Vysotsky culture

Villages were discovered in the river dunes and over the creeks. Small quadrangular dugouts served as housing. In the Repnevsky settlement in the Lviv region in the dugout were found the remains of a small vaulted furnace made on a rod frame. In the settlement of Pochap, Zolochevsky district, fragments of some casting molds were found.

Since the end of the 1890s, the Vysotsky and Lugovsky burial grounds in the village of Czech, Lviv Region, became especially famous. In the first of them, 300 burials were investigated, and there should be about 1000 of them in total in this repository. The buried submerged in the soil, without external signs, is located on a hill, among wetlands. Grave pits ran in rows along the line east-north-east - west-south-west, that is, almost latitudinally.

The pits did not have traces of any overlap. The remains of people often lie elongated on their backs, their heads to the south. In the form of rare exceptions, there is a crouched position of the skeletons on the side. Of the total number of open graves, corpses account for up to 90%, about 10% - full corpses . In the few cases of cremation, the ashes of the buried were mostly laid directly into the grave. Ballot boxes were used much less frequently. Quite often there are paired burials, where a man and a woman were usually buried at the same time. Their hands are sometimes folded together, and in some cases the dead are as if lying in each other's arms. Apparently, the killing of women was used (cf. sati ), which testifies to the special situation of men in the high family. There are few family graves when several adults and children were buried in the same pit.

In Krasnensky Kurgan, corpses with western and eastern orientations of the heads of the buried were discovered. In the presence of the embankment and in the orientation of the burials, the Scythian influence is felt.

In the inventory, the most famous vessels, including urns. It is possible that the tiny vessels found quite often served for some ritual purposes. Less commonly found are bronze or iron jewelry, small tools or weapons. Among the objects are also known stone tools, sometimes very original forms. There are no swords or daggers in the graves.

Once in the Vysotsky burial ground, an iron spear tip with a laurel-shaped feather was met. At the bottom of the feather, on the sides of the rib, there is a small hole. The closest analogy can be two spearheads from the burial place of the Chernoles forest culture in s. Butenki of the Poltava region, which dates well to 710-690 years BC.

A bow and arrow played a role. In the early days, single bronze double-bladed tips with a long sleeve. There are flint tips with good retouching, there are still quite a lot of them.

In later burials, in particular the Vysotsky burial ground, Scythian bronze arrowheads, sometimes three-lobed, are sometimes found with an additional spike. All of them date back to a period no later than 600-500 BC.

People belonging to the Vysotsky culture still widely used stone. Bored wedge-shaped axes, spherical maces, cylinder-like, perfectly ground hammers were used in hand-to-hand collision.

In male burials, iron and bronze implements are also found. A small anvil is known, a flat iron hatchet with lateral protrusions (however, it could, as it was with the Scythians, serve as a tesla and even a hoe ), elongated bronze Celts, sleeve cast chisels . Knives made of iron with a slightly curved back and a narrow petiole closely resemble Chernoles . Among them there are knives with a slightly raised tip of the Hallstatt type. The listed tools indicate foundry and blacksmithing, as well as the significant development of woodworking craftsmanship. Found bronze sickles with lamellar petioles and flint sickles in the form of curved knives . Together with single grain graters, they alone make it possible to judge agriculture . There is no information on the use of the plow .

Jewelry was worn not only by women, but also by men, because some types of them are found in male burials. First of all, they include hryvnias and chest pins for covering raincoats. Of the head ornaments, smooth open temporal rings are known in the form of a very incomplete spiral with conical cones at the ends, as well as the usual nail-shaped early Scythian type with a wide hat and a thin spiral rod. Hryvnias were either massive or puffy. The first at both ends have eyelets for ties. These loops represent either just a curl from the thin ends of the hoop, or tubes from the ends unlined into a triangular plate. There are ribbed hryvnias from a tetrahedral twisted wire. Other hryvnias are rhombic in diameter and smooth. Blown hryvnias do not have any ears, thick, completely covered with a rather complicated rifled ornament, which consists of transverse and longitudinal lines, zigzags, etc. Bronze rings with four protrusions, sometimes in the form of through circles, are often suspended from hryvnias and other decorations. Pendants from a bronze plate sometimes have the shape of a trapezoid rolled up from above into the eye, also decorated with a dashed ornament. These pendants were used in a number of other cases. Bracelets were made of bronze and iron. Some of them were solid. Others had open ends, facing each other or tightly brought together. The bracelets are either smooth, or covered with transverse notches, or decorated with oval bulges. Occasionally there are spiral bracelets in 4 - 5 turns. They, like some unclosed bracelets made of records. Breast pins are less diverse, but generally common for different simultaneous cultures of forms. Pins with a single-turn head are known, sometimes from a ribbed twisted top of a rod, from a nail-shaped and conical head, with a head in the form of a large flat one-sided spiral and, finally, with a bulge or four bulges slightly lower than the head. The last type is the earliest; it is borrowed from the Hungarian Hallstatt or from the Noah culture . Near the chest pin are not very ordinary, but still spectacular spiral brooches are occasionally found. Having looked closely at the jewelry, it is easy to see that hryvnias and bracelets, with significant similarities with the Hallstatt and Puddle ones, are original in some details and ornamentation; pendants are peculiar, although trapezoid-like partially remind Hallstatt ones, but by the method of attachment they are more similar to the Blackwood ones. A set of pins is to a certain extent similar to the Puddle, and from the Blackwood, and Scythian. Pins with a large spiral head are closest to the puddle counterparts. In general, the decoration of this rather poor culture is associated with neighboring cultures.

Ceramics of the Vysotsky culture is coarse, polished, part of it has a rib, which is always closer to the bottom. These vessels are mainly represented by two forms: either with a wide straight mouth, or with a noticeably bent edge. Both types of vessels have a very small bottom. Occasionally, such vessels are equipped with one handle. Among them there are quite a few miniature ones. The distribution of these forms of vessels in the high culture of Vysotsk reflects a significant share of the Ludice influence, as Polish archaeologists see it. At the same time, the Vysotsky tribes did not have any pots of puddle types in use. But the “tulip-like” vessels, that is, the pots with the greatest expansion near the middle and with a corolla with a barely outlined neck, are closest to the Belogrudov- Chernolessky form.

The bowls simply expand upward, without having for the most part the sides. Coarse or sweetened, they do not repeat Lusatian. Other of them have holes in the bottom and served as colanders. There are types of bowls of the early Scythian time with a curved inward edge.

Cups, or as they are often called “scoops”, usually hemispherical, sometimes slightly narrow in the neck and have a tape handle. This form inherits most of all from the Black Forest. Sometimes among the vessels come pear-shaped glazed, blackish or brown, others with conical protrusions on their shoulders. These vessels exactly coincide from the Black Forest and Early Scythian vessels in the forest-steppe. As a matter of fact, compounds from bowls, cups, and pear-shaped vessels in one or another variant are a common sign of Hallstatt, Puddle, Blackwood, and early Scythian forest-steppe complexes of time. As additional forms, small vessels with two or three necks are found, vessels in the form of birds with a high stalk, rhytons with a handle and sharp-nosed goblets. These last two forms exist in the early Scythian time in the Dniester-Dnieper cultural circle.

• Kanivets V. I., Questions of the chronology of Vysotsky culture, “Brief Communications of the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR”, 1955, No. 4
• Sulimirski, T., Kultura Wysocka, Kr., 1932.
• Grakov B. N., "The Early Iron Age" - M.: Publishing House of Moscow University, 1977