Початок металургії доби пізньої бронзи у Східній Європі

Abstract

The article discusses the sources of innovations that paved the way for metallurgy in the Late Bronze Age and a number of fallacies, forming the legacy of Soviet archaeology, that entered the contemporary archaeology of Eastern Europe and gained the status of axioms underpinning the body of universally recognized knowledge. One such fallacy is the "Seymin-Turbin Transcultural Phenomenon that was born in the Altay Territory" (Chernykh, Kuzminykh 1987). When viewed in the light of newly discovered facts, it turns out that the Seymin terra incognita of V.S. Bochkarov was situated not in Siberia but in Right-Bank Ukraine. This region, unlike the Volga Region or even less so the Altay, since the 5th millennium BC had formed the northern portion of an Eneolithic early-agrarian civilisation according to Machnik (1987). These several millennia of cultural development ensured "an exceptionally high development level of metallurgy and metalworking for those times" in Eastern Europe (Klochko 2017a), which in turn had a considerable impact on the subsequent cultural development of northern Eurasia. Therefore, does it appear that the Aryans set out on their route to India from the banks of the Dnieper? Or rather from the banks of the Rhine but via the Dnieper? What will DNA analyses tell us?