During the 2024 field season, members of the North-Western Archaeological Expedition continued the study of pile-dwelling settlements in the Serteya Valley (Smolensk Region). In the course of the work, several unique artefacts have been discovered.
“We are continuing to study the multi-layered Serteya II site which is being explored using underwater archaeological methods, as well as its riverside utility zone. It is yielding some utterly new, astonishing materials,” Andrei Mazurkevich, the head of the expedition. states. “For the first time we have managed to uncover antiquities from the 5th–4th millennia BC in the Dnieper-Dvina interfluve. Our finds point to the strong influence of the steppe and forest-steppe cultures of Eastern Europe and the penetration of bearers of those cultures into the forest zone. Those were fairly small, mobile groups of animal herders. So far there is no evidence that the penetration of the steppe-dwellers in the north-west led to the keeping of livestock, but we can say for certain that they brought their material culture: clay vessels, objects made from bone and horn.”
One of this season’s important finds is a pendant made from a boar’s tusk, a man’s pectoral ornament, that was found in a cultural layer of the 5th–4th millennia BC at the Sertyeya II peat-bog settlement.
Additionally, last year the archaeologists began the exploration of one more settlement – Serteya XI, which dates from the 3rd–2nd millennia BC. Some exceptional items have been discovered, including a bronze adze testifying to the local population’s active trading links with southern Bronze Age tribes. Bronze artefacts were hitherto unknown in 3rd-millennium BC settlement sites in this region.
“This year we found an amber pendant there,” Andrei Mazurkevich related. “It had originally been used as a sewn-on spangle, but then was reworked to become a personal adornment. That indicates that although the ‘Amber Road’ ran along the Western Dvina, here on the River Serteya amber articles were few in number and highly prized.”
Another unique find is an anthropomorphic flint figurine. Such articles have previously not been found so far to the west. Now a whole body of research needs to be carried out to establish whether this figurine was used as a pendant or an amulet, or else had some other function. Furthermore, archaeologists conjecture that it may not have been fully finished. If that hypothesis is confirmed, then it will be possible to assert that the figurine was produced by local craftspeople.
The study of pile-dwelling settlements in north-west Russia is associated with Alexander Miklayev, a leading researcher in the Hermitage’s Department of the Archaeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia, who turned 90 this year. He discovered and was the first to investigate these sites back in 1963. Since that time work on them has been carried out in a consistent and planned manner.
“An integrated programme formed for the study of peat-bog sites, including the phenomenon of pile-dwelling settlements in north-west Russia. Now the chief task is to study the structure of the settlements, the methods used to construct dwellings, the economics of their way of life and the palaeoecology,” Andrei Mazurkevich explains. “This is a unique situation, a rare opportunity provided by the museum. Our scientific studies have been supported by the Russian Research Foundation (project No 22-18-00086: ‘Between East and West: hunter-gatherers of the lake district in the west of Russia in the 7th–3rd millennia BC (economic strategies, cultural traditions , inter-regional relations and palaeoecological conditions)’).”
During the field work in July and August, a field school also operated with the support of the Istoriya Otechestva [History of Our Country] for the ninth time already. Around twenty young archaeologists and students from various places in Russia took part. The programme included guided tours and a series of lectures on the Neolithic Revolution, the history of the study of Russia’s peat-bog archaeological sites, pile-dwelling settlements, the approach to investigating Stone Age sites and the conservation of artefacts made of organic materials and ceramics in the field.
