Special section
Soviet archaeology in the steppe zone
Introduction
V.M. MASSON"& TIMOTHY TAYLOR
The steppe region, the temperate grassland of
the Asian land-mass that runs the thousands of
kilometres practically from the coast of the
Atlantic to the coast of the Pacific, is one of the
great zones of human settlement. It offers
archaeology on the large scale, where local
adaptations link to a grander picture. Most of
the steppe falls in the Soviet Union and is
studied by Soviet archaeologists, much of
whose work is inaccessible to those many of us
who have no Russian.
The steppe is novel in a second way also, for
Soviet archaeology has a distinctive flavour in
its ideas and how it works with them; there are
concerns and terminologies that do not quite
correspond with the common concepts of west
European scholars.
This special section, which is edited by the
director of the archaeological institute in Lenin-
grad and by ANTIQUITY'S assistant editor, there-
fore offers us new archaeology from the Soviet
steppes in two senses of the phrase.
Cultural transformation and historical
progress in the steppe zone
Numerous sites in the Eurasian steppe zone
have been investigated by Soviet archaeo-
logists. These investigations include expedi-
tions organized by the Leningrad branch of the
institute of Archaeology of the Academy of
Sciences of the Soviet Union. The sites cover a
huge time-span, from the Palaeolithic to the
medieval period. Thanks to the specific char-
acteristics of the natural environment, pro-
cesses of cultural adaptation are strikingly
apparent in terms of the formation of special
cultural-economic types with their characteris-
tic ways of life; correspondingly, material
* Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 191041 Leningrad, Dvortsovaya naberezhnaya 18, USSR.
ANTIQUITY
63 (1989): 779-83
culture reflects these phenomena in the
archaeological record.
The spatial disconnectedness of the huge
zone was gradually overcome as a result of
technical and economic advances. The tribes
that lived here often created dynamic systems
for the dissemination of information and
exchange of cultural achievements.
Soviet philosophers view society as an
adaptive-adapting system. In ancient commu-
nities, adaptive processes operated in three main
spheres. Firstly, economic strategy, aimed at
reliability in the provision of food and, later, at the
provision of raw materials for the various indus-
tries that had become an integral part of the
economic macrosystem. Secondly, a large part
was played by adaptation in everyday life directed
towards the creation of an artificial environment
from dwellings to clothes and artefacts for pro-
cessing and using food. Finally, social adaptation
was also of great significance although it is even
more difficult to reconstruct from archaeological
material. The decisive r6le here was played by the
transformation of the socio-normative system,
actively realizing internal mechanisms as well as
perfecting them and creating new ones.
Existing material demonstrates that, in the
steppe zone, three main cultural stages or
epochs occurred as the result of the interaction
of mechanisms of cultural adaptation and social
progress.
The first stage of culture is the type repre-
sented by the Palaeolithic mega-fauna hunters.
Its essential features are relative stability, embo-
died in nomad base-camps, and intellectual
progress, reflected particularly in a large
number of prestige, symbolic innovations from
statuettes to symbolic marks.
780 V.M. MASSON & TIMOTHY TAYLOR

FIGURE 1. The Eurasian steppe zone. Present-day environmental zonation, with grassland-steppe shown
hatched and mountain shown stippled (collated from several sources; zonation in the Sayano-Altai
cannot be shown in detail with these conventions because it varies more with altitude than latitude in
this region). The grassland-steppe Jies between 40"N and 55"N. Scale c. 1 :25,000,000. Conical
orthomorphic projection with two standard parallels

The second epochal type of culture which
formed in the steppe zone is represented by the
pastoralist-agriculturalist tribes of the paleo-
metallic period. Wheeled vehicles were created
and perfected by them. The struggle for forcible
redistribution of pastures and accumulated
wealth gives rise, at a certain stage, to a type of
militarization of society that found expression
in progress in the production of weapons. The
development of early complex societies with a
non-urban developmental path takes place in
conditions of initial accumulation and concen-
tration of power. In addition, the under-
developed nature [in comparison with urban
civilizations) of social structures gives rise to
culturally regressive phenomena, and to fluc-
tuation in developmental cycles.
Finally, the third epochal type is the culture
of communities which are called early nomadic
communities in the Soviet literature. They are
most strikingly represented by the Scythians in
Europe and the Sakas in Asia. In our opinion,
the transition to mobile pastoralism
(nomadism) in this instance played no less a
r6le than that played by the 'urban revolution'
among early agricultural communities. New
forms of economic activity made it possible to
obtain maximum surplus product with a given
level of technological development and in a
given ecological situation. These forms facil-
itated the rapid progress of quick intra- and
inter-zonal contacts, the accumulation of
wealth, social differentiation, new advances in
the military sphere, and the militarization of
society. The nomadic federations become a
powerful military-political force in the ancient
world. The processes of cultural, ethnic and
political consolidation intensify. These tradi-
tions survive, in many respects, into the medie-
val period.
The investigation both of the actual commu-
nities of the steppe zone and of their interac-
tions with neighbouring peoples and tribes, in
the first instance with urban civilizations,
opens up great possibilities for the study of
world history in all its diversity.
Views of the steppe
Perceptions of the steppe in history are indeli-
bly coloured by the activities of its most famous
 SOVIET ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE STEPPE ZONE
100’E
n d P i n
son, Chingiz [or Genghis) Khan. The image of
the ferocious mounted bow-shooting nomad
and attendant horde has become almost emble-
matic of the Eurasian grassland or, at least what
periodically issued from it in popular imagin-
ation. In literature, it has been a powerful and
consistent theme from Herodotus’ History to St
John Perse’s Anabase.
From their heartland around Karakorum, the
Mongols were able to do what no other group
before had done: to unify the entire steppe
within their own military and political system
and begin to incorporate its edges into a univer-
sal empire, five or six times the size of either
Alexander’s or Rome’s. They conquered China
in the East and Persia in the South. In the West
they left the subjugation of Europe unfinished
for internal reasons (Morgan 1986).
This centrality of the steppe within the
Eurasian world is often forgotten by historians
(cf. Gumilev 1987). As its peoples were rarely
literate, they have often been conceptually rele-
gated to a ‘barbarian’periphery. Yet the steppe
is the Eurasian axis, a freeway which, weather
permitting, extends 5500 km from the Danube
plains of Central Europe to Tung-Pei (Manchu-
ria). It is almost continuous, partially interrup-
ted by the Urals, and more fully by the mountain
knot of the Sayano-Altai, which rise to 4505 m
(14,780 ft). These divide it into three main
781
50”
ranges: the Black Sea steppe, Kazakh steppe,
and Mongolian steppe (FIGURE 1).
The climate is strongly continental, with
vegetation correlating with available moisture
and changing in line with latitude (Symons
1983). Periodic variations in cyclonic activity
seem to have caused medium- to long-term
fluctuations in precipitation, making the steppe
alternately dry and cold or warm and wet
(Abrosov 1962; Gumilev 1967: 62ff.; and see
MarCenko & Vinogradov, below, pages 803-13).
The steppe is a treeless expanse of drought-
resistant perennial grassland in which turf-
forming feather grasses predominate (mainly
Stipa ucrainica on the western steppe) along
with species such as Sheep’s fescue (Festuca
ovina) (Knystautas 1987: 38). The most char-
acteristic soil is chernozem or Black Earth, but
to the south, and further east, poorer steppe
extends over chestnut soils and mountain pod-
sols (FIGURE 2).
Much of the steppe lies within the borders of
the Soviet Union. From west to east, the rel-
evant Soviet regions, Republics, and Autono-
mous Republics are: the Moldavian SSR, the
Ukrainian SSR, the Volga and Kuban regions,
the Kalmyk ASSR (Kalmykia), the Kazakh SSR
(Kazakhstan) with the Uzbek SSR (Uzbekistan]
to its south, the Altai regions, the Tuva ASSR
(Tuva),the Buryat ASSR, and the Amur and, on
 V.M. MASSON & TIMOTHY TAYLOR

FIGURE 2. Mounted shepherd on the steppe in Tuva, below the peak of Mongun-taiga at the western end
of the Tannu range of the Sayano-Altai mountains. The grass here, on mountain podsol, grows much
shorter than on the chernozem to the west. Photograph by Caroline Humphrey.

the Pacific sea-board, Khabarovsk regions. Sub-
stantial parts of the steppe zone’s eastern exten-
sion lie within Mongolia and northern China.
It is bounded on its southern side by sea,
desert, or mountain: the deserts of Turkmenia
[Turkestan) and the Gobi; the mountains of the
Carpatho-Balkans (Romania and Bulgaria) the
Caucasus (Georgia and Azerbaijan), and the
Pamirs and Tien Shan [Tajikstan and Kirghizia).
To the north lie, successively, a zone of forest
steppe, a zone of mixed coniferous and broad-
leaved woodland, coniferous taiga, and treeless
tundra. This horizontal pattern is broken by the
rivers. To the west of the Urals, the principal
steppe rivers the Dnieper, Don and Volga empty
southwards into the Black and Caspian Seas.
Further to the east, the Ob, Yenisei and Lena run
northwards to the Arctic ocean.
The steppe has often deceived outsiders by its
apparent emptiness. Edward Daniel Clarke,
who travelled through parts of it in 1800, wrote,
’frequently, when we . . . believed ourselves in
the midst of a most uninhabited country, which
might be compared to a boundless meadow, we
beheld villages to the right and left of us,
concealed, by the depth of the banks of the river,
below the level of the plain; not a single house
or church would have been otherwise dis-
cerned’ [Clarke 1810: 246).
Subjects in the special section
The first houses which we can discern archae-
ologically are from the Middle Palaeolithic, at
sites such as Molodova on the Middle Dniester,
dated by I4C to 40,000-45,000 (Gamble 1986:
161), and made of skin and bone. Over 700
Palaeolithic sites are now known in the Soviet
Union [Lubine & Praslov 1987). Here, Nikolai
Praslov looks at the competing strategies of
mammoth- and bison-hunters on the Russian
Plain at 25,000-15,000, whilst 1.A. Sapozhni-
kov, Z.A. Abramova, V.N. Stanko & 1.A. Borzi-
jak provide a summary overview of recent work
on Late Palaeolithic cultural adaptations in the
steppe zone.
Copper metallurgy seems to have been intro-
duced to the Neolithic communities of the
steppe from the Carpatho-Balkan metal-
 SOVIET ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE STEPPE ZONE
working focus, via the Tripolye culture of Mol-
davia (Chernykh forthcoming). Valentin Derga-
chev reviews the entire Eneolithic to Late
Bronze Age period in the light of the latest
excavations, looking at the transition from an
‘appropriating economy’ (hunter-gathering) to
various forms of ‘productive economy’, particu-
larly the development of semi-mobile forms of
pastoralism which, by the Middle Bronze Age,
enabled far greater populations to inhabit the
steppe zone.
As V.M. Masson points out, the development
of pastoralism and advances in metallic
weaponry and wheeled vehicle construction
provided the ground conditions for the emerg-
ence of martial nomadic formations which were
‘the best able to endure exertion and hardship
and the least costly to maintain and therefore
the best adapted for conquering territory and
overthrowing kingdoms’ (Marco Polo Travels:
Latham 1958: 99). The chronology of this
emergence and the exact nature of the socio-
economic groups involved is debated
(Vainshtein 1980; Khazanov 1984). One of the
continuing uncertainties is over the chronology
of horse domestication and the development of
riding; but it is certain that by the early 1st
millennium BC, mounted groups were present
on the steppe.
In their new Scythian periodization, pre-
sented for the first time here, Konstantin Mar-
c‘enko & Yuri Vinogradov consider the impetus
to full nomadism at the beginning of the 1st
millennium BC to have been in part climatic,
and its emergence to have been critically inter-
References
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the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
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connected with different ethnic groups and
socio-economic formations that existed in the
margins of the steppe zone.
Moving eastwards to the foothills of the
Sayano-Altai in South Siberia, and later in time
to the violent and confused Hunnic period,
similar complex patterns of ethnic identity and
interaction are followed by Dimitri Savinov
amongst groups of Kyrgyz, Altai-Tele Turki and
Kimak-Kypchak - inhabitants of the steppe on
its mountain and desert interfaces between the
5th and the 10th centuries AD.
Note on translation
Soviet archaeology is is both theoretically and
methodologically different from, for instance,
Anglo-American archaeology. This difference
is manifest in the terminology used by the
contributing authors. Their terminology and
usage has been preserved, as far as is pos-
sible, in the translations. Footnotes have been
introduced where the meaning might seem
unclear.
Acknowledgements. ANTIQUITY would like to thank the
individual Soviet authors, and particularly Professor V.M.
Masson, for their work in producing this special section.
Thanks are also due to Konstantin MarCenko for his hospi-
tality in Leningrad, as well as to A. Alexeev, A. Anfertiev,
P.M. Dolukhanov, E.N. Nosov, 1.1. Saverkina, S.E. Tok’tasiev
in Leningrad, V.A. Bashilov, V.V. Dvornichenko, A.N.
Meliukova, S.Yu. Saprikin and Y.T. Yablonsky in Moscow,
and all those who madeANT1QIJITY’svisit to the Soviet Union
so interesting and enjoyable. We would also like to thank
Clive Gamble, Caroline Humphrey, Olga Soffer and Jane
Renfrew for editorial advice.
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