Historiography of the Neolithic Trans-Urals: the Kozlov and Poludenskaya Cultures

Abstract

The paper concerns the analysis of the history of the study of the Kozlov and Poludenskaya Neolithic Cul-tures. The territory of distribution of these archaeological cultures from the end of the 7th to the third quarter of the 5th millennium BC encompassed the forest Trans-Urals and the southern taiga zone of Western Siberia, as well as the adjacent northern edge of the forest-steppe. The source base of the research is represented by a critical analysis of scientific publications touching upon the problems of the Neolithic period in the Trans-Urals, primarily those addressing the functioning of the Kozlov and Poludenskaya Cultures, since the appearance of the first sci-entific concepts to the present day. Three stages in the history of the study of the analyzed cultures have been identified. Although the first artifacts of the Neolithic era are known in the region since as early as the 1830s–1860s, the beginning of the development of first scientific concepts about the Neolithic period of the Trans-Urals (the first stage) is associated with publications of V.N. Chernetsov and O.N. Bader at the turn of the 1860s–1870s. These researchers contemplated the development of the Trans-Ural Neolithic period within the framework of a single East-Urals culture in three successive stages. V.N. Chernetsov introduced the concept of “the Kozlov phase” into scientific discourse as the early stage, followed by the Yuryinsko-Gorbunovskaya and Chestyyag phases. O.N. Bader retained the name of the early stage as the Kozlov stage, but replaced the designation of the other two with the terms “Poludenskaya” and “Sosnovoostrovskaya” stages. A milestone in the historiography of the Neolithic period in the Trans-Urals was the monograph by V.T. Kovaleva published in 1989. Therein is intro-duced a new, fundamentally different from its predecessors, concept of the development of the Neolithic in the region. The researcher abandoned the view of the cultural unity of the Neolithic period in the Trans-Urals and substantiated two lines of development that had emerged already at the early stage — the Koshkino and Kozlov groups of archaeological sites — and which continued in the Late Neolithic as the Boborykino and Poludenskaya Cultures. Since then, the main ideas of V.T. Kovaleva's concept have been developing, or have been fundamen-tally revised on the basis of new sources compiled by the scientists.