Discovered in 1873 when the industrialist S. I. Mamontov brought to Uvarov skulls found by an engineer at the Utkino station building the Iaroslavl-Vologda railroad line in the upper Don basin, this culture was named for the village close to the site. Uvarov considered it to be on the cusp between Stone and Bronze Ages, unclear whether or not the bronze items had simply been imported from another Asian group. Spitsyn and Gorodtsov, though, located it in the Bronze Age, late 3rd to mid- 2nd millennium. The people were Indo-European, a mixture of Baltic, Slavic, and German tribes. Noted for both battle axes and ceramics, it was one of the most influential cultures in the forest belt of Eastern Europe. Archeological evidence also shows them in battle with the Volosovo culture, which Uvarov had discovered near his family estate of Karacharovo and identified as a transitional point between Paleo- and Neolithic cultures. The Bronze Age Fatianovo tribe ultimately displaced the Volosovo when brought their cattle to graze on the latter’s lands, in the Volga-Kama region.
Associated Region: Volga Basin
Found on the right bank of the Kama River, this is a unique culture, and one of the richest kurgans in Russian archeology, from the 9th-3rd centuries, BCE. Artefacts show evidence of at least some trade with Scythians. Because there are several burial styles, it is impossible to isolate a single culture here; some evidence suggests that this was an Ugro- tribe. At 1st Congress K. I. Nevostruev mentions that they burned their corpses.
Born in Moscow into a petty noble family and educated at the university there, Shpilevskii’s first posting sent him to Kazan in 1860. He blossomed into a champion of the historical archeology of the region, organized the KOAIE, and proved instrumental in getting the 4th Archeological Congress there. His magnum opus, “Ancient Cities and Other Bulgaro-Tatar Monuments in the Province of Kazan” won numerous academic honors. In 1885, he was transferred to the Demidov legal lyceum in Iaroslavl, where he formed other academic societies and worked on the provincial statistical committee.
Nevostruev was one of the first archeologists to come from Viatka, just as he was also among the first trained in theology to develop church archeology as a branch of the science. His primary contribution was the cataloging of Slavic manuscripts in the Synodal Library, which won him the Lomonosov Prize, but he also excavated in the Ananinskii Mogilnik.