2009). All 14 C dates discussed here are presented as calibrated BC

(cal BC). However, the ages obtained from statistical modeling are given in yr BC; any modeling

was applied to calibrated 14 C dates. OxCal v. 4.0 (Bronk Ramsey 1995, 2001) with the calibration

curve IntCal04 (Reimer et al. 2004) was used for the calibration. Uncertainty of the individual cali-

1 School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. Corresponding author. Email:

pavel.dolukhanov@ncl.ac.uk.

2 School of Mathematics and Statistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom.

3 Department of Earth Sciences and Geomorphology, Taras Shevchenko National University, Kiev, Ukraine.

4 Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences, Kiev, Ukraine.

5 Samara Pedagogical University, Russia.

6 Radiocarbon Laboratory, Institute of Environmental Geochemistry, National Academy of Sciences, Kiev, Ukraine.

7 Radiocarbon Laboratory, Institute for History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia.

8 Institute of Limnology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Proceedings of the 5th International 14 C and Archaeology Symposium , edited by Irka Hajdas et al.

R ADIOCARBON , Vol 51, Nr 2, 2009, p 783–793

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P M Dolukhanov et al.

brated dates was characterized by the corresponding fraction (1/4 or 1/6) of the continuous cali-

brated date interval at the confidence levels 95.4% and 99.7% (the latter was used if the former inter-

val had significant discontinuities).

Figure 1 Early Neolithic cultures in eastern and central Europe: 1–Yelshanian;

2–North Caspian; 3–Rakushechnyj Yar; 4–Surskian; 5–Dnieper-Donetsian; 6–

Bug-Dniesterian; 7–Upper Volga; 8–Narvian; 9–Linear Pottery. White arrows:

expansion of early farming; black arrows: spread of pottery-making traditions.

The 14 C dates used here have been obtained for the organic matter in the pottery, animal and human

bones, and freshwater mollusk shells found in the archaeological deposits. Human bones and mol-

lusk shell are affected by the 14 C reservoir effect, which offsets the dates towards older ages (Lillie

et al. 2008; Zaitseva et al. 2009). This effect is as yet difficult to quantify in general terms, so we

treat such dates at their face value here. The entities most strongly affected by this effect are the

Dnieper-Donets and Azov-Dnieperian cultures, where most of the dates come from cemetery skele-

tal remains; the age estimates for these cultures should be treated with caution. A significant number

of dates for the Yelshanian culture used here are from mollusk shells, but they do not belong to the

oldest group of dates and thus do not affect our conclusions.

The data sets used in this paper contain a statistically significant number of 14 C dates for each of the

cultures, which justifies our attempt to apply statistical modeling to them. It is a widely recognized

problem that choosing the oldest date from a set of multiple date determinations, in order to charac-

terize a “first arrival” event, can amount to choosing the least probable date from the set. More

sophisticated procedures are required, but there are no universally adopted procedures of this kind.

The approach used in this paper is detailed below (see Davison et al. 2009 for a detailed discussion).

If only a few (<8) date measurements are available, and those dates all agree within the error, we use

their weighted mean value. For a series of dates that cluster in time but do not agree within the cal-

ibration error, we use different approaches depending on the number of dates available and their

errors. Should the cluster contain <8 dates, we take the mean of the dates (as in the previous case),

as any more sophisticated statistical technique would be inappropriate for such a small sample. If,

however, the date cluster is large (i.e. >8 dates), the

, where

is the confidence interval corre-

sponding to the 1-

deviation. The uncertainty of the resulting age estimate is then characterized by

2 statistical test can be used to calculate the

most likely date T 0 of a coeval subsample as described in detail by Dolukhanov et al. (2005). The

calculations results are presented in the form T = T 0 ±

Spread of Neolithic in the S. East European Plain

785

σ c . Our procedure is very sim-

ilar to that implemented in the “R_Combine” function of OxCal (Bronk Ramsey 2001). However,

OxCal’s procedure first combines the uncalibrated dates into a single 14 C measurement and only

then calibrates it. Our approach, on the other hand, first uses the calibration scheme of OxCal and

then combines the resulting calibrated dates to give T . For our purposes, this adds the flexibility of

discarding dates with the largest relative deviation from T . As a check, we combined several sets of

dates using both OxCal and our procedure; the results agree within an acceptable margin.

If a geographically localized culture has many 14 C determinations that do not cluster around a single

date, a histogram of the dates is analyzed. If the data have a wide range and have no discernible

peaks (i.e. are approximately uniformly distributed in time), they may suggest prolonged Neolithic

activity at the site, and we choose, as many other authors, the oldest date (or one of the oldest, if

there are reasons to reject outliers) to identify the first appearance of the Neolithic. Apart from sites

with either no significant peak or only 1 peak, there are sites whose 14 C dates have a multimodal

structure, which may indicate multiple waves of settlement passing through this location (e.g. the

Yelshanian culture). In such cases, multiple dates were attributed to the culture.

RESULTS

Environments

Several 14 C-dated pollen sequences are now available for the steppe and forest-steppe of Ukraine,

notably, Glubokoe and Rogalik 12 (Figure 2) (Gerasimenko 1995). Based on this and other evi-

dence, the reconstruction of the vegetation cover for Ukraine’s Atlantic period was carried out.

These data show the general expansion of mixed forests with broad-leaved species, oak, lime, elm,

as well as hygrophilous elements, ash tree ( Fraxinus excelsior ) and ivy ( Hedera helix ), in a time

span broadly coincident with the appearance of Neolithic settlements. The early Atlantic pollen

spectra in the southwestern steppe (Beloles’e and Mirnoe sequences; Pashkevich 1982) show higher

values of pine and broad-leaved arboreal species ( Quercus , Tilia , Carpinus , Ulmus ), the grassland

dominated by forbs, and that Compositae and Chenopodiaceae acquired a mesophytic character. A

similar character of Early Atlantic vegetation is evident in the Lower Dniester area (Volontir 1989).

During the Atlantic period, forests expanded both northwards and southwards with respect to their

present-day locations. Entire valleys of the Dnieper, Dniester, Southern Bug, Seversky Donets, and

Don were forested, and the forests reached the Black Sea shores. Broad-leaved forests transgressed

into the steppe, considerably diminishing the treeless area.

Recently obtained pollen evidence shows similar changes occurring in the eastern forest-steppe

area. The sequence of the Chekalino I site on Sok River (a tributary of the Middle Volga, Samara

Oblast) indicates the appearance of Ulmus , Quercus , and Populus pollen at the level of early

Neolithic settlement (Figure 3, zone 2), suggesting the occurrence of floodplain forests. The high

percentage of Chenopodiaceae , Artemisia , and Gramineae pollen signals the prevalence of steppe

communities further afield.

According to quantitative estimates for various areas of the East European Plain (Khotinsky 1977,

1987; Kremenetsky 1991, 2003; Khotinsky and Klimanov 2002), the climate during the time span

of about 6000–4500 BP was of a less continental character with milder winters and a mean annual

temperature exceeding the present one by 2

C. In the steppe, the January temperature was higher

C. Annual precipitation was higher by 100–150 mm

(Kremenetsky 2003). The data for the Samara Oblast suggest increased precipitation and a lowering

of temperature during the Atlantic period.

C, and the July one, lower by 2

the standard deviation of the dates in the coeval subsample, denoted

than now by 1

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P M Dolukhanov et al.

Figure 2 Pollen diagram of the Rogalik 12 peat bog

Figure 3 Pollen diagram of the Chekalino 4 site

Chronology of Archaeological Sites

Yelshanian

The Yelshanian-type (Y) pottery, the earliest technology of this kind on the East European Plain,

was first recognized in the Samara-Volga area in the 1970s (Vasiliev and Panin 1977). By now, the

typical “Yelshanian assemblage” has been identified at several sites: Staraya Yelshanka I, II; Mak-

simovo; Chekalino; Lower Orlyanka; Ivanovka; Lugovoye III; Lebyazh’ye I; Bol’she-Rako-

pvskaya; Il’ynskaya; Krasnyi Gorodok; Zakhar-Kolma; Vilovatovskaya; and a few others

(Mamonov 1994; Lastovsky 2006). In all these sites, the “pure Yelshanian element” has been recog-

nized only in 2 cases, the lower strata of Chekalino IV and Lower Orlyanka II.

Yelshanian pottery was manufactured from the local sandy clay, which included a natural admixture

of organic matter and small fragments of mollusk shells. The vessels were fired in open hearths at

Spread of Neolithic in the S. East European Plain

787

C. The vessels had rounded or pointed bottoms and straight rims

with either flat, round, or pointed edges, transforming into S-profiled rims. The majority of pottery

vessels were not ornamented; in rare cases, one notes incised lines, pit impressions, or short notches,

forming zigzag patterns. Several vessels were decorated by a belt beneath the rim consisting of pits

and “pearl” impressions.

Presently, 22 14 C dates have been obtained for the organic matter in the pottery and freshwater shells

found in the archaeological deposits. These and other data have been processed in an attempt to

identify the coeval periods. This test for the Yelshanian culture yields T = 6771 ± 160 BC with

σ c =

132 yr (Figure 4a).

The North Caspian

Early pottery sites have been identified in various parts of the North Caspian (NC) Lowland and

along the lower stretches of the Volga River. Vasiliev and Vybornov (1988) distinguish 2 cultural

groups, the Kairshak-Tenteksorian and Jangar-Varfolomeyvian, which together form the Lower

Volga cultural entity. Each group comprises several chronological stages. The Kasirshak-Tentekso-

rian culture had apparently developed on the local Mesolithic substratum, which is evident in the

Mesolithic character of its lithic industry. Its pottery, which has no direct analogies, was manufac-

tured from clay that included crushed shells, fish scales and vertebra, and plant remains. The pottery

consists of straight-walled vessels with round bases, ornamented by incised lines and oval impres-

sions forming simple geometric patterns.

The sites belonging to the Jangar-Varfolomeyevian cultural entity are found both on the right and

left banks of the Volga River (Yudin 2004). Its common features include the prevalence of the blade

technique in the stone inventory, with a high proportion of tools, particularly various types of end-

scrapers, with the common occurrence of geometrics and arrowheads. The pottery was usually man-

ufactured from clay with crushed shells. The flat-based pots with strait or S-shaped walls were dec-

orated in the upper portions by strokes and incised lines forming simple geometric patterns .

Recently, a large series of 14 C dates has been obtained for organic matter in the ceramics. The coeval

sample test reveals T = 5859 ± 236 yr BC with

Rakushechnyi Yar

Rakushechnyi Yar (RY) is a clearly stratified settlement located on a small island in the lower

stretches of the Don River (Belanovskaya 1995). The excavations exposed an area of ~1200 m 2 ,

with 23 archaeological layers ranging from the Bronze Age to the Neolithic. The deepest levels (23–

6) belong to the Early Neolithic. The pottery, which constitutes the main element of the material cul-

ture, is encountered in large quantities starting with the lowermost level of the site. These are

straight-walled or slightly profiled flat- and conic-bottomed vessels with either straight or outside

bended rims. In the ornamented vessels, the decoration was usually restricted to the upper portion

and consists of impressions of stamps, fish bones, and shell rims. The coeval sample assessment of

14 C dates for Early Neolithic levels of RY yields T = 5960 ± 260 with

Bug-Dniesterian

The Early Neolithic in western Ukraine and Moldova is usually associated with sites of the Bug-

Dniesterian culture (BD) (Danilenko 1969; Markevich 1974). About 40 sites belonging to this cul-

temperatures not exceeding 450

σ c = 192. Significantly, there is a considerable num-

ber of dates falling beyond the subsample and showing ages in the range 8000–6500 BC (Figure 4b).

σ c = 212. As in the previous

case, a significant number of older dates (6900–6600 BC) fall beyond the coeval sample (Figure 4c).

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