The culture of Siberia at the initial stages of history. Stone Age on the territory of Khakassia

The Stone Age is the oldest and longest archaeological period during which the main tools and weapons were made of stone. Its duration is about 2.6 million years - from the beginning of anthropogenesis to the appearance of metals. The line separating man from his monkey ancestors is the beginning of the conscious manufacture of tools.

The Stone Age is divided into the Old (Paleolithic), Middle (Mesolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic).

Paleolithic is usually divided into the following stages: early (lower) paleolith (from 2.6 million years to 100 thousand years ago), middle paleolith (from 100-80 to 40-35 thousand years ago), upper (late) paleolith (40 - 12 thousand years ago). Each subsequent period is more progressive in comparison with the previous one in terms of the technology of making stone tools and their diversity.

Geological periodization is often found in specialized literature, especially when it comes to the Paleolithic and anthropogenesis. Let's bring her. In the geological development of the planet Earth, five major eras are distinguished: Archean, Proterozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic. The last era - the Cenozoic is divided into the following eras:

Paleocene epoch: 65 - 55 million years ago;

Eocene epoch: 55 - 38 million years ago;

Oligocene epoch: 38 - 25 million years ago;

Miocene epoch: 25 - 5 million years ago. Climate cooling. Appearance of the great apes.

Pliocene epoch: 5 - 2 million years ago; Continued cooling. The emergence of early hominids in Africa.

Pleistocene epoch: 2 million years - 10 thousand years ago. The rise of glaciers. Glaciation with alternation of glaciers and interglacial periods (warming). Anthropogenesis. At the end - the appearance of a modern man.

Holocene epoch: from 12 - 10 thousand years to our time. The climate has warmed, the glaciers have receded. Rasogenesis.

The geological period in the history of the Earth from the emergence of man to the present is called the Anthropogen. It spans the Pleistocene and Holocene. Anthropogenic changes (that is, associated with man) took place as the population of the planet increased, people settled, and their economic activities became more complicated. At present, the anthropogenic impact on nature has become threatening: pollution of soils, water bodies, air, destruction of natural vegetation and wildlife.

Most scientists dealing with the problem of anthropogenesis are convinced that Africa is the birthplace of humanity. The single center of human origin, in which the most significant stages of its evolution successively proceeded, is located in the region of the East African Rift, stretching in the meridional direction from the Dead Sea depression through the Red Sea and further through Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. The most ancient fossils were found here, testifying to the separation of the first representatives of the hominin family from what we call the great apes, which occurred about 5-6 million years ago. Most of the skeletal remains of ancient hominids and sites of ancient man were also found here.

The early (lower) Paleolithic is the time of the existence of Australopithecus and Archanthropes - the most ancient people, which include such species as homo habilis (handy man), homo erectus (upright man) and homo ergaster (working man, closer to modern man, although and with archaic anatomical features).

The most ancient traces of human presence to date were discovered in 1992-1994. basin of the Kada Gona River (Ethiopia): 16 sites that yielded more than 3,000 stone tools and bone remains of the man himself, along with the split bones of wild animals. The entire fossil complex, located under basalt tuffs, testifies to the existence here about 2.6 million years ago of primitive Homo, who was engaged in hunting and, of course, capable of tool activity. This idea is also confirmed by the finds of later (starting from 2.3 million years) sites with stone products - quartz flakes, choppers, scrapers, etc. in the valley of the river. Omo and around the lake. Turkana (Kenya). The Omo industry is characterized by the dominance of small fragments and types of stone products that have no analogues in the Olduvai culture. Thus, already at the dawn of human civilization, the first cultural differences appear and we can talk about the existence of two archaeological cultures.

Excavations in the Olduvai Gorge (East Africa, Tanzania), carried out by L. and M. Leakey in the 1960s - 1970s. gave stone tools dated c. 2.4 mil. years ago. These are roughly processed products, among which it is difficult to distinguish stable groups.

At the turn of two million years ago, people from Africa - the populations of Homo erectus (upright man) or Homo ergaster (working man), went beyond the African homeland. It was not migration in the truest sense of the word, but a long and gradual process of settlement. In this migration wave to the east, two main directions can be distinguished - southern and northern, which were separated by the mountain ranges of the Himalayas and Tibet.

The settlement of Central and Northern Asia (including Siberia) is associated with the northern route. The movement of archanthropes along it is marked by many sites, including those with anthropological finds.

Unique and, unfortunately, not yet fully explored cave complexes have been discovered in Azerbaijan, on the Karabakh lowland.

In Georgia, in Dmanisi (60 km from Tbilisi), over the past 10 years, amazing paleoanthropological finds have been mined - skull covers and jaws of an ancient person (together with pebble tools, whose age is 1.6-1.7 million years.

The oldest Central Asian site was discovered in Tajikistan by Professor V. A. Ranov. This is the Kuldara site, where pebble tools aged approx. 900 thousand years.

There are differences in the appearance of the stone industry between the eastern and western parts of the range of archanthropes. The eastern part (Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Altai, Yakutia, China and the Far East) is characterized by massive chopping tools with a wide working edge - choppers and choppers.

Two types of Lower Paleolithic sites are known: open sites associated with hunting and stone extraction sites, and cave sites. In Siberia, the oldest sites are Karama and Ulalinka in Altai.

Parking Karama located in Altai, in the valley of the Anui River. Nearby, 6 more caves and more than 10 open-type sites are being explored. The minimum age estimate for Karama is 550-700 thousand years. It is the oldest known Paleolithic site in Russia and one of the oldest in Eurasia.

Here, at two sites of parking at elevations from 30 to 60 m above the modern river edge, in red-colored deposits of slope and alluvial genesis, several levels of occurrence of Paleolithic artifacts were found, which, judging by their appearance, belong to the Early Paleolithic pebble-type industries. Stone industry of Karama of the Olduvai type. Among the products of primary cleavage, there are core-shaped pebbles with smooth impact areas and negatives of parallel removals, as well as shortened unfaceted spalls. The main components of the typologically expressed inventory include side-scrapers made in longitudinal and transverse versions; serrated and serrated-notched tools formed on shortened spalls; as well as chopping products such as choppers with a convex flattened blade and a massive hewn heel. A characteristic feature of most Karama pebble tools is a combination of fairly archaic morphological features and relatively advanced secondary processing techniques. These tools are very primitive, but for their time they were quite effective.

Parking Ulalinka is located near the city of Gorno-Altaisk. It is two-layered, the upper layer contains finds of the Upper Paleolithic, and the lower one is associated with the Early Paleolithic. The industry is represented by yellow-white quartzite pebbles with amorphous cleavage planes. A core was found with a beveled impact platform and traces of removal on one of the sides. There are choppings and scrapers made of pebbles with one-sided and two-sided processed blades. The layer with these finds has been dated by paleomagnetic and thermoluminescent methods in the range from 300-400 thousand to 1.5 million years. If the reliability of the lower limit of this range is in doubt, then the upper limit looks quite reasonable.

In Africa at the turn of approx. 1.2 million years ago, the so-called Acheulean culture was formed (it got its name from the first place of finds of such tools in France), characterized by a more advanced technical tradition of making tools. Despite the large number of technological methods of stone processing and the absence of a standard set of tools, common typological features can be distinguished in the Acheulean stone industries. According to this technical tradition, the edge of the stone was no longer simply beaten off, but it was processed from different sides with a series of directed blows, giving a certain shape and sharpening along the perimeter. Similar, very effective tools were made not only from solid pebbles, but also from flint flakes taken from stone cores - cores.

The Acheulean stoneworking technique continues the development of the Olduvai technique. This is evidenced by the coexistence of Olduvai and Acheulean tools. in many monuments. The hand axes themselves are developed from Olduvai proto axes and choppings. Actually, the early axes are the same choppings, only with sharper edges and a more regular and uniform shape. Axes are rather massive tools up to 10-20 cm long and weighing up to 0.5-1 kg. Their pointed wedge-shaped point and thickened "heel" (opposite end) indicate that they were chopping tools. They were hardly fixed in the handle and, most likely, were held by the heel in the hand during cutting. It was a versatile tool. Such tools, such as choppers and axes, were used by the Tasmanians in the 19th century. They made them by hitting a rock with a jaw or throwing them onto another stone. At the same time, the Tasmanian bounced off so as not to get hurt by flying sharp fragments-flakes. The flakes themselves were also used as cutting tools. With the help of such tools, the Tasmanians made notches on the tree to climb it, and did many other operations, using it as a universal tool.

Hand axes continue to exist in the Mousterian era, but at the same time they acquire a more miniature form.

450-350 thousand years ago, a new migration wave, already associated with the Late Acheulean culture, began to spread from the Near East.

Typical tools of the Acheulean culture were hand axes or bifaces - universal double-sided tools with sharp edges, widespread in Africa. In Kazakhstan (Mugodzhary), at the exit of ancient rocks and ancient material, where for thousands of years the primitive man came to make tools, dozens of them were found on one square meter of excavation.

A similar stone industry was discovered in the lower layers Denisova cave in the river valley Anui in Altai. The uniqueness of the Gorno-Altai finds lies in the multi-meter thickness of well-structured deposits, which made it possible to obtain a fairly complete picture of the development of this industrial complex over a huge period of time.

By the end of the Acheulean period, finds on the high terraces of the right bank of the river. Angara near the Bratsk reservoir. Disk-shaped double-sided, single-platform and double-platform cores, flakes, blades with pronounced platforms and impact tubercles were found.

The Early Paleolithic of the Far East is represented by the sites of Ust-Tu, Filimoshki and Kumara.

Filimoshki and Kumars located on the river Amur. The tools found here are represented by choppers, choppings made of massive pebbles, tools with a “spout”, amorphous cores without prepared impact platforms. The nature of the edge from which the chips were made indicates that such cores could be used as scrapers.

The earliest remains of man and his culture in the regions of Europe and Asia closest to Siberia are finds in the filling of ancient caves on the Zhou-kou-dian upland in northern China, near Beijing. The synanthropes that lived there had pronounced ape-like features. At that time, among the ancient heat-loving animals, there lived the saber-toothed mahairod tiger, Merck's rhinoceros, which later became extinct.

Sinanthropus used fire and made stone tools, in terms of technical design close to the Acheulian products of the Lower Paleolithic period. To the same distant time, rough stone products from river pebbles split across the river, found on the heights of the Tien Shan in Kyrgyzstan, on the river. On-Archa, on the way from the lake. Issyk-Kul to Naryn.

At a later, Mousterian, time, animal species of the previous time continued to exist in Europe and Asia, but along with them, for the first time, representatives of the fauna appear, the distribution of which was associated with progressive cooling, with a general deterioration in climatic conditions, which characterizes, in essence, all subsequent time - until the end of the ice age.

The Mousterian time includes human handicrafts and the remains of a Neanderthal-type person found in the Teshik-Tash grotto in southwestern Uzbekistan, in the Amir-Temir cave, as well as finds in the Aman-Kutan cave near Samarkand, in a number of places on the Krasnovodsk Peninsula , in the lower part of the Uzboy valley and in the river basin. Syr-Darya near Leninabad and Naukat.

Mousterian time dates, apparently, also a stone pointed point of two-sided processing, found by M. V. Talitsky on the river. Chusovoy.

Also of great interest are rough massive pi pointed flakes found in ancient pebbles near the village of Kanai on the Irtysh in northwestern Kazakhstan. They are so archaic in appearance that they can be typologically attributed to the time preceding the Upper Paleolithic. This is all that we now have for the most ancient stages of human history in the regions of Eastern Europe, Central and Central Asia closest to Siberia.

On the territory of Siberia, the remains of an ancient thermophilic fauna are also recorded, which accompanies the most ancient people - the man of the lower and middle Paleolithic. These are the remains of an ancient elephant - trogontherium, Merck's rhinoceros, elasmotherium in the sands near Pavlodar and broad-fronted deer in the pebbles of the second floodplain terrace on the Irtysh in the Tobolsk district, which belong to the so-called Tiraspol complex of fossil fauna. The subsequent, late Stierian time includes animal remains that form the "Khazarian" faunal complex, distributed over the vast territory of Eastern Europe, northern and Central Asia and occupying, in general terms, the space between 45 and 60 ° N lat. sh., in the east to the limits of Transbaikalia, and in the west to the British Isles and France inclusive.

And yet, despite these facts, indicating that the natural conditions of Siberia and the Soviet Far East were quite favorable for the existence of the most ancient people of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, indisputable traces of their activity have not yet been found here. The question of the existence of the most ancient man in Siberia still remains unresolved. It is quite probable that the vast expanses lying to the east of the Urals, at that distant time, when primitive mankind was going through the first stages of its development, were still deserted.

The probability of this assumption is also confirmed by the fact that so far no signs of the presence of ancient anthropoid apes have been found on the territory of Siberia, and the first ape-men had to initially stay in a certain, more or less limited area of ​​\u200b\u200btheir settlement, where the most favorable natural conditions existed for them.

The spread of ancient man to the north and east of Asia then encountered a very serious obstacle in the form of a sharp deterioration in climate and cooling that occurred at the beginning of the Quaternary period, with which the Ice Age was associated.

During the greatest distribution of glaciers, coinciding with the Mousterian time (the Rissky stage of the ice age), as geologists believe, there was also a grandiose water barrier that separated Europe from northern Asia. It was formed as a result of the fact that the waters of the great Siberian rivers were dammed by glaciers that reached almost 60 ° N in the west. sh., and formed a strait connecting the Aral Sea with the Caspian basin. As a result, the huge territory of the current West Siberian lowland was under water. Glaciers were sliding down from the Altai and Sayan mountain systems. For the development of Siberia by a man of the ancient stone period, it was necessary that these natural obstacles disappear. In addition, a complete restructuring of the entire life and culture of ancient mankind was required so that it could finally go beyond the limits of its original settlement and reach the Siberian spaces. It was necessary, first of all, that new, more perfect than in the Middle Paleolithic, methods of hunting and appropriate hunting equipment arose, so that people learned to build special dwellings to escape the winter cold and wind, and also to store food for the winter. It was necessary, finally, that people create real sewn clothes that would allow them to be outside their homes in the winter and freely hunt animals.

All this became possible only at the end of the Paleolithic time, in the Upper Paleolithic of archaeological periodization, that is, not earlier than 40-30 thousand years ago.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the oldest indisputable traces of man in northern Asia, known at the present time, belong to a rather late stage against the backdrop of the world history of mankind. This was the last, according to the terminology adopted by geologists, the period of the Ice Age. It was a time when the peculiar mixed animal world of this era was still fully preserved, when, together with representatives of the typically Arctic fauna: arctic foxes, lemmings, musk ox and white partridge, not to mention the reindeer, in the vast expanses of Eastern Europe and northern Asia lived mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.

In the east of Europe, the Aurignac-Solutrean stage of the Paleolithic was then ending and a new, Magdalenian, began. The earliest, now known Paleolithic monuments of Siberia date back to this time. Upper Paleolithic sites are quite numerous (about 150 sites). They are located almost all in the valleys of large rivers. Three main, relatively narrow, areas of distribution of Upper Paleolithic sites in Siberia can be distinguished: the upper reaches of the Ob (with the center near the present city of Biysk), the upper course of the Yenisei (from Minusinsk to Krasnoyarsk) and the area around Baikal (the Angara with its tributary Belaya, Irkut, Selenga , Onon, upper reaches of the Lena). On the Lena, Paleolithic sites discovered in recent years reach 61°N. sh., which is the extreme, hitherto known northern limit of the distribution of Paleolithic man, not only in Siberia, but also on earth in general.

The earliest in age is the first Paleolithic settlement found in 1871, explored by Russian scientists, a parking lot near the Military Hospital in Irkutsk.

Judging by the carvings of mammoth tusk found there (including large rings) and ornamented handicrafts, as well as laurel-leaf stone tips, the Paleolithic settlement near the Military Hospital dates back to the end of the Solutrean time.

In 1928 and 1936 on the Angara, two more Paleolithic sites were discovered that are widely known in science - Malta and Buret. Both of these settlements belong to the same time, somewhat later than the parking lot at the Military Hospital. By European standards, this should most likely be an early Madeleine, as evidenced by the characteristic "baton of chiefs", Mezin-type piercings, regular conical-cut cores, small disc-shaped scrapers, and developed bone processing.

Both of these settlements are located east of the Yenisei: Buret - in the Angara valley itself, on its right bank, near the village of the same name, and Malta - along the river. White, in with. Malta. They are characterized by surprisingly similar features of culture and way of life; features so close that one can see in them successive settlements of the same ancient community, or even simultaneous settlements of two related communities closely related to each other. This connection is all the more likely that both settlements are separated from each other by a distance of no more than 3-4 km in a straight line.

Systematic, large-scale excavations in Malta and Bureti (about 800 m2 were excavated in Malta, 400 m2 in Bureti) make it possible to restore this ancient culture and the way of life of its bearers not only in general terms, but also in a number of characteristic details.

First of all, it is essential that the Paleolithic sites of Malta and Buret were real settlements, consisting of a number of durable dwellings designed for long-term use. In Buret, for example, the remains of four dwellings were found.

One of them, better and more complete than all the others, had a base deepened into the ground and undoubtedly excavated specially for this purpose, rectangular in plan. A narrow corridor led out of it, overlooking the river. Along the edges of the recess, mammoth femurs were originally placed in a strict order, symmetrically, dug into the ground with their lower ends and firmly fixed at the bottom for stability with limestone slabs. These were a kind of “pillars” of an ancient dwelling, the constructive basis on which its walls and roof rested. There were about twelve such "pillars" in the dwelling.

Together with the “pillars”, the remains of the roof frame of the Paleolithic dwelling survived. Inside the house, on its very floor, there were many reindeer antlers, no doubt specially collected and sorted. In a number of cases, the horns lay, crossing each other at a right angle, with certain gaps between the rods and their processes, forming, as it were, a grid. It follows that the roof of the Paleolithic dwelling in Buret must have had a base in the form of an openwork net of deer antlers, crossed and mutually woven with each other not only by the winding, but also by their intertwining processes.

Hearths were placed in the middle of the dwellings; on the floor of them were found various items made of stone and bone. In their type, layout and architectural features, the dwellings of Bureti and, in all their essential features, the dwellings of Malta similar to them reveal an unexpectedly close resemblance to the dwellings of the settled coastal tribes of our northeast of relatively recent times, the 18th-19th centuries. They are brought together: 1) the presence of a recess, 2) rectangular outlines, 3) an entrance in the form of a corridor, 4) the use of bones of large animals as a building material (in one case, a mammoth and a rhinoceros, in another, a whale), 5) the use of stones for greater stability of the pillars, 6) the construction of dwelling walls made of earth, slabs and bones (whale vertebrae among the sedentary Chukchi and Eskimos, rhinoceros skulls in Buret), 7) an elastic and lightweight roof frame made of whale ribs (on the Chukchi semi-underground dwellings, as in Bureti, it corresponded to a grid of deer antlers intertwined and tied with straps). Like the roof of a walkar, the roof of a Paleolithic dwelling must have had the appearance of a small, slightly elevated earth mound from above.

The dimensions of the dwellings are also very close: the area of ​​the Chukchi Valkar in the 18th century. reached, like the area of ​​the Paleolithic houses of Bureti, 25 m2; the height of the latter was also at least 2-2.5 m.

Very close to the Chukchi-Eskimo coastal settlements and the whole character of such a Paleolithic settlement as a whole. The dwellings of Bureti, like the old Chukchi ones, were located on an elevated place with several buildings side by side, and all of them faced the river with the exit, while the Chukchi-Eskimo ones were oriented in the same way with the exit to the sea.

Just as certain is the similarity of the culture and way of life of the Paleolithic inhabitants of Siberia with the life of the later sedentary Paleo-Asians of our northeast. Like them, the Paleolithic inhabitants of Siberia wore deaf clothes made of skins in the form of overalls with a hood on their heads, and inside their dwellings they sat naked.

Map of Paleolithic settlements in Siberia

Paleolithic figurines found in Malta (20 copies) and Bureti (5 copies) expressively testify to this. For the most part, they depict naked women with only superbly trimmed lush hair on their heads. However, in 1936, a rather large figurine was found in Buret, depicting a woman in embroidered clothes with a distinct headdress in the form of a hood thrown over her head. The same two figurines, only miniature and therefore more schematically interpreted, ended up in Malta. Like the Paleo-Asiatic tribes and the Eskimos, the most ancient, Upper Paleolithic population lived by hunting, had throwing boards and the so-called "wands of the chiefs", that is, apparently, tools for kneading belts, made realistically interpreted images of animals from bone and horn, honored female goddesses and spirits like Silla or the Ashiyak of the Eskimos.

However, the opinion of a number of prominent researchers (Boyd-Dawkins, G. de Mortillet, E. Larte, K. Rasmussen) about the direct origin of the Eskimos from the ancient Paleolithic tribes of Europe - the Madeleines cannot be accepted at the present time.

The general similarity of culture in this case is explained by the same nature of the natural geographical conditions of the end of the Ice Age with those currently existing in the Far North and the corresponding proximity of the economic and household way of the Upper Paleolithic of Siberia to the way of the Paleo-Asian tribes and Eskimos of the 18th-19th centuries.

Abundant hunting prey of the Paleolithic era, when hunting for giant pachyderms and herds of reindeer delivered no less meat than fishing for sea animals in the modern Arctic, led to a strong settled life in the most convenient places for this. The harsh climatic conditions of the ice age with the same inevitability caused the need to build on the Angara in the Paleolithic time the same solid earthen dwellings of a semi-underground type that existed in the Arctic with its piercing winds and low temperatures in the 18th-19th centuries.

Due to the lack or complete absence of building timber, people of the Paleolithic era, as well as the Arctic tribes of our time, had to equally widely resort to other materials replacing it, especially bone, especially since the abundance of bones and horns in itself prompted people to think about using this material as a building material. And, finally, the rich Paleolithic art of Siberia allows us to recall how the long arctic night and the cruel northern winds, which in the recent ethnographic past doomed strong and active hunters to forced inactivity, together with an abundance of such grateful material as walrus tusks, contributed to the amazing development of ornamental art and fine sculpture among these inhabitants of the deep Arctic. The same, undoubtedly, took place in the Baikal region of the Old Stone Age.

Thus, at the end of the Ice Age there was a remarkable culture of Paleolithic hunters of Eastern Europe and Siberia, which can be called the continental culture of settled Arctic hunters of the Upper Paleolithic.

The indisputable unity of the ancient culture of reindeer, mammoth and rhinoceros hunters in Europe and Asia, of course, is based on the general conditions of their existence. However, the sites of the Military Hospital, Malta and Buret, the earliest monuments of human culture in northern Asia, show such a close resemblance to the culture of contemporary Ice Age people living in eastern and western Europe that this similarity can hardly be explained by simple convergence alone. However, it should be borne in mind that other opinions were expressed in our literature, according to which the culture of the Upper Paleolithic, represented by finds in Malta and Bureti, arose in a convergent way, regardless of the culture of their contemporaries in Europe (M. G. Levin and O. N. Bader).

In Malta and Bureti, exactly the same as in the Western European settlements of the Early Madeleine period and in the simultaneous monuments of Eastern Europe, small flint tools made from thin lamellar flakes were found: incisors, cutting points and, in particular, piercings of various shapes, including lateral ones. and double ones, so well known, for example, from excavations in Ukraine, in Mezina.

As already mentioned, remarkable monuments of primitive art were also found in the depths of Siberia: figurines of women and birds carved from mammoth tusk, engraved drawings depicting a mammoth, snakes, a large number of ornamented household items and finely made jewelry. On the Shishkinskaya rock in the upper reaches of the Lena, finally, wonderful images of wild horses that lived in the Upper Paleolithic, reminiscent of the Przhevalsky horse in their type, and in style the Late Madeleine examples of Paleolithic painting, survived. An image of an extinct bull, a bison, was also found there.

For all its indisputable originality, the rich art of the Upper Paleolithic of Siberia is, as it were, a direct offshoot of the high and peculiar artistic culture that flourished in the Ice Age among the Paleolithic hunters of Europe, and not only in terms of plots, but also in small specific details of its samples. These are, first of all, the characteristic interpretation and posture of female images. As for the originality of the monuments of the Paleolithic art of Siberia, it is quite natural, given the sharp difference between at least the finds in Mezina in the Ukraine, on the one hand, and the finds on the Don, on the other. It is clear that similar differences could hardly have been less profound, separating the art of the inhabitants of distant Eastern Siberia from the art of their contemporaries on the banks of the Don or Dnieper.

All this gives grounds for the assumption that the most ancient inhabitants of Siberia penetrated the shores of Lake Baikal from Eastern Europe at the end of the Ice Age, in the Solutrean and Magdalenian times, bringing here their original culture of the Arctic hunters of the Upper Paleolithic.

With the passage of time, however, profound changes take place in the life and culture of the ancient population of Siberia, and, obviously, in its composition. These changes were so deep and serious that one could recognize them as the result of a complete break in the cultural and ethnic tradition, if this were not contradicted by the facts proving also the presence of some continuity of the culture of the late Paleolithic of Siberia from the earlier one, the time of Malta and Bureti.

In the Late Paleolithic period, which includes such sites as Afontova Gora on the Yenisei, Verkholenskaya Gora near Irkutsk on the Angara, Oshurkovo, Nyangi and Ust-Kyakhta on the Selenga, Makarovo, Shishkino, Nyuya, Markhachan and other settlements on the Lena, the number of the ancient population of Siberia increases greatly. This is evidenced by the general increase in the number of settlements towards the end of the Paleolithic. They are no longer counted in units, but in tens. The area mastered by man is expanding just as sharply. People inhabit the valleys of the most important Siberian rivers in their southern part - the Amur, Selenga, Yenisei, Angara and Lena; settled in Altai, where previously there were solid ice of glaciers. In the Lena valley, they descend to Olekminsk and Markhachan, north of all other Paleolithic sites in Europe and Asia.

Such a wide settlement of the Paleolithic man takes place against the background of significant changes in the natural environment surrounding the ancient inhabitants of Siberia.

One of the earliest Late Paleolithic sites, Afontova Gora, differs from the older ones only in the absence of woolly rhinoceros bones. Otherwise, the fauna of Mount Afontova is very close to the fauna of Malta and Bureti. There are bones of mammoth, reindeer, arctic fox, wild horse and animals living in these places: roe deer, fox, wolverine, bear, hare, etc.

The image of a mammoth on a plate of mammoth tusk. Malta

A calculation of the number of individuals characteristic of various climates and landscapes showed that 24% of the animals found on Mount Afontova are among the deep northern forms (arctic fox), 12% are now inhabitants of a temperate climate (red deer, roe deer, saiga, horse), the rest are characteristic of both climatic zones. Landscape calculations showed the predominance of tundra and steppe forms. They turned out to be 37% (arctic fox, mammoth, horse, saiga), and only 7% of the forest (wolverine, red deer, roe deer, bear); the rest are found both in the forest and in open areas (reindeer, fox, hare, etc.). Late Paleolithic (Late Madeleine) sites in the Yenisei valley (Resettlement center near Krasnoyarsk, Kokorevo-Zabochka and Kiperny log, Biryusinsk localities) and contemporary sites in the Angara valley (Olonki, Ust-Belaya), as well as in the Lena and Selenga valleys, are dated to the later, on the first floodplain terraces, 6-12 m high. Cultural remains lie here in the thickness of alluvial deposits, and neither products from mammoth tusk, nor the bones of this animal are no longer found among the kitchen remains. It follows that not only the rhinoceros, but also the mammoth that lived much longer, has already died out. At the same time, another characteristic representative of the ancient fauna of the Wurm Ice Age, that is, the end of the Ice Age, disappears here - the polar fox, the arctic fox. They are replaced by forest animals. At the Oshurkovo site, for example, along with the bones of a bison bull and a reindeer, bones of a red deer and a wild boar, typically forest animals, were found. The climate obviously became somewhat warmer and was no longer as humid as in the previous time. A new, post-glacial era begins.

Even more significant changes are observed in the culture and way of life of the inhabitants of the Paleolithic settlements in Siberia. Former settlements, consisting of a number of solid long-term dwellings, are disappearing. The settlements looked like temporary hunting camps, consisting of a few above-ground dwellings, of which no other traces, except for hearths, have been preserved that allow restoring their shape and structure. The hearths have the form of annular layouts of slabs placed edgewise. Their diameter does not exceed a meter (about 60-70 cm). Similar structures were found, for example, on the Yenisei (Zabochka site) and in the Lena valley, near the village. Makarovo. Near the hearths, relatively few stone tools, flakes, and animal bones are usually scattered. The dwellings themselves, most likely, had a shape close to modern conical tents, tents or uras, consisting of thin poles that form the frame of the building, and a light tire made of animal skins or birch bark.

Changes in the general character of settlements and the arrangement of dwellings should be put in direct connection with general changes in nature and the economic and household way of life of the primitive hunters of Siberia. The disappearance of the giant herbivores of the Ice Age, the death of the rhinoceros and the mammoth could not but cause significant changes in the life of the ancient tribes. Previously almost inexhaustible supplies of meat food began to dry up.

In order to exist by hunting only animals smaller than the mammoth and rhinoceros, it was necessary to switch to a more mobile lifestyle and to a new, more maneuverable than before, hunting tactics. Wandering from place to place following herds of reindeer, herds of horses and wild bulls, late Paleolithic hunters could no longer build crowded communal settlements and erect large collective dwellings. In the place of their more or less temporary stops, at best, there remained a few hearths made of stone, similar to the same stone calculations at the sites of the later reindeer herding tribes of Siberia. It is possible that the general transition from a harsh glacial climate to a milder post-glacial climate also had an important influence on the change in the nature of dwellings, when the need for semi-underground living quarters, carefully sheltered from the piercing wind of the tundra, disappeared. Such dwellings such as dugouts, as we will see later, were preserved in Siberia only by fishermen who constantly lived in one place.

Just as profound was the change in material culture, in stone production equipment. This change found its expression both in the types of tools, in their shapes and sizes, and in the main features of the stone processing technique, in the methods and techniques for making stone tools. If at first, in that distant era, when there were extensive settlements of semi-settled mammoth and rhinoceros hunters on the Angara and Lena, the stone inventory of their inhabitants had much in common with the Upper Paleolithic inventory common to Eastern and Western Europe, now the appearance of stone tools is suddenly and dramatically changing. Instead of graceful piercings with curved or straight thin points, miniature scrapers, finely retouched lamellar blades and Madeleine chisels of various shapes, large, massive and heavy things are spread, as rough at first glance as they are uniform in type, made mainly from river pebbles.

All these, in essence, are only particular variants of the same, with amazing constancy, a repeating product: a massive side-scraper, semi-lunar in shape or close in shape to an oval, decorated along the steep working edge with sharp retouching with long and wide facets. Sometimes, however, such products have a straight working edge, in some, however, very rare cases, even slightly concave. Some of them are processed only on the upper side, and some on both sides, but these differences are not so characteristic and are not so common anymore.

In general, due to their original form and specific, reminiscent of the Mousterian counter-shock technique, processing of the working edge, such products make an extremely peculiar impression. This impression is enhanced by the fact that among the countless series of scraper-like tools of this kind, reminiscent of Mousterian ones, there are wide massive points, processed with the same steep retouching along the edges and similar in shape to Mousterian pointed ones.

Pointed points from the Paleolithic sites of Siberia are also close to the Mousterian ones in that the material for their manufacture was wide plates taken from typical wide disk-shaped cores - completely Mousterian in appearance.

The archaic appearance of the inventory of these sites is so definite and sharp that previous researchers distinguished in it not only Mousterian, but even Lower Paleolithic elements. They described massive oval-shaped tools processed on both sides as "bifaces", i.e., as the closest analogy to the axes of the Agaelian or even the Shellic time. Based on the presence of archaic forms of stone products and the corresponding archaic technology, they first attributed the Late Paleolithic products found by I.T. Mousterian time. However, I. T. Savenkov himself definitely pointed out that, along with things made of stone, reminiscent of Mousterian or even Acheulean in type, in his collections there are things of a very late appearance for the Paleolithic, for example, chisels, various lamellar points and small scrapers.

He drew the attention of archaeologists to the fact that excellently designed bone items are found here: darts, jewelry, needles and awls.

Thus, researchers faced a new and extremely interesting riddle: how to explain such an unusual combination of typologically ancient objects and new types of things, which in the west are separated in time by tens of millennia, and in Altai, in the valleys of the Lena, Yenisei and Angara lie side by side, in the same cultural layer, in the inventory of the same Upper Paleolithic settlement.

A solution to this problem has been tried in various directions. Some researchers (G.P. Sosnovsky, A.P. Okladnikov) sought in the 1930s to derive the Late Paleolithic culture of Siberia in a direct evolutionary way from an older, i.e. from the Malta-Buret culture and saw the transition from one culture to the other is an expression of the continuous evolutionary rise of the ancient Siberian tribes from the lowest level of culture to the highest.

Other researchers (L. Savitsky, N. K. Auerbach) wanted to see here only an expression of the direct influence on the culture of the Paleolithic population of Siberia of the cultures of deep Asia, in particular the Paleolithic of Mongolia and China.

A third point of view was also expressed (V. I. Gromov), according to which the originality of stone tools, characteristic of the Siberian Paleolithic, depends on the rough material that was at the disposal of the local population. Due to the lack in Siberia of such excellent material for making stone tools as, for example, chalk stone on the Don, local craftsmen had to be content with such rough material as black lidite in Transbaikalia or greenstone pebbles on the Yenisei and Altai. As a result, the proponents of this view believed, the production of elegant and thin plates could not develop here, which served as the basis for the mastery of stone processing, which was perfect at that time, using squeezing retouching techniques. This point of view cannot be accepted for the reason that later, in the Neolithic time, on the territory of Siberia there was a fully developed and no less, if not more, perfect than in Europe, Neolithic stone processing technique; were no less developed, in particular, the techniques of squeezing retouching, which were often used on the same “rough” material used by the Paleolithic masters. Thus, not the material, but human needs determined the technique of making tools, their shapes, and even the choice of the material itself.

But what exactly were these needs?

Did they follow from evolutionary inertia, from millennia-old traditions? Or, on the contrary, did the reason lie in the fact that the old population was replaced by a new one, with traditions other than before, with habits and inclinations different than before? However, both of these points of view, which equally had some very weighty factual grounds, met with more careful consideration of the facts and significant objections.

Against the first hypothesis is the fact that in reality it is impossible by direct evolution to derive from the inventory and the specific squeezing technique of stone processing in Malta and Bureti the types of tools and the technique of their manufacture, characteristic of the sites of the subsequent time. It is completely incomprehensible, for example, how a more ancient disk-shaped core could have evolved from a more perfect prismatic core, or from an end scraper - an incomparably coarser Mousterian type scraper. As for the second point of view, it was evidenced by the great and real similarity in stone tools and in the technique of their manufacture between the Paleolithic of Siberia, on the one hand, and the Paleolithic of East Asia, on the other. But for all that, in the Paleolithic of East Asia, nowhere were such things specific and characteristic of the Siberian Paleolithic as leaf-shaped tips or oval side-scrapers, as flat bone harpoons, found. All this clearly developed in Siberia on its own, on the spot. And all this, taken together, testified that the situation in reality was much more complicated than previously thought. It was clear that they were wrong as supporters of straightforward evolutionary development, who assumed that the “mixing” of elements of material culture of different times or different stages, characteristic of the Late Siberian Paleolithic, indicates the presence of especially ancient archaic remnants in the culture of local tribes, their deep conservatism, that they were much stronger and stronger than their contemporaries in the West, retained elements of the technology of the distant Lower Paleolithic past, and so did their opponents, who reduced everything to a clash of various cultural and ethnic groups. The latter also, in essence, developed the same point of view about the greatest backwardness of the tribes of the Siberian Paleolithic in comparison with the European tribes, only stated even more definitely, in an even more pointed and even tendentious form. According to this point of view, most fully and clearly formulated by A. Breuil regarding the Paleolithic of China, deep Asia is regarded as a country where ancient forms were initially conserved, as a country of stagnation and inertia, in contrast to Europe, where culture has always been rapidly advancing.

It is easy to see that in such a formulation this view is not only superficial, not only unfair, but also directly offensive to the peoples of Asia, expresses an essentially imperialist concept, refuted by the entire history of the Asian peoples and, first of all, the great Chinese people.

In fact, a deeper and more objective study of the sites of the Siberian Paleolithic, as well as the Paleolithic of East Asia, shows that there is only a sharply peculiar and, at the same time, certainly progressive way of development of Asian tribes of ancient times, which must be approached with different classification standards and headings, with different estimates than to the Paleolithic of Western or Eastern Europe, in terms of the originality of its historical path and the originality of the contribution of the most ancient population of northern and eastern Asia to the culture of the Stone Age.

Considering the types of stone products from Siberian Paleolithic sites not in static, but dynamically, in their development, it is easy to see that from the primary, insufficiently designed large scraper-like products, characteristic of such settlements as Malta and Buret, are gradually developed clear in shape and finished according to their technical features tools of "archaic" forms, which were mentioned above. In addition, if these large things were at first represented only by relatively few samples, then over time their number steadily increases until they finally reach a more or less significant predominance over stone tools of a different kind. In the inventory of the Late Paleolithic settlement of Siberia, there is, therefore, not the technical traditions of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic - relics of the deepest past, but signs of a new formation, it is obvious - evidence not of stagnation and backwardness, but of some kind of rapid and uncontrollable development and, at the same time, an extremely peculiar development that does not fit into the usual framework of Western European classifications.

The reason for such a peculiar development should, apparently, be sought in the field of those vital needs of primitive hunters who were served by these types of tools. These tools could hardly be used for any work related to the processing of soft materials, including fur and leather. They are closest to woodworking tools, as they have a massive and durable blade suitable for chopping and planing operations. The fact that the source of the development of the stone inventory of the Siberian Paleolithic in its characteristic direction is precisely here, in the needs of technology and economy, is evidenced by the presence among the Late Paleolithic tools from Siberia of real ax-shaped or adze-shaped objects, registered both in the Altai, Yenisei, Angara, beyond Baikal, as well as Lena. In the depths of the actual Paleolithic, still by the nature of technology, there was, therefore, a progressive process of designing large cutting tools of a new type, those tools that later turned into real axes and adzes of the mature culture of the Neolithic era.

At the same time, in Siberia, earlier than in many other places, a kind of loose-leaf technique for the manufacture of tools and weapons was formed and flourished. At the sites of Verkholenskaya Gora near the city of Irkutsk and Oshurkovo near the city of Ulan-Ude, for example, excellent bone points with deep grooves for sharp flint blades were found. Products of this kind, therefore, combined the flexibility and elasticity of bone and horn with the strength and hardness of flint; as a result, they had an undeniable advantage over both simple stone arrowheads and knives, and over bone products without additional stone blades.

Not later, if not earlier than in other countries, the first domestic animal of hunting tribes appears in Siberia - a dog.

Relatively early in Siberia, the use of fish for food is quite widespread: on the Angara in Verkholenskaya Gora and on the Selenga in Oshurkovo, harpoons of the Azil type, excellently made from the horn of a red deer, were found. At the Oshurkovo site, along with such a harpoon, numerous fish bones were found, indicating that hunting for fish occupied an important place in the economy of the inhabitants of this site.

However, in the process of such progressive development, the concrete forms in which the evolution of culture took place were also reflected in the specific historical situation in which the Siberian tribes of the Old Stone Age lived for centuries, the specific historical events that took place in this part of Asia affected.

The fact that the culture of the most ancient population of Siberia first developed in the same forms and in the same direction as the culture of their contemporaries in the West, in the basins of the Danube, Dnieper, Don and Volga, and then, as it were, abruptly turned in its development in the other direction, certainly not accidental and is of great importance in the history of Europe and Asia.

It can be explained by the fact that the tribes of Siberia at first lived the same life with the tribes of the West, were in contact with them and had a single culture at the core. Then, already by the very end of the Ice Age, not crowded, widely dispersed over the colossal expanses of Siberia in the process of its development, they lost direct contact with the population of Western countries and, isolated from them, for a long time began to live their own special life, created a new, essentially excellent culture in many respects.

A striking and clear manifestation of this originality are the noted features in the manufacturing technique and forms (types) of stone products that served the economic needs of Paleolithic man. While in the West, at the end of the Paleolithic, the process of development of the so-called microlithic technique was going on, when the necessary tools were made mainly on knife-shaped plates cut in a certain way into parts, in Siberia, the main method of designing blanks of stone tools was splitting large pebbles into two parts or removing large plates. from the surface of cores of an archaic disk-like type, similar to Mousterian ones.

At the same time, in the conditions of an isolated existence in the colossal territories of Siberia and the Far East, here, obviously, a special physical type of the local population is being formed. In the Upper Paleolithic, anthropologists believe, the main racial groups of modern humanity arise: the Negroids in Africa and the neighboring regions of the Mediterranean, as well as in southeastern and southern Asia, the Caucasians in Europe, and, finally, the Mongoloids east of the Urals. While the local remains of Upper Paleolithic man found in Europe are predominantly of the ancient Caucasoid type, Cro-Magnon (in the broad sense of the word), new archaeological and anthropological data indicate the existence of certain Mongoloid features among the ancient inhabitants of the eastern regions of Asia already at a very early age. time. One statuette of a woman, found in 1936 in Bureti, has a carefully modeled face with a distinct Mongoloid imprint. It has narrow, characteristically slanted eyes, a low, as if blurry nose, and prominent cheekbones.

From the Paleolithic layers of Mount Afontova near Krasnoyarsk, fragments of the bones of the hands and a fragment of the skull, a fragment of the frontal bone, found in 1937, come. The last find was studied by G. F. Debets. The morphological features of the fragment (sharp flattening of the nose bridge) indicate Mongoloid features and allowed Debets to state that the Upper Paleolithic population of Mount Afontova belonged to the Mongoloid, in the broad sense of the word, racial type.

Thus, the meager data that paleoanthropology currently has at its disposal seem to indicate that the Paleolithic population of the Baikal region and the middle Yenisei belong to the Mongoloid racial type. Here, the proximity to those regions of Eastern and Central Asia, where, in the opinion of Soviet anthropologists, the Mongoloid racial type arises, could have an effect. It should be noted in this connection that throughout the entire territory of the Mongolian People's Republic one can trace the development of the culture of its Late Paleolithic population in the same basic direction as in Siberia. Therefore, all this vast territory in the Late Paleolithic can be safely called the Siberian-Mongolian cultural region.

However, given the singularity and fragmentation of the finds, it would be risky to attribute everything said above about the physical type of the ancient inhabitants of Siberia to its entire territory, taken as a whole. It is quite possible that the population of other regions, in particular the Altai and the Minusinsk Basin, already in the Paleolithic belonged, in their anthropological type, not to the Mongoloid, but to the Caucasoid circle of forms. In favor of such an assumption, as we shall see later, materials on paleoanthropology of later epochs speak.

In general, the end of the Upper Paleolithic time is, apparently, that most important historical step in the past of the peoples of Siberia and our Far East, when their ancestors for the first time stand out from the rest of mankind as owners of a special physical type and culture specific in nature.

This was the second largest stage in the ancient history of Siberia.

The third stage of the latter coincides with the spread of new Neolithic monuments.

The settlement of Siberia was much later than the settlement of the territories of Europe and Asia due to the harsh climatic conditions. This period was called the Ice Age, that is, the period of global cooling and glaciation. There have been many such ice ages over the past 3 billion years. There is a perpetual motion on the globe, the essence of which is that the surface ocean currents, due to a change in the axis and angle of rotation of the Earth, transfer huge masses of cold and warm water between different parts of the world, therefore, in different parts of it, glaciation occurs, that is, the accumulation of ice in the form glaciers that form when the snow that has not melted for many years is compacted.

In the Pleistocene, polar and mountain glaciers advanced and retreated at least four times, capturing vast territories of Europe and America, covering up to 30% of the earth's surface. Currently, extensive ice sheets have been preserved only in Antarctica and Greenland. Approximately 11,000 years ago, land thawing began and continues to this day. During the epochs of glaciation, water was bound in the thickness of the continental ice and the water level fell, so at one time an isthmus was formed between Siberia and Alaska, along which people and animals migrated. Only after the final melting of the last glacier, the climate of the entire vast territory is formed.

Children of the glacier, hunters of mammoths and long-haired rhinos roamed the area. Primitive people lived on the shores of numerous fertile glacial lakes, who were engaged in fishing and gathering. At this stage of development, man was no different from the rest of the animal world, and it can be assumed that there really was no reasonable person (Homo Sapiens) here for a certain period. But glaciers melted, lakes dried up, mammoths and rhinos died out, but herds of herbivores appeared: deer, wild bulls, horses, etc. The distant past of the inhabitants of Siberia can be judged by the archaeological finds that were made on the banks of the Kita River.

These were the dwellings of an ancient man and several burials. A little later, there were finds in the area of ​​​​the settlements of Malta and Buret, located on the Belaya River (the real Usolsky district, Irkutsk region). Discovered finds of 14-15 thousand years ago. The dwellings of an ancient man made of animal bones were discovered: the support of the dwelling was made of mammoth tusks, its skull, skulls and femurs of other large animals, and the roof was made of reindeer horns, which made it possible to have a hole at the top for smoke to escape. The dwelling looked like a plague. Burials have not been found here. The finds on the Kitoy and Belaya rivers are the remains of the culture of an ancient man and were called the Kitoy culture. Another unusual and unique find is the burials of ancient people in the regional city of Irkutsk, called the Glazkovsky necropolis.

In the Irkutsk region itself, there are more than 700 interesting archaeological sites (we will consider some of them since they are located on the territory of our Nizhneudinsky district). Irkutsk finds are about 2 thousand years older than the Egyptian pyramids. This is the only unique monument in the world that has been preserved in the center of a large city, illuminating the life and death of an ancient man. The finds were made in the area of ​​the Kai Mountain and the park of the Paris Commune. The first remains of burials and household items were discovered in 1887 during the construction of an orphanage in the Glazkovsky suburb in the area of ​​the Kaiskaya Mountain on the left bank of the Angara River, another part of the burials was discovered in the area of ​​the park of the Paris Commune, and this is already on the other side, Sverdlovsk district of Irkutsk. Here they found a parking lot and burial places of people who lived 7 - 8 thousand years ago (Neolithic) and even more than 30 - 35 thousand years ago, i.e. in the late period of the ancient Stone Age (upper poleolith).

These burials of two cultures - Kitoy and Glazkovo - can be considered almost identical, since practically ancient people lived close to the area and there were similarities in household items. At present, the places of settlement and the type of people who lived in this territory have not yet been fully studied. It is only known that it was a nomadic people, their dwellings were a structure similar to a chum. Fishing was the main occupation of the people. They made tools and ornaments. The clothes of ancient people were made of leather. The people who lived in this area were Asians of a special Baikal race, physically very strong. The faces of these people were more rounded and the eyes more slanted than those of modern representatives of the Mongoloid race. The deceased were on average at the age of about 30 years, height 145 - 170 cm. According to the available information and the hypothesis of scientists, during this period, due to some reasons, a demographic crisis occurred, due to which people generally degenerated throughout the region for a long period.

According to the study of single and group burials, the bodies of the dead were richly smeared with ocher and were located on their backs with their heads to the northeast. Burials were accompanied by inventory - stone axes, knives, fish hooks, bone needles, spearheads, decorations from wild boar fangs, morality, green and white jade. There were images of heads of moose and fish. To date, there is no answer why they were buried so massively here and that these are burials of the Kitoi culture discovered in 1881, although no burials were found there.

Glazkovo burial, or as it is called the Glazkovo necropolis, is unique in that all burials, including bone material and skulls, due to the special landscape and soil composition, underwent minimal deformation. In the region of Malta and Bureti, 4-5 burials were found, but the skulls were not preserved, which made it impossible to establish the racial identity of the buried. The Glazkovo burial only partially clarified the racial affiliation of the buried. In 1954 in the valley of the Charysh River, Krasnoyarsk Territory, the Ust-Kanskaya Cave was discovered, in which bones of extinct animals and Neandental tools were found, and this suggests that a person lived here from 50 to 100 thousand years ago during the Pleistocene (Quaternary period).

Stone tools found on the Urlinka River in the Altai Mountains give reason to believe that a person was present here 100 and even 200 thousand years ago. Then there were no races of a certain type, but it can be assumed that Altai was the center of human settlement throughout the North-Eastern part of Asia. In 1937 the Frenchman C. Fromage, getting acquainted with the most ancient monument of the Stone Age (polealite) Afontova Gora, raised a fragment of the skull (frontal part with nose bridge), which had the features of the Mongoloid race. This suggests that the ape-men (sicatropes) came here from Central Asia. According to the conclusion of the anthropologist G. F. Debets, people of the Mongoloid type lived on the territory of the present Baikal and Transbaikalia, in contrast to the population of Western Siberia, where the Europeoid type was in charge. Eleven thousand years ago, people migrated from Southeast Asia to North Asia. During the transition from the Poleolith to the Neolithic (New Stone Age), people occupy new spaces of Siberia and that the Mesolithic hunter (transitional time) already lived on the banks of the Yenisei and Angara rivers.

By virtue of his natural qualities and quick natural learning, man began to occupy the leading role in the animal world and the highest step in the evolutionary chain. Then it was a paradise for a primitive hunter. Hunting for animals gave him food, he sewed clothes from the skins. Man has learned to make tools for labor and hunting. The perceived need and ability of people to protect themselves from the surrounding animal world, which threatened its existence, gave impetus to human reproduction. With the growth of the population and the obviousness with this limitation of hunting resources, people are forced to engage in cattle breeding, and this already required the efforts of the team and the person begins to unite into clans and separate groups (tribes).

The first domesticated animals appear, which were originally in human habitats. Gradually, due to the increase in the number of people, the habitat narrowed and a person had to look for new habitats, where there would be favorable conditions for increasing the number, life and reproduction of animals. As a result, nomadic and semi-nomadic animal husbandry began to develop. As the number of livestock increases, grazing land is quickly depleted, and this leads to an ecological crisis, which leads to a reduction in individuals, which leads to starvation and extinction, or it was necessary to expand the ecological space. And such a crisis broke out about 10-12 thousand years ago. (example - Glazkovo burials). Many populations of Homo sapiens are on the verge of extinction. And that's when man invented agriculture. A new stage of development began, but it could also come to a limit. All these reasons served to accelerate the settlement of man on the planet. The more favorable areas of Europe, Asia, America were settled more intensively, and only then the more unsuitable areas for life began to be settled, in which a person adapted to more severe conditions.

There are archaeological finds in the territories of the Nizhneudinsk region and the city of Nizhneudinsk - these are mainly sites of an ancient person, household items and hunting. True, not a single burial was found at any of the sites, or the goal was not to look for these burials.

The most famous early site of an ancient man is the Kobluk mountain site. It is located at the ledge of the right bank of the Uda River, near the village of Kobluk. When clearing the outcrops, four cultural horizons were discovered here, one of which dates back to the late poleolithic era - the ancient stone age. It contained the remains of ancient animals, flakes - waste that remained during the manufacture of stone tools. In three other horizons, a mass of flakes, fragments of stone tools, and a fire pit were found. They are attributed to the transitional period from the Old Stone Age to the New Stone Age (Neolithic).

The parking lot deserves special attention, which was visited by almost every resident of our city of Nizhneudinsk and hardly suspected that he was walking on the land of our ancient ancestors. This is the shore of the lake, bearing the gloomy name of "dead" on the northern outskirts of the city. The lake is nothing but the old course of the Uda River. Therefore, the parking lot received the official name "old woman". It received this name in 1976, when exploration work was carried out here in the valley of the Uda River by a complex expedition of the Irkutsk State University. At that time, fragments of nine ceramic vessels were recorded. Even though back in 1972. students of the same university found 50 fragments of various vessels here. The most interesting ones are in the Irkutsk Museum of Local Lore. There are also exhibits in our Nizhneudinsk Museum - more than ten fragments with various ornaments - a molded roller, an inclined impression, a "herringbone", a floral ornament, annular impressions. Arrowheads and many flakes were found. The named site has already been partially destroyed as a result of soil weathering, although from year to year more and more new finds appear on the sandy slope.

At 62 km from the city of Nizhneudinsk, up the Uda River, there are well-known Nizhneudinsk (Bogatyr) caves for almost all Nizhneudinsk residents and guests of the city. In the caves, researchers have found the remains of ancient fossil animals that lived tens of thousands of years ago in the late glacial or post-glacial periods. The remains of a primitive man or tools of his labor were not found there, but in the 20s of the 20th century, a wooden harpoon tip was found there with hedgehog needles tied to it, wrapped in birch bark. (More detailed information about the Bogatyrsky caves will be given in another article). The transitional period from the Old Stone Age to the New Stone Age is called the Mesolithic, and this is the most interesting period in the history of mankind. It was during this period 10-12 thousand years ago that an ancient hunter tames a dog, invented a bow and arrows, fishing hooks, invented a spear - two or three bone points tied to a stick. It was the Mesolithic man who, at some distance from the dwelling, dug a “household pit” for a garbage dump, which was filled with broken bones, flakes, and various fragments.

Neolithic - New Stone Age people painted animal figures and hunting scenes on the rocks. The drawings of ancient hunters were discovered by the Nizhneudinsk researcher M.I. Pugachev in our area, at the mouth of the Yarma River, which flows into the Uda River, the so-called petroglyphs, and on the opposite side there is a cave consisting of three rooms. In February 1979 they were studied by a group of scientists led by Professor A.P. Okladnikov. This is how he described the petroglyphs: “The drawings are located 70 km higher from Nizhneudinsk in the valley of the Uda River. Rock paintings are located on the right bank of the Uda River on a low cliff. They are located in groups on wide planes. The bulk of the drawings depict animals - moose. All drawings are made according to the same technique: they are embossed with fine dotted retouching, forming narrow grooves 1-1.5 mm wide. On a rocky low cliff there is a drawing of an elk. The first beast is followed by a whole group of the same images on the neighboring Yarma rock. Behind them - the second even more numerous, but more ancient. This whole series was not the work of one master, but ancient hunters came to this rock over and over again, generation after generation, and left signs of their stay, their drawings on it. Neolithic man once comprehended the secret of baked clay. With the advent of clay vessels, new cooked food appeared.

On the territory of the modern city of Nizhneudinsk, there are a number of finds that indicate that an ancient man lived here. In 1990 in the area of ​​​​the asphalt plant, the eastern part of the city, workers digging a pit dug out 2 knives and a bronze ax. A former student of school No. 10 A. Lityaev, being at his dacha (the area of ​​the oil pipeline), found flakes that remained during the manufacture of tools and a stone ax with ears. According to the researchers, these finds belong to the Polealite era. The find was handed over to the Irkutsk Museum of Local Lore, according to the opinion of the museum researcher, they have not yet had such fine work. At 3 km from Nizhneudinsk, in the area of ​​the place called Strelka, the remains of pottery and flakes were found (expedition of the CNS in 1993 led by Dzyubas).

Rich in content, an ancient site was discovered at the mouth of the Kara-Bureni River, 2 km below the village. Alygdzher (Tofolaria) by geologist Molotkov. Taking rock samples in a pit at a depth of 30-40 cm from the surface, he found burnt bones, flakes, fragments of tools in it. Everything found was transferred to the Irkutsk Museum of Local Lore in 1956. In 1966 this site was visited by Nizhneudinsk explorer M. I. Pugachev, where he again finds arrowheads, flakes, vessels, bones. Ethnologist Academician S. I. Vanshtein defines this site as the Neolithic era (5-7 thousand years ago). In 1966 in the area of ​​​​Lake Kastarma, M.I. Pugachev discovered flakes and a stone ax with ears, dated to the Mesolithic and Neolithic epochs. Flakes of the Mesolithic period were found in the area of ​​Lake Lisovskoye.

On the rivers Ipsit and Khangarka - household items, the remains of Bronze Age ceramics. 2 km. from the village of Chekhovo in the direction of Nizhneudinsk, near the bridge over the river Ut, flakes and blades were discovered by the expeditions of Generalov and Abdulov in 1995. The same expedition in the same year, 8 km. from the village of Hudayelan near the bridge over the Mut River, finds of ceramics and a bronze ax discovered by local residents (Bronze Age) were confirmed in 1960. this was certified by the Pork expedition. Outside the village of Solontsy in a grotto located downstream of the Uda River by the Expedition of Generalov and Abdulov in the same 1995. ceramics, flakes, processed bones, a bronze pipe, stele tips were found, and earlier local residents found a bronze ax there. They also discovered ceramics, flakes, a fire pit from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in the area of ​​the village of Porog, 3 km away. 1 km. from the mouth of the river Ut, near the bridge to Promyslovik, ceramics and flakes were found. 1 km from the former village of Muksut ceramics, flakes, plates of the Bronze Age. In the village Kamyshet was discovered the site of an ancient man was not investigated and during the construction of a bridge across the Zamzorka River, the same site was discovered, examined by specialists, but there are no results of the examination.

Also, we do not have data on the site of an ancient person in the village. Geological near the cafe Favorit and the area of ​​the village Sheberta. At the mouth of the Ipsit River, an ancient human site was found, arrowheads, bone figurines were found, and in a nearby cave, a hair net and a birch bark leaf with prayers in the Old Slavonic language. Along the river Uda, closer to Tofalaria, arrowheads and arrowheads were found in a grotto. A stone ax was found in the city of Alzamai. On the river Saryg-Oi in 1984. during excavations during the removal of the upper layer, a Bronze Age site was discovered.

The Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) got its name from the Greek words "paleo" - ancient and "lithos" - stone. This is the first and longest period in the history of mankind, which began about two million years ago.

In nature, there were rhythmic changes caused by the onset of glaciers. The West Siberian Plain, where we live, began to be developed by man at the end of the Paleolithic, about 15-20 thousand years ago, at the very end of the Ice Age. The science that studies this ancient period is called archeology. It studies the historical past of mankind on material monuments (tools, utensils, weapons, dwellings, settlements, fortifications, burial places), the main method of discovery of which is excavation.

On the territory of our region, a large number of bones of mammoths, woolly rhinos and other animals that lived near glaciers have been preserved.

The initial stages of the past of the Siberian tribes take place against the backdrop of the grandiose events of the Ice Age - the Pleistocene.

200-300 thousand years ago - the time of the first ice cover in Siberia. According to glaciologists, researchers of glaciers believe that about half of present-day Europe turned out to be covered with a continuous cover. Next to the European ice sheet, which extended to the Urals, lay the second one, the Taimyr one.

The dead icy desert, spreading over hundreds and thousands of square kilometers, was more terrible than the most terrible hot deserts of our time.

However, along the outskirts of the great glacier, the peculiar life of the glacial regions was in full swing. At the very edge of the ice began the boundless tundra, a land of swamps and endless lakes.

Waterfowl and herds of hoofed animals found abundant food in the forest-tundra and tundra of the near-glacial region. Already along the very edge, musk oxen were wandering in groups. Departing from the midges, in the summer they went towards the icy cliffs, from which the saving cold flowed, thousands of herds of reindeer. In the first place in this complex of animals that existed from northern China to Spain, from the Laptev Sea to Mongolia, there were two giant extinct animals - the mammoth and the rhinoceros. But the formidable ruler of the ancient animals was a beast whose appearance has not yet been restored: it was called the “cave lion”. In temperament and habits, it was a cross between a modern lion and a tiger.

Along with mammoths and rhinos, in the steppes and tundras, not only herds of reindeer, but also herds of wild horses and wild bulls, arctic fox, saiga antelope, bighorn sheep and red deer - deer peacefully grazed. It would be surprising if in this country, which nature has so generously endowed with animals, man has not appeared for a long time.

The settlement of Siberia by man was a long and very complex process. But how long ago and how widely people settled in Siberia is still unknown. Even at the height of the Ice Age, there were routes along which ancient people could settle. Scientists name 3 ways of settling Siberia:

• 1. From Central Asia.
• 2. From the Center and South of Asia.
• 3. From Eastern Europe.

In addition, A.P. Okladnikov puts forward the hypothesis that Southern Siberia itself was among the centers of the formation of man.

Pendant with the image of the Egyptian god Harpoctrates and a necklace (Tyurinsky burial ground). According to the materials from which tools were made, the following stages of the initial history of mankind are distinguished:

the ancient stone age (paleolithic) - 2.6 million - 10 thousand years BC. e.;

middle stone age (Mesolithic) - 10 thousand - 6 thousand years BC. e.;

New Stone Age (Neolithic) - 6 thousand - 3 thousand years BC;

copper-stone age (Eneolithic) - 4 thousand - 3 thousand years BC. e.;

Bronze Age - 2 thousand - 1 thousand years BC. e.;

the Iron Age began about 1 thousand years BC. e.

In Siberia, archaeologists find sites of Paleolithic people. The territory of the modern Tyumen region began to be settled by people many thousands of years ago. The oldest settlement of Neolithic people was found near Lake Andreevsky. Scientists found scrapers, knife-like plates, flint spearheads, a bone knife designed for butchering fish, clay sinkers for nets, etc. at the parking lot. People led a sedentary lifestyle, were engaged in fishing and hunting.

Sites of a later period - the Bronze Age - were discovered in the town of Suzgun on the Chuvash Cape (near Tobolsk) on the Poluy River and in other places.

Even more sites from the Iron Age have been found. At this time, on the territory of the Yalutorovsky district in the VI-IV centuries. BC e. Sargats lived - an association of nomadic tribes (Alans, Roxolans, Savromats, Yazygs, etc.). These tribes roamed from the Tobol River to the Volga.

The number of archaeological studies in the Tyumen region and in Western Siberia in general of sites of the Sargat time is small. But since the time of Peter the Great, Western Siberia has been the main supplier of ancient gold objects for museum collections.

Pottery of the Sargat culture. Archaeological expeditions of the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of Russia, Ural and Tyumen State Universities discovered about a hundred archaeological sites on the territory of the modern Yalutorovsky District: the remains of settlements, burial complexes of various eras - from the Neolithic to the late Middle Ages. These monuments were little excavated: in 1893, the Finnish archaeologist A. Geykel explored the burial mound near the village of Tomilovo. The historian I. Ya. Slovtsov noted 44 mounds in its composition. Only three of them have survived to this day. The rest were destroyed during construction or plowed up. In 1984-85. researcher of the Tyumen State University V. A. Zakh investigated the settlement of the era of the developed Bronze Age "Bird cherry bush-1" 4 km from Stary Kavdyk and 3 mounds of the early Iron Age near the village of Ozernaya.

In 1959, P.M. Kozhin - a Moscow archaeologist unearthed 2 mounds near the village. Commemorative. During excavations at Pamyatnoye, a group of five burial mounds was examined, located in a wide floodplain at the confluence of the Tobol and Iset rivers near the Yalutorovsk-Pamyatnoye road.

At the Pamyatnoye III site, located on a sandy terrace above barrow I, fragments of Sargat small vessels were found in a small area: one of them with triangles on the shoulders, the other with pits squeezed out from the inside of the neck. A bronze socketed trihedral arrowhead was also found here. It is possible that, along with the site of the Bronze Age, there was a burial site of the Sargat time.

In 1995, the archaeologists of the Institute for the Development of the North began a systematic study of the Ingalskaya Valley, on the territory of the Yalutorovsky District between the Tobol and the Iset, this valley is located at the confluence of the named rivers. There are several hundred settlements, settlements, mounds and soil burial grounds dating back to the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages.

Weapons and horse harness of the Sargat culture. The excavations of Tyutrinsky, Savinovsky and other burial grounds dating back to the first centuries of our era painted a vivid picture of the stratification of the Sargat society: The poor were buried with a minimum set of things, under small mounds; over the graves of the pedigree of the aristocracy, monumental earthen pyramids were built, reaching several tens of meters in diameter. The graves of the nobility, especially women, abounded in sets of imported beads and jewelry. These finds allow us to conclude that the Sargat tribes traded with the states of Central Asia, and through them with India.

During the excavations of other archaeological sites, the finest golden threads were found - the remains of richly embroidered clothes. There are dozens and hundreds of tools made of flint, jasper and slate, collected in settlements dating back to the New Stone Age and the Eneolithic.

Not far from the confluence of the Tobol and Iset, archaeologists began to explore the Buzan area, which is about 5.5 hectares. This area is covered with cultural layers of monuments of different times.

A rich necropolis dating back to the Eneolithic period was found here. The earth presented the archaeologists with two dozen beautifully polished and carefully drilled teardrop-shaped stone pendants, apparently included in the pectoral decoration, as well as a knife made of black flint shale, rare in terms of elegance, with a pommel shaped like a head of a bird of prey. Not far from the burial, a whole complex of objects was cleared. It included seven arrowheads, more than 250 knife-like plates and a round stone product ornamented around the entire perimeter with a hole in the center.

In one of the burials, a boat of the Eneolithic period, 5 meters long, was found. Next to it were visible traces of another boat, smaller in size. Our ancestors firmly believed that a person does not die, but only changes the form of life. And in another life, the items needed in this one will also be needed.

So archaeological excavations make it possible to recreate the history of the ancient life of Siberia, its settlement by man.

The accumulated archaeological, ethnographic, folklore materials and written sources make it possible to connect the origin of the term "Siberia" with the self-name of one of the ethnic groups that inhabited from the end of the 1st millennium BC. e. part of the territory of the forest-steppe Irtysh region. Such an ethnic group, called "Siberia", were the ancestors of the ancient Ugrians, who entered into long-term interaction with other ethnic communities of Western Siberia and Kazakhstan (including the Turkic-speaking ones).

Siberia: general information

The word "Siberia", originally denoting only an ethnonym, then was assigned to the fortified settlement of the Sipyrs on the banks of the Irtysh. In the first half of the XIII century. The Mongol military leaders knew the "forest people Shibir". From the second half of the XIII century. and in the XIV century Siberia is already widely found as the name of a certain territory north of the possessions Golden Horde rulers. In the XV century. in the Russian chronicles, the “Siberian Land” is known and its location is quite clearly characterized - the area along the lower reaches of the Tobol and the middle reaches of the Irtysh, where, obviously, the descendants of the ancient Sipyrs lived, largely assimilated by Turkic elements, and therefore differed from other groups of the Ugric peoples of the lower Irtysh and Priobya. With the emergence at the end of the XV century. statehood of the Tobolsk Tatars and the Turkicized Ugrians-sipyrs "Siberia" began to be called the state - the Siberian Khanate. Along with the Siberian Khanate in the territory east of the Urals in the XVI century. the Tyumen Khanate, Yugra and Mangazeya were known.

After the Russians conquered the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates on the Volga, the time came to advance to Siberia, which began with the campaign of Yermak Timofeevich in 1582. The arrival of the Russians was ahead of the development of the continental parts of the New World by Europeans. In the XVII-XVIII centuries, Russian pioneers and settlers went to the East through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. First, Central Siberia was settled, covered with forests (taiga), and then, with the construction of fortresses and the subordination of nomadic tribes, the steppe Southern Siberia.

In the Russian Empire, Siberia was an agrarian province and a place of exile and hard labor. At the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, the Trans-Siberian Railway was built, which gave a significant impetus to the economic development of Siberia and allowed more than 3 million people to be resettled here. During the Soviet era, there was a decline in agricultural production and an increase in the role of Siberia as a source of minerals and hydropower.

Stone Age

In the Pleistocene of North Asia, the development of five glaciations was noted:

shaitan (500-400 thousand years from our days),

Samarovsky (280-200 thousand years),

Taz 160-130 thousand years),

Zyryansky (100-55 thousand years),

Sartan (5-10 thousand years).

The first glaciation (Lower Pleistocene) is compared according to the classical Alpine scale with the Mindel glaciation of Western Europe, the next two (Middle Pleistocene) - with the Rissian and the last two (Upper Pleistocene) - with the Wurm. Between glaciations, warm interglacial stages are distinguished: Tobolsk (300 thousand years), Shirtinsky (200-160 thousand years), Kazantsev (130-100 thousand years) and Karginsky (55-25 thousand years).

During the Ice Age, the climate of Siberia was cold and dry. The lack of moisture prevented the accumulation of thick snow and ice layers. Therefore, the glaciers here did not have such huge sizes as in Europe. On the outskirts of the glacier, vast tundra-steppes stretched for hundreds of kilometers, turning south into the forest-steppe. During the interglacial period, the climate warmed considerably and became humid. Glaciers melted, tundra moved north. The dominant position in the vegetation cover was occupied by dark coniferous and broad-leaved forests. Numerous herds of herbivorous animals grazed in the boundless Siberian expanses: mammoths, woolly rhinos, reindeer, bison, wild horses. In such natural conditions, the development of Siberia by primitive man began. But nature is not just a background against which the ancient history of the Siberian tribes unfolded, but the necessary material basis for their existence, from which a person drew all the necessary life resources - food, clothing, housing, warmth, light.

The time of the initial settlement of the southern regions of Siberia, according to the latest data, is determined by the second half of the Middle Pleistocene (Taz and Kazantsev time). In archaeological terms, it corresponds to the end of the Acheulean - the beginning of the Mousterian within the framework of the early (lower) Paleolithic.

The carrier of the late Acheulean and Mousterian traditions was the Neanderthal man - Homo neandertalensis. The basis of his economy was hunting, which became a reliable and main source of livelihood. The relative imperfection of hunting weapons was largely compensated by both the abundance of the Pleistocene fauna and collective forms of hunting. They hunted mainly mammoths, rhinos, horses, deer. Along with hunting, gathering was widespread. Vegetable food occupied a significant place in the diet of ancient people.

Conducting a collective hunting-gathering economy, living together in cave shelters required from paleoanthropes a sufficiently developed social organization, the existence of a natural division of labor by sex and age, certain norms for the distribution of food products, and orderly sexual intercourse. All this makes us think that in the Mousterian, as in the Late Acheulean, people lived socially, in close-knit communities, in which clan relations gradually developed by the end of the Early Paleolithic. Between forty and thirty thousand years ago, a new stage in the development of the Stone Age began - the late (upper) Paleolithic. From its beginning, the appearance of a person of a modern physical type - a neoanthrope, is associated.

Technical discoveries and improvements, while accelerating the general pace of development of human society, at the same time more clearly showed local differences in the development of primitive culture. According to the peculiarities of the stone inventory (the shape of the products, technical, methods of their design), archaeologists establish the territorial and chronological groupings of the Late Paleolithic sites, singling them out into special archaeological cultures.

The most striking Late Paleolithic sites in Siberia are the sites of Malta and Buret in the Angara region. These are long-term settlements connected by the unity of culture with durable semi-dugout dwellings built using the bones of large animals, wood and stone slabs. The stone industry is characterized by prismatic cores; points, piercers, cutters, carvers and knives made from blades, as well as scrapers and chisel-shaped tools from flakes. A distinctive feature of the Malta-Buret culture is the highly developed Paleolithic art: female figurines carved from mammoth ivory and bone with emphasized signs of gender (some of them are depicted dressed in fur clothing such as overalls), figurines of flying and swimming birds, various ornamental decorations.

Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) - a new progressive stage in the history of mankind. The beginning of the Mesolithic generally coincides with the beginning of the modern geological epoch - the Holocene. About 10 thousand years ago, with the final retreat of the glacier, cardinal changes in the climate, landscape and animal world took place.

A new historical epoch - the Neolithic (New Stone Age), which began in Siberia 7-6 thousand years ago, coincides with the so-called climatic optimum of the Holocene. In most parts of Siberia, forests rich in animals and birds are widespread. The deep rivers abounded with fish. The climate was much warmer and milder than today. Siberian nature in the era of the New Stone Age favored the life of primitive hunters and fishermen. And it is no coincidence that it was at this time that a person is mastering the most remote corners of North Asia.

The Neolithic era is usually called the time of the Neolithic revolution. In the Neolithic, only the population of the Far East, along with hunting and fishing, began to engage in agriculture. In the rest of Siberia, the economy throughout the Neolithic era remained appropriating. Remoteness from the primary centers of the producing economy and less favorable natural conditions affected. However, the absence of "revolutionary" changes in the economy did not exclude the progress of hunting and fishing, the technology of manufacturing tools. An effective hunting weapon - a bow and arrows - became widespread. Productive net fishing in many areas became the leading branch of the economy, which made it possible to switch to a relatively settled way of life. The population of the most remote Siberian regions masters new methods of stone processing: grinding, drilling, sawing.

One of the main tools is a polished stone ax for the development of forest areas, and pottery appears. It is these economic and technological achievements that constitute the historical content of the Siberian Neolithic.

The chronological framework of the Neolithic era is different for individual regions of Siberia. Starting 7-6 thousand years ago, the Neolithic in the III-II millennium BC. e. almost everywhere it is replaced by the era of early metal, but in Chukotka and Kamchatka it continues until the 1st millennium BC. e.

For three millennia of the Neolithic era, man completely mastered the entire territory of North Asia. Neolithic settlements have been found even on the Arctic coast. The variety of natural conditions from the Urals to Chukotka largely predetermined the formation of various cultural and economic complexes that corresponded to the specific landscape and climatic conditions of such regions as Western, Eastern and North-Eastern Siberia, the Far East. Within these unique historical and ethnographic areas of the New Stone Age, numerous archaeological cultures were formed, marked by the unity of the territory, economy, main types of tools and ceramics.

Within Western Siberia, archaeologists identify several archaeological cultures: Eastern Ural - in the forest Trans-Urals and adjacent areas of Western Siberia, Middle Irtysh - in the middle reaches of the Irtysh, Upper Ob - in the forest-steppe Ob.

The presence of long-term settlements with semi-dugouts in Western Siberia testifies to the sedentary nature of the Neolithic population. A large number of tools for hunting and processing prey speaks of its significant role in the local economy. The main object of hunting was the elk, and this was reflected in the fine arts. The image of an elk is embodied both in the small plastic art of the Trans-Urals and in the stone engravings of the Tomsk pisanitsy. Apparently, these images were based on primitive hunting magic.

The natural-geographical boundary separating Western Siberia from Eastern Siberia has been a cultural-ethnic boundary almost at all times. In the Neolithic era, to the east of the Yenisei, a huge array of archaeological cultures stretching to the Pacific Ocean, similar in economic structure and, possibly, related in origin, was formed. The Neolithic sites of the Baikal region have been studied most fully. Regional periodization of the Baikal Neolithic developed by A.P. Okladnikov, became the backbone for the whole of Eastern Siberia.

In the early Neolithic Isakov culture (4th millennium BC), Paleolithic traditions are still felt, but polished adzes, double-sided processed arrowheads and pottery give the Isakov complexes a completely Neolithic appearance. In the era of the developed Neolithic, the Isakov culture is replaced by the Serov one. The carriers of the Kitoy culture (second half of the 3rd millennium BC) who replaced the Serovites inherited the techniques of making and dyeing ceramics from their predecessors, but somewhat reoriented their economy, which was also reflected in the production inventory. The constant search for game forced the Baikal people to lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle. They did not have long-term settlements and dwellings like West Siberian semi-dugouts. At the sites left by them, archaeologists manage to find only numerous bonfires and traces of light portable dwellings such as the plague. Tribes close to the Baikal people in culture and way of life lived in Yakutia.

The extreme northeastern regions of Siberia in the Neolithic era long remained the area of ​​distribution of remnant Mesolithic traditions. Only in the II-I millennium BC. e. the northeastern Neolithic cultures (Tarya in Kamchatka and North Chukotka in Chukotka) acquire a fully developed form. The first clay vessels, polished axes and various stone knives finely worked with continuous retouching, and scrapers, arrowheads and spears appear.

The economic complexes that developed in Siberia, the originality of which was largely determined by the differences in the natural environment, in turn predetermined the features of the social organization of ancient societies. Paleosociological analysis of settlements, dwellings, and cemeteries makes it possible to establish the number and nature of production groups of the Neolithic era. Among the semi-sedentary hunters of the tundra and the East Siberian taiga, these were economically independent families and associations of several families of up to 21-25 people. The fishermen and farmers of the Far East had large (up to 50 or more people), united by the joint obtaining of food, collectives. It is in such large labor collectives that a clear tribal organization has developed. Connected by a common origin and exogamous customs, family-economic and tribal groups united into tribes - the highest socio-territorial organization of the Neolithic.

Ethnocultural areas of Siberia

In the Neolithic era in Siberia, not only cultural and economic, but also ethno-cultural communities were formed. These were areas of settlement of ancient tribes who spoke the languages ​​of the same family. Archaeological and linguistic sources make it possible to single out three main ethno-cultural areas in Siberia, mostly coinciding with cultural and economic areas.

The archaeological cultures of Western Siberia are part of the Ural-Siberian ethno-cultural community. It is characterized mainly by pointed-bottomed vessels, made by the method of tape molding and decorated on the entire outer surface with a linear-pricked and comb ornament. Linguistically, this community can be associated with the eastern or Proto-Ugric-Samoyed branch of the Ural family.

The Baikal-Lena ethno-cultural area included the archaeological cultures of the Baikal region, Yakutia and the extreme northeast. The entire range is characterized by poorly ornamented round-bottomed vessels with imprints of woven mesh or false textile imprints. Pottery was made using a solid mold and mesh, and later by knocking out. The Baikal-Lena community is associated with the distant ancestors of the Paleo-Asiatic peoples.

The third ethnocultural area covers the territory of the Far East and includes monuments with flat-bottomed ceramics. The Neolithic cultures of the Far Eastern area are still difficult to interpret ethnically. The peculiar ornamental art of the Amur Neolithic, such defining elements as the Amur braid, spiral and meander, have been preserved in the ethnographic art of the modern Tungus-Manchurian population of the Amur. This suggests their genetic connection with the carriers of the Neolithic cultures of the Far East.

In the second half of the III millennium BC. e. in the southern regions of Siberia, the first metal products appeared, marking the end of the Stone Age. The first metal from which people learned to make tools was copper. The period of distribution of tools made of copper and its alloys (various types of bronze) received the name of the early metal era in archaeological periodization. In the development of ancient metallurgy and metalworking, researchers distinguish several stages. They formed the basis of the internal periodization of the era.

The first period is called the Eneolithic (Copper Stone Age). The term "Eneolithic" indicates the transitional nature of the era and denotes the initial, preceding the appearance of bronze, the period of distribution of metal products, existing with a developed and fully preserved stone industry. As spectral and metallographic analyzes have shown, the metal things of the Eneolithic time are made of metallurgically pure copper by forging or smelting in open casting molds. The absolute date of the Eneolithic in Siberia is the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. e.

Bronze Age in Siberia

The second period of the early metal era, traditionally called the Bronze Age, is associated with the development of artificial copper-based alloys, that is, bronzes.

Bronze differs from copper in one important quality - hardness. Due to this, bronze tools became more widespread than copper ones. The main technical achievement of the ancient metallurgists at this stage was the casting of almost all products in closed double-sided molds.

In different areas, researchers identify several stages in the Bronze Age itself. The most common is a three-term periodization with the allocation of the stages of the early, developed and late Bronze Age. In general, the Bronze Age of Siberia dates back to the II-beginning of the I millennium BC. e.

The era of early metal in Siberia has several features. Metallurgy of copper and bronze could appear only in those places where there are deposits of copper ores. In Siberia, large deposits accessible to primitive miners are confined to the mountainous regions of the Urals, Rudny Altai, Sayan and Transbaikalia. There are practically no reserves of copper ore on the vast territory of Western, Eastern and North-Eastern Siberia, the Far East. Therefore, the era of early metal did not become a universal stage in the cultural and historical development of the entire Siberian population. Eneolithic monuments are known only in areas directly adjacent to mining and metallurgical areas. Monuments of the Bronze Age are much more widespread, but even at that time the culture of many tribes of Northeast Asia and the Far East was at the Neolithic level. The second feature of the early metal era in Siberia is its short duration. Here it fits into one and a half millennia, while in the most ancient mining and metallurgical regions of the Old World, tools made of copper and bronze dominated for three thousand years. This is due to the fact that the ancient metal penetrates into Siberia relatively late, at the final stages of the development of the Eurasian copper-bronze metallurgy.

The growth of labor productivity, due to the introduction of metal tools, in the presence of favorable environmental conditions, inevitably had to lead to a radical restructuring of the economic systems that developed in Siberia in the Neolithic. Starting from the Eneolithic era, the population of the Siberian steppes and forest-steppes is gradually moving to cattle-breeding and agriculture. The era of early metal was destined to divide Siberia into two worlds: the steppe-forest-steppe, inhabited by cattle breeders and farmers, and the taiga, where hunters and fishermen lived. Some researchers draw such a sharp line between the areas of the appropriating and producing economy that they suggest that only cultures associated with agriculture and cattle breeding be attributed to the Eneolithic era, and that societies of hunters and fishermen that are synchronous and close in material culture to them be considered Neolithic. The most ancient Siberian metal-bearing cultures (Afanasyevskaya, Shapkulskaya and Lipchinskaya) refute this point of view and prove that copper products of the same type are distributed among cattle breeders of Southern Siberia, and among hunters and fishermen of the forest Trans-Urals. Obviously, the Eneolithic is not associated with the same economic system, but finds a kind of refraction in different ecological zones.

Siberian Eneolithic cultures were localized in areas adjacent to mining and metallurgical areas. In Altai in the Minusinsk steppes in the second half of the III millennium BC. e. Afanasiev tribes appeared. Apparently, they migrated here from more western territories and brought to Siberia the beginnings of metallurgy, agriculture and cattle breeding. All leading types of guns were made by the Afanasievites from stone. Copper was used for jewelry, needles, awls, small knives. The Afanasiev masters did not yet know how to cast, copper objects were processed by forging. Ceramics of the Afanasevo culture is diverse in size and shape. Tall, pointed-bottomed vessels with Christmas ornaments predominated. The pattern was applied with a blunt stick or a comb stamp. The economy of the Afanasievites was complex. Along with net fishing and hunting, traditional for Neolithic Siberia, cattle breeding and, to a lesser extent, agriculture have been developed. Findings of bones of domestic animals in the graves and in the cultural layer of the settlements indicate that the Afanasievites bred cows, horses, and sheep. An integrated economy allowed them to live settled, in permanent dwellings.

In the second half of the III millennium BC. e. copper items (awls, knives) appear in the forest Trans-Urals and adjacent regions of Western Siberia in the inventory of the Lipchin and Shapkul cultures.

In the first half of the II millennium BC. e. in the south of Western and Eastern Siberia, cultures of the mature Bronze Age are formed: Krotovskaya and Samusskaya in the Upper Ob region, Okunevskaya - in the Minusinsk steppes, Glazkovskaya - in the taiga Baikal region.

The largest archaeological find in Siberia among the most ancient is considered to be a 5-meter-long burial boat discovered in the Buzan-3 burial ground (Ingalskaya Valley, south of the Tyumen region), artifacts of which date back to the Copper Age. The burial ground dates back to 3190 BC. e. plus or minus 60 years. Thus, it is the same age as Stonehenge (3020-2910 BC), the first cities of Mesopotamia]] (3500-3000 BC) and much older than the well-known pyramids of Cheops (2560-2540 BC) and monuments of Arkaim (2200-1600 BC).

Along the course of the Charysh River, traces of ancient human habitation were found in several caves. Various ornaments and utensils were found in the mounds of Katun, Charysh, in the upper reaches of the Alei, the Irtysh River, which indicates a relatively high culture of the inhabitants of ancient Siberia. On many cups, bronze and silver mugs, quite complex drawings are visible, which are images of various animals and birds. In the same mounds there are attachments to horse harness, often made of solid gold. The same tribes left numerous plates and "women", sometimes covered with inscriptions.

Jade tools found in Barnaul deserve special attention. Attachments to horse attire were also found in barrows, often made of massive gold. Due to the large number of bronze, gold and silver items and numerous traces of ancient mining and smelting in Altai, it can be judged that mining and processing of precious and other metals began and was carried out here very early. Herodotus' indications on the ways in which gold was delivered leave no doubt that it was about gold mining within the present Altai.

The ancient inhabitants of Altai smelted ore in large clay pots, fragments of which are found near the mines along with stone and copper tools. So, in the Zolotushensky mine, two objects made of pure copper were found. In the Zmenigorsk mine, the same items were found, along with stone hammers, and the skeleton of a miner crushed by a landslide with a tool and a leather bag filled with ocher ores was also found. At the same time, there are no iron tools in the ancient Altai mines. Although, according to Chinese chronicles, iron mining was carried out here in the 7th century BC. e.

In the middle of the II millennium BC. e. the cultural image of the Siberian steppes and forest-steppes is changing dramatically. The Andronovo culture spread throughout the vast territory from the Urals to the Yenisei. The Andronov tribes constituted a whole epoch in Siberian history. This was the time of the establishment of a developed manufacturing economy in the south and the far penetration of bronze metallurgy. Finds of the Andronovo culture (2300 BC - 1000 BC) and the Cherkaskul culture (1500 BC) are widely represented among the archaeological sites in Siberia. - 1200 BC) and Sargat cultures (500 BC - 500 AD), which belong to the ancient Ugrians.

In the Siberian steppes, a single economic and cultural type of shepherds-cattle breeders and farmers developed for all Andronovites. Andronovtsy lived settled in long-term semi-dugouts. Their settlements were located in river valleys rich in pastures and fertile lands suitable for agriculture. The herd was dominated by cattle, sheep, horses. Andronovites became the first riders in the Asian steppes. Cattle were kept on pastures for most of the year under the supervision of shepherds, and in winter - in special pens. Cereals were cultivated on easy-to-cultivate floodplain lands. The soil was cultivated by hand with stone and bronze hoes. Hunting and fishing were of no great importance in economic life.

The Andronovites were tribes of metallurgists. They possessed copper and tin mines and supplied metal far to the west. Their casters ensured the widespread production of tools (sickles, axes, celts) and weapons (daggers, socketed tips, spears with leaf-shaped feathers), including outside the Andronovo area. Having mastered the steppe and forest-steppe, the Andronovites, in search of new fields and pastures along the river valleys, penetrated into the taiga zone, where they mixed with the aboriginal population. As a result, andronoid cultures (Cherkaskul, Suzgun, Yelov) developed in the south of the West Siberian taiga, combining local and alien traditions. Under the influence of the Andronovo culture, the bearers of these cultures developed their own bronze-casting centers, which played an important role in the spread of metal in the taiga zone.

At the end of the II millennium BC. e. Andronovo culture in Southern Siberia is replaced by Karasuk. The Karasuk tribes had a great influence on the Siberian cultures of the final stage of the Bronze Age. It can be traced over a vast territory from the Upper Ob to Yakutia. The steppe economy underwent some changes in the Late Bronze Age. In the composition of the Karasuk herd, the proportion of small cattle increased, which made the herd more mobile and made it possible to switch to seasonal migrations. Thus, on the eve of the Iron Age, the conditions for the transition to nomadic cattle breeding were created in the South Siberian steppes.

In the Late Bronze Age, metal spread throughout almost the entire territory of North Asia. Under the influence of the Karasuk culture, its own metallurgical center was formed in the Ust-Mil culture of Yakutia (end of the 2nd-1st millennium BC). In the first half of the 1st millennium BC. e. single bronze items appear in the Ust-Belsk culture of Chukotka. But a few imported bronze objects did not change its Neolithic character. In essence, the population of Chukotka and Kamchatka continued to live in the Stone Age.

The economic differentiation of the north and south predetermined the features of the social history of the population of the taiga and the steppe. Under the conditions of a commercial (hunting and fishing) economy and a very low population density, the main production team in the taiga zone continued to be an individual family or group of families. The genus, deprived of an economic function, became unstable. Apparently, the amorphous tribal organization, evidenced by ethnography among some taiga peoples of Western and Eastern Siberia, was also characteristic of this territory in the early metal era. More developed social relations could have developed among sedentary fishermen with their specialized productive economy, greater population density and a strong settled way of life. The funeral rite of the burial grounds of the Bronze Age fixes the dependent position of women and singles out the most successful hunters and worshipers (shamans?).

Social development in the steppes went much faster. Family cemeteries and the presence of tribal territories (stand out in the Andronovo culture) testify to the traditions of a developed tribal system. However, a paired family was already distinguished in its bowels, as evidenced by the wide distribution of paired burials.

In the second half of the II millennium BC. e. rich burials and powerful, towering above the rest, mounds of individual barrows appear in the steppes - eloquent evidence of the emergence of property and social inequality in the societies of pastoralists and farmers in South Siberia.

Iron Age in Siberia

The Iron Age brought great changes to the life of the peoples of ancient Siberia and the Far East.

Siberian tribes got acquainted with iron in the 1st millennium BC. e. The Early Iron Age of Siberia covers a significant chronological period: VII c. BC e. - IV century. n. e.

The historical and archaeological features of the development of the steppe regions of Eurasia make it possible to single out two long periods in the Early Iron Age: Scythian or Scythian-Sakian and Hunnic or Hunnic-Sarmatian). On the basis of developed nomadic pastoralism, societies with a military-democratic way of life developed here and the first tribal unions took shape.

"Scythian" time in the history of the peoples of the Eurasian steppes refers to the VIII-III centuries. BC e. and is characterized by the transition from pastoral-agricultural forms of economy to nomadic pastoralism.

In IV-III centuries. BC e. the barbarian periphery attracted the close attention of the government of the Celestial Empire: at that time, a warlike alliance of the Xiongnu was formed, and the fight against this enemy required the search for allies. Chinese diplomacy is actively collecting information about the western and northern lands. Usuns, Yuezhi and Dinlins fall into their field of vision. According to written sources, in their time they created strong political unions that successfully opposed the Huns for a long time.

The Yuezhi lived in the mountains and valleys of the Altai and Sayan. In modern Scythology, the Pazyryk and Uyuk cultures of Altai and Tuva are associated with the Yuezhi. The question of the linguistic affiliation of the Yuezhi is unclear. Most often they are attributed to the eastern Iranian-speaking Massagets. According to another opinion, the Yuezhi were multilingual, and, in particular, some ethnonyms date back to the Turkic languages. The excavations of the Pazyryk burial mounds testified to the mixed Mongoloid-Caucasoid type of the Yuezhi.

To the northeast of the Yuezhi, in the Yenisei steppes, the Tagar culture of the Dinlins was widespread. The Dinlins, according to the Chinese, were related to the Huns, but always hostile to them. Unlike the neighbors of the Yuezhi, the Dinlin-Tagars led a settled way of life.

The tribes of the Tagar culture achieved a high development in metal production and metalworking. Most of the ancient copper mines of southern Siberia belonged to the Tagars. They greatly improved the composition of various bronze alloys. The famous Tagar golden bronze in the form of ingots, and more often products, was exported to other regions, especially to the taiga and forest-steppes of Western and Central Siberia.

"Scythian time" in the Eurasian steppes is replaced by "Hunno-Sarmatian" in the III century. BC e.-IV c. n. e. The Sarmatians in the west, the Huns in the east began to dominate the Great Steppe. This period is characterized by the complete victory of iron over bronze and stone in material culture, the further development of nomadism and the unprecedented scope of migration processes.

In the first centuries A.D. e. on the vast barbarian periphery of the slave-owning world, almost simultaneously in the societies of the Germans, Slavs, Huns, Sarmatians, a transition began to a class society. These peoples form powerful military-political alliances, they become mobile and aggressive. The decrepit slave-owning civilizations, which had reached an economic dead end, torn apart by internal contradictions, were unable to repulse the barbarians. The world was on the eve of the "great migration of peoples", the impetus for which was given in the east. Siberia played a significant role in the life of the Eurasian steppe Middle Ages.

Yugra (XI-XVI centuries)

The name of Siberia is not found in Russian historical monuments until 1407, when the chronicler, speaking of the murder of Khan Tokhtamysh, indicates that it took place in the Siberian land near Tyumen. However, Russian relations with the country, which later received the name of Siberia, date back to ancient times. Novgorodians in 1032 reached the "iron gates" of the Ural Mountains - according to Solovyov's interpretation) and were defeated by the Yugras here. Since that time, chronicles quite often mention the Novgorod campaigns to Ugra.

Since the middle of the 13th century, Ugra had already been colonized as a Novgorod volost; however, this dependence was not strong, since the indignations of the Yugras were not uncommon. As the Novgorod “Karamzin Chronicle” testifies, in 1364 the Novgorodians made a big campaign on the Ob River: “Novgorodians, boyar children and young people, came from Yugra and fought along the Ob river to the sea.” When Novgorod fell, relations with the eastern countries did not die out. On the one hand, Novgorod residents, sent to the eastern cities, continued the policy of their fathers. On the other hand, the tasks of old Novgorod were inherited by Moscow.

In 1472, after the campaign of the Moscow governor Fyodor Motley and Gavrila Nelidov, the Perm land was colonized. On May 9, 1483, at the behest of Ivan III, a large campaign was launched by the governor Fyodor Kurbsky-Cherny and Ivan Saltyk-Travin to Western Siberia against the Vogul prince Asyka. Having defeated the Voguls at Pelym, the Moscow army moved along the Tavda, then along the Tura and along the Irtysh until it flows into the Ob River. Here the Yugra prince Moldan was captured. After this campaign, Ivan III began to be called the Grand Duke of Yugorsky, Prince Kondinsky and Obdorsky. In 1499, another campaign of the Moscow army took place beyond the Urals.

Siberian Khanate (XIII-XVI centuries)

At the beginning of the 13th century, the peoples of southern Siberia were subjugated by the eldest son of Genghis Khan named Jochi. With the collapse of the Mongol Empire, southwestern Siberia became part of the Ulus of Jochi or the Golden Horde. Presumably in the 13th century, the Tyumen Khanate of Tatars and Kereites was founded in the south of Western Siberia. It was in vassal dependence on the Golden Horde. Around 1500, the ruler of the Tyumen Khanate united most of Western Siberia by creating Siberian Khanate with its capital in the city of Kashlyk, also known as Siberia and Isker. The Siberian Khanate bordered on Perm, the Kazan Khanate, the Nogai Horde, the Kazakh Khanate and the Irtysh Teleuts. In the north, it reached the lower reaches of the Ob, and in the east it was adjacent to the Piebald Horde.

Conquest of Siberia by Yermak (late 16th century)

In 1555, the Siberian Khan Yediger recognized vassal dependence on the Russian Kingdom and promised to pay tribute to Moscow - yasak (although the tribute was never paid in the promised amount). In 1563, the Shibanid Kuchum, who was the grandson of Ibak, seized power in the Siberian Khanate. He executed Khan Yediger and his brother Bek-Bulat.

The new Siberian Khan made great efforts to strengthen the role of Islam in Siberia. Khan Kuchum stopped paying tribute to Moscow, but in 1571 he sent a full yasak of 1,000 sables. In 1572, after the Crimean Khan Devlet I Gerai ruined Moscow, the Siberian Khan Kuchum completely broke off tributary relations with Moscow. In 1573, Kuchum sent his nephew Mahmut Kuli with a retinue for reconnaissance purposes outside the khanate. Makhmut Kuli reached Perm, disturbing the possessions of the Ural merchants Stroganovs. In 1579, the Stroganovs invited a squad of Cossacks (more than 500 people), under the command of atamans Yermak Timofeevich, Ivan Koltso, Yakov Mikhailov, Nikita Pan and Matvey Meshcheryak, to protect against regular attacks from Kuchum.

On September 1, 1581, a squad of Cossacks, under the general command of Yermak, set out on a campaign for the Stone Belt (Urals), marking the beginning of the colonization of Siberia by the Russian state. The initiative of this campaign, according to the annals of Esipovskaya and Remizovskaya, belonged to Yermak himself, the participation of the Stroganovs was limited to the forced supply of supplies and weapons to the Cossacks.

In 1582, on October 26, Ermak captured Kashlyk and began the annexation of the Siberian Khanate to Russia. Having been defeated by the Cossacks, Kuchum migrated south and continued to resist the Russian conquerors until 1598. On April 20, 1598, he was defeated by the Tara governor Andrei Voeikov on the banks of the river. Ob and fled to the Nogai Horde, where he was killed. Ermak was killed in 1584. The last khan was Ali, the son of Kuchum.

At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, settlers from Russia founded the cities of Tyumen, Tobolsk, Berezov, Surgut, Tara, Obdorsk (Salekhard) on the territory of the Siberian Khanate. In 1601, the city of Mangazeya was founded on the Taz River, which flows into the Gulf of Ob. Thus, the sea route to Western Siberia (Mangazeya Sea Route) was opened.

With the foundation of the prison Narym, the Pegaya Horde was conquered in the east of the Siberian Khanate.

17th century

During the reign of Mikhail Fedorovich, the first tsar from the Romanov dynasty, Siberian Cossacks and settlers master Eastern Siberia. During the first 18 years of the 17th century, the Russians crossed to the Yenisei River. The cities of Tomsk (1604), Krasnoyarsk (1628) and others are founded.

In 1623, the explorer Pyanda penetrated the Lena River, where later (1630s) Yakutsk and other towns were founded. In 1637-1640, a route was opened from Yakutsk to the Sea of ​​Okhotsk up the Aldan, Mae and Yudoma. When moving along the Yenisei and the Arctic Ocean, industrialists penetrated the mouths of the Yana, Indigirka, Kolyma and Anadyr rivers. The consolidation of the Lena (Yakutsk) region for the Russians was secured by the construction of the Olekminsky prison (1635), Nizhne-Kolymsk (1644) and Okhotsk (1648). In 1661 the Irkutsk prison was founded, in 1665 the Selenginsky prison, in 1666 the Uda prison.

In 1649-1650, the Cossack ataman Yerofey Khabarov reached the Amur. By the middle of the 17th century, Russian settlements appeared in the Amur region, on the coast of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk, in Chukotka.

In 1645, the Cossack Vasily Poyarkov discovers the northern coast of Sakhalin.

In 1648, Semyon Dezhnev passes from the mouth of the Kolyma River to the mouth of the Anadyr River and opens the strait between Asia and America.

In 1686, the first smelting of silver from Argun or Nerchinsk silver ores was carried out in Nerchinsk. Subsequently, the Nerchinsk mining district arises here.

In 1689, the Nerchinsk Treaty was concluded, border trade with China began.

18th century

In 1703 Buryatia became part of the Muscovite state.

On December 29, 1708, in the course of the regional reform of Peter I, the Siberian province was created with the center in Tobolsk. Prince MP Gagarin became the first governor.

In 1721 in St. Petersburg, in the presence of Peter I, the first governor of Siberia, Prince Matvey Gagarin, was hanged. As a warning to others, his body was left to hang in the square in front of the Stock Exchange for seven months. Official court documents testify that embezzlement and kindred protectionism became the reason for the sovereign's anger. Another version was presented by the Swedish geographer Philipp Stralenberg, who lived in Tobolsk for 13 years, and after him by the Russian historian Pyotr Slovtsov in the book “Historical Review of Siberia” (1838): allegedly “Gagarin plotted to secede from Russia, because they were correctly installed in Tobolsk caused by gunsmiths and the making of gunpowder began. The fact that back in 1719, Prince Matvey secretly announced the upcoming separation of Siberia from Russia, after many days of torture, some of the governor's close associates allegedly confessed.

In the 18th century, Russian settlement of the steppe part of southern Siberia takes place, which until then was held back by the Yenisei Kyrgyz and other nomadic peoples.

Construction began in 1730.

By 1747, a series of fortifications, known as the Irtysh line, was growing. In 1754, another new line of fortifications, Ishimskaya, was rebuilt. In the 30s of the 18th century, the Orenburg line arose, resting at one end against the Caspian Sea, and at the other against the Ural Range. Thus, strongholds appear between Orenburg and Omsk. The final consolidation of the Russians in Southern Siberia takes place already in the 19th century with the annexation of Central Asia.

On December 15, 1763, the Siberian Order was finally abolished, and yasak began to be placed at the disposal of the Cabinet of His Imperial Majesty.

In 1766, four regiments were formed from the Buryats to maintain guards along the Selenga border: the 1st Ashebagat, 2nd Tsongo, 3rd Atagan and 4th Sartol.

In the reign of Peter I, the scientific exploration of Siberia begins, the Great Northern Expedition is organized. At the beginning of the 18th century, the first large industrial enterprises appeared in Siberia - the Altai mining plants of Akinfiy Demidov, on the basis of which the Altai mining district was created. Distilleries and salt factories are founded in Siberia. In the 18th century, about 7 thousand workers were employed in 32 factories in Siberia, together with the mines that served them. A feature of the Siberian industry was the use of the labor of exiles and convicts.

Style develops in architecture Siberian baroque.

19th century

Administrative division

As a result of administrative reform M. M. Speransky in 1822, Asiatic Russia was divided into two general governments: West Siberian with a center in Tobolsk and East Siberian with a center in. Tobolsk, Tomsk provinces and Omsk region were assigned to Western Siberia, Irkutsk province, the newly formed Yenisei province, Yakutsk region, Okhotsk and Kamchatka coastal administrations and the Troitskosava border administration were assigned to Eastern Siberia. The provinces were divided into districts, and the latter - into volosts and foreign councils.

On July 22, 1822, the tsar approved 10 laws that constituted a special “Siberian institution”: “Institution for the management of Siberian provinces”, “Charter on the management of foreigners”, “Charter on the management of the Kirghiz-Kaisaks”, “Charter on exiles”, “Charter on stages”, “Charter on land communications”, “Charter on urban Cossacks”, “Regulations on zemstvo duties”, “Regulations on grain reserves”, “Regulations on debt obligations between peasants and between foreigners”.

In 1833, the Siberian provinces were united under supervision into the Siberian gendarmerie district, since during these years the influx of exiles (Decembrists, participants in the Polish movement of 1831) increased.

Industry

Of the 86 rocks and minerals mined by the time of the peasant reform in Russia, at least 12 were mined only in Siberia. The Siberian mining industry was concentrated in the southern, more settled and livable areas.

In the 19th century, the gold industry actively developed in Siberia, in terms of production at one time exceeding all other industries combined (See. Gold Rush in Siberia, Lena gold mines). Siberia in the middle of the century began to give 70% - 78% of all gold production in the country. The gold industry, in terms of the cost of production and the number of workers, has become the largest mining industry in Siberia.

At the same time, new paper, leather, soap, glass, and flour-grinding industries appeared.

Transport

In Siberia, at least 24 rivers were used for navigation. Of these, only eight moved up and downstream, the remaining sixteen carried only rafting of goods and timber downstream. River navigation was limited by natural conditions: the ice on the rivers kept from 5 to 8 months, while in European Russia 2-7 months. Quite frequent on the Siberian rivers, shoals, rapids, shivers, the need to "revolve" significantly limited the size of ships.

In 1844, the first voyage between Tyumen and Tomsk was made by the steamer Osnova. In 1860, already 10 steamers sailed along the rivers of Western Siberia, in 1880 - 37, in 1894 - 105 steamers and 200 barges. First steamer on the Yenisei appeared in 1863. In 1896, there were 172 steamboats on all the rivers of Siberia.

In 1805, the construction of the Circum-Baikal Road was completed, which ensured uninterrupted communication with Transbaikalia.

In the 1890s - 1900s, the Siberian Railway (in other words, the Trans-Siberian Railway) was built, connecting Siberia and the Far East with European Russia. The railroad significantly changed economic conditions. There was no need for large intermediaries, it was not necessary to create large annual stocks of goods in trading cities, for example, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Verkhneudinsk. Goods were delivered continuously throughout the year by rail in small batches, trade became smaller, began to require less working capital and shorter credit terms.

Agriculture

In the middle of the XIX century in Western Siberia there were 702 thousand horses, 1113 thousand heads of cattle, 1452 thousand sheep; in all Siberia there were 266 thousand deer. There were 56 horses per hundred people in Siberia, and only 26 horses in European Russia, 63 and 36 cows, respectively, 140 sheep in Eastern Siberia, and 61 in European Russia.

In the middle of the 19th century, the yield in Siberia was somewhat higher than in the European part of the country; after the abolition of serfdom, the yield in European Russia grew faster than in Siberia.

At the beginning of the 18th century, 55 types of crops were cultivated in European Russia, and only 14 in Siberia. In the middle of the 19th century, the number of crops increased to 113 in the European part, and to 29 in Siberia. In Siberia and the Far East, before the First World War, it was taken into account 7.6 million acres of arable land, which accounted for 0.7% of the entire territory.

Finance

Until the 1740s, there was a ban on bill transfers from Russia to Siberia and vice versa. The government feared that voevodas and governors, under the guise of merchant bill transactions, would be able to withdraw their money from Siberia. Money was transported to Siberia in cash.

From December 5, 1763 to June 7, 1781, copper coins were minted exclusively for circulation in Siberia. Siberian coin.

Since 1769 banknotes (paper money) have appeared in circulation. After the resolution of the bill transfer of payments from Russia to Siberia, cashless payments began to spread, and the formation of the banking system began. Opened state for credit and bill transactions in 1772 in Tobolsk, and in 1779 in Irkutsk.

In 1800, trade rules with China allowed only barter transactions. The purchase and sale of goods for money, as well as credit transactions, are prohibited.

In the 1830s - 1860s, urban public banks appeared in Siberia.

Education, science, culture

Tomsk University was founded in 1878. Before the wide dissemination of university and high school science, the role of scientific centers in Siberia was played by local history museums. The Irkutsk Regional Museum of Local Lore was founded in December 1782.

In 1851, the Siberian department was created in Irkutsk. Russian Geographical Society(SORGHUM). After 27 years, it was divided into two departments, East Siberian and West Siberian (VSORGO and ZSORGO).

Relocation to Siberia

After the peasant reform of 1861, the flow of peasant settlers to Siberia increased.

20th century

At the beginning of the 20th century, Eastern Siberia became the rear for the Russo-Japanese War. The rapid economic development of Siberia continues, connected with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The urban population of Siberia from 1840 to 1913 increased by 6.2 times.

During the civil war in the summer of 1918, Soviet power was overthrown in Siberia and Omsk became the center of the anti-Bolshevik government. On April 6, 1920, a buffer Far Eastern Republic was created. After the defeat of the White troops in Siberia, Soviet power is again established (See. Eastern Theater of Operations of the Russian Civil War).

In 1925, instead of the previously existing provinces, the Siberian Territory was formed with the center in Novosibirsk, in 1930 it was divided into the West Siberian Territory and the East Siberian Territory, subsequently also divided into regions.

In the late 1920s, the industrialization of Siberia began. In the 1920s-1930s, the coal industry developed in the Kuznetsk coal basin. Construction and new factories require workers. In 1928-1937, 2706.1 thousand people arrived in the Novosibirsk region, 777.1 thousand in Irkutsk, and 440.1 thousand in Chita. By 1939, the proportion of the urban population of Siberia had grown to 31.3%.

Even before the revolution of 1917, a railway was built from Novo-Nikolaevsk to Semipalatinsk, and in 1926-1931 the Turkestan-Siberian Railway was built from Semipalatinsk, connecting Siberia with Central Asia.

During the Stalinist repressions, Siberia became a place of mass “kulak exile” and a location for Gulag camps.

During the Great Patriotic War, the population of large Siberian cities grew sharply due to the evacuation of industry and people from the European part of the USSR. In 1941-1942, about 1 million people arrived in Siberia.

In 1957, on the initiative of Academicians M.A. Lavrentiev, S.L. Sobolev and S.A. Khristianovich was formed Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

In the 1950s-1970s, a number of large hydroelectric power plants were built on the rivers of Siberia (Novosibirskaya HPP on the Ob, Yenisei HPP cascade, Angarsk HPP cascade). On July 8, 1974, the Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway" was adopted.