Szekessy Vilmos (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 60. (Budapest 1968)
Ginsburg, V. V.: An anthropological characterization of the Sarmatians in the Volga area
310 V. V. GINSBURG, pared to the Central Asian interfluvial type, the steppe-type of the Sarmatians exhibits a slightly more elongated skull, more strongly curving forehead, and more sharply delineated Europoide features. The small collection of Sarmatians deriving from the Don area and studied by L. G. VUITSH may be characterized by the Central Asiatic interfluvial and steppetype. Finally, the Sarmatians of the Dnyepr area stand, as pointed out by T. S. KONDUKTOROVA, nearer to the ones of the Saratov group than to the others. The above data confirm the archeologieal hypothesis on the dispersion and settling of the tribal groups of the Sarmatians (K. E. SMTRNOV, 1950), and the fact that they had been in contact primarily with the surrounding populations. The Sarmatians of the Volga area indulged in cephalic deformation, applied by a bandage around the skull of the new-born infant. This came into usage here around the turn of our era (in the Middle Sarmatian period), and was extensely practiced during the time of the Late Sarmatian culture. The custom of cephalic deformation was wide-spread in Central Asia (in the Hun — Usuny setting), in the Volga area and the Northern Caucasus (with the Sarmatians and Alans), and in the plains of the Central Danubian region (in the Sarmatians and Pre-Avar groups of Hungary), in the first Millennium A.D. This custom was practiced considerably earlier in the Volga and the Kuban areas namely in the Bronze Age. However, it was not demonstrated in the Sauromatians. Hence we have better grounds now to assume that this usage arrived with the Huns (Heftalites, Hionites) from the east rather than to presume that it already existed in the Volga and Kuban areas in the Bronze Age, and that it came into vogue again after an interval of nearly a thousand years of disuse, and then spread towards the east. Even so, the problem of the origin and courses of spreading of cephalic deformation with respect to the Sarmatians is still unclarified. Despite the considerable variability of the anthropological types studied in the Sarmatian groups, the mean values of the given characters, obtained from large series, are similar in all groups examined. The data discussed above testify to the comprehensive genesis of the Sarmatians, Sauromatians, and the earlier Bronze Age populations of not only the Volga area, but also to those of the Don and Dnyepr regions. The available findings, displaying the synbiosis of various types during the entire existence of the Sarmatian culture, also reveal that, with respect to the Sarmatians, the arrival of the given ethnic groups and their intermixing with the aboriginal population was continuous and had not been delimited to some short period. In this latter case, the leveüing up of the types would have come into existence, but this is not observable. Concerning the Sarmatians of the Volga area, the intermingling increases with both the Transvolga and the Ukrainian populations, among others, with the Scythians in the Dnyepr area. The diminishing cranial index of the Sarmatians in the later period amply testifies this. The levelling up of the characters in all Sarmatian groups, — observable in the proximity of the mean values as well as in the close means calculated per the given age — correctly reflect the ethnic unity and the common course of development of all Sarmatians and riot the partial period of the ethnogenesis of the several tribal groups, to be clarified by intraserial type-analyses. (Lecture given in the Anthropological Department of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, on 16 October, 1967)
