Director of the SUSU Eurasian Studies Research and Education Centre and specialist on the early Iron Age archaeology Aleksandr Tairov has shared at the “Ananyino World” Forum in Yelabuga on what mysteries of nomads’ routes they managed to unravel thanks to the finds in the S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky cavern and cave and in other caves in the South Ural region.
The S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky cave was discovered quite recently, in 2020. In 1910, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a pioneer of colour photography in the Czarist-era Russia, had taken a photo of an entrance to a cave located five verst (verst is a Russian unit of distance; five verst equal 7 kilometers) off Simskaia station, but obviously he had not ventured into that cave. After that, data about the cave had been lost, and only one hundred and ten years later Ural speleologists re-discovered it. This cave was named after the legendary photo artist.
Archaeologists also got interested in the S.M. Prokudin-Gorsky cave as traces of human living activities were found there. Researchers dug small exploratory shafts, where bones of animals of the Holocene and late Pleistocene epochs’ fauna were found, along with artefacts of the Palaeolithic age. In the excavation heaps of an old collapsed trench on the cave bottom, they found six fragments of ceramics without ornaments, typical of the Volga-and-Kama region and the Cis-Ural region. In the trench dump, they also discovered a brass plate rolled into a tube, a part of the collar of a brass cauldron, and copper slag.
In the shaft dug in the cavern neighbouring to this cave, researchers discovered several fragments of ceramics without ornaments but with admixed talcum, a brass three-blade socketed arrowhead, and a knife on a flat quartzite plate.
According to Aleksandr Tairov, “this archaeological monument was more likely a temporary campsite of the early Iron Age, and judging by the shape and size of the arrowhead, it could be dated back to the 5th-3rd century BC”.
So we can imagine the following picture: during long travels, some person could take cover from bad weather here, cooked food, broke some pottery by accident, or fixed the cauldron, smelting the required parts right on the spot.
In the neighbouring cave, the so-called “UFO cave”, a unique-for-the-South-Ural-region ingot of copper was found, weighing almost 1.5 kilogrammes.
The mass-spectrometric analysis of the brass objects showed that these had been most likely brought here from the South Trans-Urals region. The ingot from the UFO cave had been obtained as a result of smelting from the ore that had been mined in the Miass area, while the cauldron collar and the tube had been made of metal obtained from the ores similar to those from Tash-Kazgan – Nikolskoye ore field, located 50 kilometres to the south-west off Miass. It is quite a long way to this Sim River area!
Professor and Doctor of Sciences (History) Aleksandr Tairov, jointly with geologists from the South Ural Federal Research Centre for Mineralogy and Geoecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, compared the copper discovered in the caves near the Sim River to the material of brass objects of the Itkul archaeological culture of the metal-makers of the early-Iron-Age forest-steppe Trans-Urals region, and similarities between them were found in a number of cases.
All of that could serve as proof of the contacts between representatives of the Ananyino and Itkul cultures, that is, the tribes of the Volga-and-Kama region and the South Trans-Urals region, who had lived on the opposite sides of the Ural mountain range.
So, how had people of the Iron Age crossed the Ural mountain range?
“They had moved, at the very least, in three directions,” believes Professor Aleksandr Tairov. “The first one had been along the Ufa River valley, where they could cross the Ural mountains in the area of the contemporary settlements of Nyazepetrovsk – Nizhniy Ufaley – Mauk – Kasli. The second road had run along the valleys of the Ufa, Ay and Bolshoy Ik rivers and crossed the Ural mountain range at the latitude of contemporary settlements of Unkurda – Kyshtym. The third route is especially interesting exactly in the context of the finds in the Prokudin-Gorsky cave complex. This road had connected the areas of contemporary Miass and Ufa. It had run via Zlatoust, Satka, Urmanchino, Novyye Karatavly, Eral, Sim, Nizhniye Lemezy, and Chuvash Kubovo. Namely along this road, which later has become known as the “Ufa road” or “Ufa highway”, such iron-and-steel works as Zlatoustovskiy, Satkinskiy, Katav-Ivanovskiy, Yuryuzanskiy, Ust-Katavskiy, Simskiy, and Minyarskiy were built in the middle 50s and early 60s of the 18th century. And after the Pugachev's Rebellion, the Miasskiy copper-smelting plant was built.”
This research is supported by a Russian Science Foundation grant.