Istvánovits Eszter (szerk.): A nyíregyházi Jósa András Múzeum Évkönyve 55. (Nyíregyháza, 2013)
A 2010. október 11-14. között Nyíregyházán és Szatmárnémetiben megtartott Vándorló és letelepült barbárok a kárpáti régióban és a szomszédos területeken (I-V. század) Új leletek, új értelmezések című nemzetközi régészeti konferencia anyagai - Gheorghe Alexandru Niculescu: Az etnikaijelenségek régészeti kutatása és a társadalomtudományok
Maeotian plastic arts: nomadic influence or nomadic order? University. The settlement is among the largest ones in this region. It stretches 700 meters along the river bank and is ca. 300 meters wide. Kuban has washed away about 1/10 part of the settlement including parts of two “citadels” separated by deep and wide ditches (Fig. 1). Ancient narrow and deep ditches that were filled in the process of the expansion of the settlement’s area were explored and ca. 1000 sq.m of the settlement were excavated. The section with cultural remains demonstrated uniform strata sequence for the whole territory of the site. The thickness of this layer consisting of ash mixed with pieces of plaster riches 2.5^1.8 m. There were found two pottery kilns (Raev 2012. 209-212) and about 200 storage pits. However, there was no possibility to trace the remains of constructions because the houses were built mainly of clay, the constructions supported by wooden poles. During seven years of work at the settlement, over 10,000 pieces of profiled shards have been collected. Grey wheel-made, burnished bowls, jugs and pots constitute the larger part of the vessels. Sinopa amphorae (Shelov 1978. 18ff.) date the ancient settlement from the beginning of the 2nd - to the middle of the 3rd century AD. Kazanskij-1 settlement existed for a short interval lasting less than 150 years, and finds from the settlement’s layers can be used for the dating of the graves of the steppe kurgans. The pottery from the Kazanskij-1 settlement includes though not large but an extremely significant group that attests to close connections of the settlement’s inhabitants with nomads from the neighbouring area. These are clay vessels decorated with zoomorphic motifs. Typically, the vertical handles of jugs are shaped as animals. For the first time, zoomorphic motifs on clay ware appeared in the steppe zone of the North Pontic region in the last centuries BC (Abramova 1984.). In this region, such vessels became typical finds in Sarmatian graves of the 1 st-3rd centuries AD (Kapustina 2010. 86). The group of ceramic vessels of the first centuries AD with zoomorphic details has been attributed to the influence of the Sarmatians (Kastanajan 1951.). An alternative view on the Transcaucasian origin of the zoomorphic motifs was not sufficiently corroborated (Abramova 1984.). The former opinion is generally accepted and well-supported (Kastanajan 1951., Marchenko 1996., Kapustina 2010.) In my opinion, we can explain the appearance of vessels with zoomorphic decoration in Eastern Europe by the arrival of nomadic peoples from Central Asia to the region. Similar decoration is known on the pottery from the settlements and graves of the Dzhetyasar Culture in the northern part of the ancient delta of the Syr-Darya river, east of the Aral Sea (Levina 1992. 69, PI. 25). Scholars underline the difficulties in identifying specific kinds of animals based on zoomorphic images (Kosjanenko 2008. 79). On the Kazanskij-1 settlement, the top parts of vertical handles of small vessels are made in the shape of ram’s (Fig. 2: 6, 7), dog’s (?) (Fig. 2: 4) and elk’s (Fig. 2: 1) head. Sometimes, there is a relief décor on the vessel’s body; for example, in our case it is a ram’s head (Fig. 2: 3). There is also a foot fragment of a bowl with burnished vertical strips surrounded by stylised figures of four birds (Fig. 2: 8). The bottom part of a vase in the shape of a wild boar can be truly regarded as work of art (Fig. 3). It is made in an extremely realistic manner; its surface is polished so that it has got a black metallic shine; images of a deer and a horse are chiselled on the wild boar’s sides. Clay vessels with handles and some details imitating metal vessels appear in the Kuban and Lower Don region in the first centuries AD. S.I. Kaposhina (1963.) separated this type of handles and the details from the zoomorphic group. Similar knobs were considered as stylised parts of animals that, after a certain time, lost their initial meaning, shifted to the body or neck of jugs (Skalon 1941.). Recently, E.P. Kapustina (2010.87ff.) suggested that various knobs, rolls and other decorative 381
