Светлана Жарникова – Ornamental complex of the Nort of Russia (страница 2)

The problem of localizing the ancestral home of the Slavs is no less controversial than Indo-Iranian. B. V. Gornung considers it possible to connect, the primary the area of formation of the Proto-Slavs with the carriers of the Trypillian Eneolithic culture of its middle stage.

At present, Soviet teachings are more and more confidently localizing the ancestral home of the Proto-Slavs in the Dnieper region and the Carpathian region, and associating the Trzhynec-Komarov culture with them II millennium BC (S. S. Berezanskaya, B. A. Rybakov, V. Danilenko, O. N. Trubachev, I. K. Sveshnikov, T. K. Alekseeva, A. I. Terenozhkin, V. A. Ilyinskaya and others). Archaeological materials testify that the connections, recorded at the level of the Eneolithic Yamnaya and Trypillian cultures, continue in subsequent historical periods, and that the Tschinetsko-Komarovskaya, Abashevskaya and Srubnaya cultures to a certain extent have common origins. The relative stability of the population of the Dnieper region and the fact that its ethnogenetic roots go back to antiquity are evidenced by anthropological data, “allowing us to trace the history of the physical ancestors of the East Slavic peoples to the Bronze Age” (V. P. Alekseev. Paleoanthropology and history. VI. 1985. no. 1.p. 35), i.e. until the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. The stability of the Slavic population on the Proto-Slavic territory is also evidenced by the fact that, as B. A. Rybakov notes, the boundaries of the Proto-Slavic Trzynets culture of the 2nd millennium BC completely coincide with the area of the Slavic Przeworsk and Zarubinets cultures of the 3rd century BC - III century AD (Herodotova Scythia. M. 1979. p. 206). Since the territories of the formation of Indo-Iranian peoples are currently recognized by most researchers in Eastern Europe and there were no historical reasons that, as noted by N. R. Guseva about the territory under consideration” (Hinduism. M. 1977. p. 43), and became one of the components in the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs, whose original ethnic area was in close proximity to the Indo-Iranian, one can conclude about the ancient contacts of the Pre-Slavs and Indo-Iranians. Many acts testify to these ancient contacts. These are data from anthropology, linguistics, onomastics, the proximity of sacred vocabulary, many mycological plots and images of folk art, common among the East Slavic and Indo-Iranian peoples.

One of the exceptionally valuable historical sources that make it possible to trace the significant antiquity of the Proto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian ties is folk ornamentation and, in particular, the deeply archaic geometric and plot ornament of North Russian embroidery, weaving, lace and woodcarving, since, according to S. V. Ivanov, “parts or groups of a disintegrated tribe often disperse and lose contact with each other, but the ornament, continuing to preserve ancient traditions, testifies to the ancient commonality of these groups” (Folk ornament as a historical source. SE. 1958. No. 2. p. 18).

The first chapter of this work is devoted to the analysis of the formation and development of the East European ornament over many millennia and the identification of both in the East Slavic, and in particular, the North Russian ornament, and in the ornaments of modern descendants of the ancient Indo-Iranian peoples, common origins, dating back to ancient times. But before turning directly to archaic Eastern European ornamentation, the author considers it necessary to dwell on an extremely important issue - modern scientific data on the time of human settlement in the north of Eastern Europe. O. N. Bader believed that due to the continentality of the climate in northeastern Europe there was no glacier, and already in the Mousterian epoch (about 100 to 40 thousand years ago) the settlement of Neanderthals covered vast areas in the north. Probably at this time, the first meeting of people with the Arctic Ocean in northeastern Europe took place (O. N. Bader. From the depths of the Paleolithic. VI. 1976. No. 2. p. 126-127), which is confirmed by the presence of the Krutaya site on Pechora The mountain, the lower layer of which is about 70 thousand years old. The presence of Paleolithic sites in the north of Eastern Europe is noted by V. S. Stokolos and K. S. Korolev in their work "The Archaeological Map of the Komi ASSR" (M. 1984). Moreover, such of them as the Byzovskaya site, located not far from the Krutaya Gora, in its inventory has much in common with layers of the same age with it (25 - 29 thousand years) of the Don site of Kostenki I, XII. During the Mesolithic period in northern Europe, the number of human sites increases, as evidenced by archaeological research by S. V. Oshibkina, V. S. Stokolos, G. M. Burov, V. I. Kanivets, and the influx of population comes from the southwestern regions of the Volga-Oka and Baltic-Dnieper (Stokolos V. S., Korolev K. S. 1984), and "traces of the resettlement of the Mesolithic population from the Ural regions have not been found" (Oshibkina S. V. Mesolithic Sukhona and Eastern Prionezhie. M. 1983. p. 284). The Neolithic period in these territories was also not a time of depopulation. So, only in the basins of Pechora, Vychegda, Mezen, about two dozen Neolithic sites were discovered on the shores of watershed lakes and in river valleys, and this despite the fact that the Russian North has been very little studied archaeologically (Stokolos B. C. 1984). G. M. Byrov notes the proximity of the Neolithic Kargopol pottery widespread in the north of Eastern Europe from the Middle Volga and Dnieper-Donetsk mid or late 5th - mid 4th millennia BC (Bypov G. M. Archaeological cultures of the north of the European part of the USSR. Ulyanovsk. 1974, p. 93). At the same time, the coincidence of the ornaments of Kargopol Neolithic ceramics with patterns on wooden items of the Mesolithic age (VII millennium BC) from the same northern territories was noted (Burov G. M. 1974. p. 93), which gives grounds to consider the Neolithic the population of the north of Eastern Europe is ethno-genetically close to the Mesolithic that preceded it - firstly,and secondly, it allows us to raise the question of whether the origins of the common material culture of Northwestern Ukraine, the Middle Volga region and the North of Eastern Europe, repeatedly noted by researchers of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age of these regions, lie in the depths of the Paleolithic - Mesolithic. Probably, B.V. Gornung was right, who believed that the belief that the Indo-Europeans, whose composition must be sought in the depths of the Stone Age, in their movements in Europe met various numerous non-Indo-European substrates is not true and that: “such an overestimation the role of these substrates and the widespread search for them are not justified ", ie:" Indo-European tribes in their migrations of the second half of the 3rd - early 2nd millennium BC often... they walked the same way, following each other, so to speak "catching up with each other" (Gornung B.V. 1963, p. 41). We can assume, based on the data of archeology, anthropology and other related sciences, that the substrate population of the north of Eastern Europe before the beginning of the movement here in the first half of the 1st millennium AD of the Slavs was largely (if not the overwhelming majority) Indo-European, related to language and culture to those who went to these lands from the lands of Novgorod and lower Russia. The preservation of elements of folk culture in the Russian North at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, often more archaic not only than the ancient Greek ones but also recorded in the Vedas, can probably be explained by the fact that the population of these places was largely descendants of the ancient population that had formed here back in as a result of advances up to the Bronze Age, i.e. at a time when, possibly, many social structures, mythological schemes and those ornamental schemes that were common for the vast Slavic-Indo-Iranian region and survived in relict form until our days, were taking shape.

Many ornaments that are components of complex geometric compositions of North Russian branched weaving, embroidery and lace, on the one hand, and Central Asian, Iranian, North Indian ornamental complexes, on the other, have their origins in the ornamentation of such Upper Paleolithic cultures of Eastern Europe as Kostenkovskaya (rows of oblique crosses ) and Mezin (rhombo-meander pattern). These ornaments, which have no direct analogies in the Paleolithic art of Europe, served V. A. Gorodtsov in his proposed division of the European Upper Paleolithic cultures of the Madeleine time (20-25 thousand years BC) into three separate areas - Western European, Central European and Eastern European (by the nature of the monuments of art) - the basis for highlighting the last (Eastern European) region. Complex swastika-meander ornaments, which continue to exist on various products of the Neolithic and Eneolithic period in Eastern Europe, in particular on the monuments of the Tisza and Trypollian cultures, appear in other parts of the Old World only in the Bronze Age, being a kind of indicator of the ways of the Eastern European Indo-European population habitat. B. A. Rybakov, exploring the development paths of the ancient rhombo-meander ornament in the Neolithic, noted the stability of this complex and difficult pattern, its undoubted connection with the ritual sphere, calling it a connecting link between the Paleolithic, where it first appeared and modern ethnography, which gives an incalculable the number of examples of such a pattern in fabrics, drinking and weaving” (Paganism of the ancient Slavs. M. 1981. p. 158).