Archaeology in Ukraine

Historical accounts frequently describe the first period of Ukrainian history or prehistory (ca. 1 [ 50 âñå to 850 ce) in terms of the succession of nomadic peo­ples, from the Cimmerians to the Khazars, who invaded Ukrainian territory and controlled it for varying periods of time.

Archaeologists have uncovered the presence of more than one culture on Ukrainian territory during any given period. These cultures, moreover, may have been geographically displaced and have lasted longer in a new place than in their places of origin. The names given to the cultures frequently are derived from sites where the first archaeological discovery was made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century (Trypillia, Zarubintsiv, Chernia- khiv) or from the style of the pottery or burial pattern adopted by the given culture {shnurova ‘line, catacomb’).

Many cultures from the prehistoric and historical eras have been distin­guished by archaeologists on Ukrainian territory. Among the best known are the Trypillian culture (ca. 3500-1400 âñå), which witnessed the transition from nomadic pastoralism to sedentary agriculture; the Bilohrudivka culture (1350-800 âñå), which coincided in part with the Cimmerian presence; and the Srubna culture (1200-600 âñå), toward the end of which the Scythians made their appearance.

By the beginning of the common era, several new cultures had emerged, although there is continual debate among scholars whether archaeological finds can be classified and then related to specific historical cultures and peo­ples.

The first of these new cultures was the Zarubynets' (named for a site near Pereiaslav), which flourished from about 200 âñå to 200 CE, particularly in northwestern (Volhynia and the Pripet Marshes) and north-central (the Kiev region) Ukraine. This culture was that of an agricultural people living in small dwellings along protected banks of rivers. They were noted for excellent iron production. The Zarubynets' culture coincides with the Sarmatian period, although it probably included several peoples (Baltic, Scythian, Pomeranian), of whom the Slavs may have been one.

In about 200 ce, the so-called Cherniakhiv culture (named for a burial ground near Kiev) emerged in both the mixed forest-steppe and open steppe geographic zones covering most of Ukraine, Moldova, and eastern Romania. This area included hundreds of settlements scattered in narrow strips, some­times nearly two-thirds of a mile (one kilometer) in length, along river banks. Gray or black polished pottery, iron tools, and metal ornaments of a high stan­dard are associated with the Chcrniakhiv culture, and, as is evident from remains, the inhabitants of the settlements also carried on trade with the Roman world to the south. Their spiritual life is revealed through several stone statues of pagan idols, three to ten feet (one to three meters) in height, found at various sites in the middle Dniester River valley and dating from the second to the fifth century. Some scholars see the Chcrniakhiv culture as reflecting the Gothic presence on Ukrainian territory; others see it as reflect­ing a stage in the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. Whatever its ethnic composition, the Chcrniakhiv culture seems to have come to a sudden end around 400 ce, probably the victim of the invasion of the nomadic Huns.

Almost simultaneously with the Cherniakhiv culture arose the Pen'kivka culture (named for a site near the middle Dnieper River now under the Kremenchuk reservoir), which was initially based in the region between the Dnieper, Southern Buh, and lower Dnieper Rivers.

century among the Dulebians in Volhynia and in the seventh and eighth centuries among the Polianians in the middle Dnieper region near the Ros' River.

Whether the Antes created a state structure or existed simply as tribal group­ings, their influence was broken after the arrival of the Avars during the second half of the sixth century. With the Avar presence, the Antes disappeared; they are last mentioned in historical sources at the beginning of the seventh century (602).

The Pax Chazarica

Aside from the disappearance of the Antes, the seventh century proved to be an important turning point in the history of Ukraine. By the middle of that century, the warlike Avars had moved out of Ukrainian lands and westward across the Car­pathians into the Pannonian Plain, while a new Turkic people, the Khazars, were

establishing a powerful political and commercial center just east of Ukrainian ter­ritory between the lower Don, lower Volga, and Kuban-Terek River valleys. As for the East Slavic tribes, some went west beyond the Carpathians with the Avars. In Ukraine, the Dulebian tribal union in Volhynia dissipated and was replaced by a new tribal union among the Polianians and Severians along the middle Dnieper valley.

The Khazar sphere was concentrated within the triangle formed by the lower Don, lower Volga, and Kuban-Terek Rivers. But Khazar influence was felt far beyond as well. By the early ninth century, several East Slavic tribes to the north­west (the Polianians, Radimichians, Severians, Viatichians), and other peoples, including the Mordvinians, Cheremissians, and Volga Bulgars in the north, and the Magyars, Onogurs, Kasogians, and Alans in the south, were all under the hegemony of the Khazar Kaganate, or empire. From the eighth century, the Kha­zars also controlled the northern Crimea, where the Crimean Goths with their center at Doros came under their influence as well.

Within this vast territory were to be found some of the most lucrative interna­tional trading routes, especially the northern branch of the silk route from China, which passed the Aral Sea and skirted the northern Caspian Sea, ending in the Khazar capital of Itil, near the mouth of the Volga. From Itil, the Khazars traded southward across the Caspian Sea to Baghdad and the Persian, later Arab, Middle East, or westward down the Don River and across the Black Sea to Byzantium. Trade and commerce were of the greatest concern to the Khazars, and the con­trol and protection of commercial routes was the highest priority of the empire’s military forces. Customs duties levied on goods passing along the trade routes under their control provided the main source of Khazar wealth, which was supple­mented by taxes collected from various peoples under their hegemony. In return for this lord-vassal relationship, the Khazars provided peace and stability in the region as well as possibilities for trade. These were the main characteristics of the new order known as the Pax Chazarica.

Because of their interest in trade and commerce, the Khazars, unlike their nomadic predecessors and successors, preferred diplomacy and peace to war and plundering. Accordingly, in the north, even after the Volga Bulgars had become independent in the mid-eighth century, the Khazars maintained friendly relations with them. Toward the south, after a fierce struggle with the Persian Empire and, later, the Arab Caliphate during the seventh and eighth centuries, in about 750 the antagonists agreed it was useless to continue fighting. Both powers decided that the Caucasus Mountains should serve as their ‘natural’ frontier.

Relations with Byzantium, the region’s major commercial emporium, were very favorable from the time of the initial rise of Khazar power in the seventh century. The Khazars served as allies of Byzantium, first against the Persians and later against the Arabs. The only potential threat to peaceful ties was in the Crimean Peninsula, where the Bosporan Kingdom had been under Byzantine hegemony since the sixth century. The Khazars built a fortress, Tmutorokan', at the site of the Greco-Bosporan city Hermanossa (Tamatarcha), on the eastern shore of the Straits of Kerch. Taking advantage of civil strife between the Crimea and the Byzantine capital, the Khazars took control of most of the peninsula at the very end of the seventh century. It was not long, however, before the Khazars assuaged Byzantine fears. They agreed to divide the Crimea into a Byzantine sphere along the coast and a Khazar sphere in the hinterland behind the mountains.

Byzantine-Khazar relations were further strengthened in the eighth century by marital diplomacy (several Khazar princesses became wives of Byzantine emper­ors) and in the ninth century by a common defense against the increasingly restless nomadic Magyars and the newly arrived Varangian Rus'. The common defense took the form of the construction in the 830s by Byzantine architects of a second Khazar capital on the Don River at Sarkel (in Slavic, Bila Vezha) and the dispatch to the Khazars in the 860s of a ‘cultural’ mission headed by the Byzantine Christian missionaries Constantine and Methodius.

The international commercial relations emphasized by the Khazars also trans­formed their empire into a fertile ground for cultural development, especially for religion.

The Khazars are important because for two centuries - circa 650 to 850 - their state fostered stability within a wide region, one surrounded by several cultures, between the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Caucasus Mountains. While the Khazar Kaganate was never the kind of impenetrable ‘bulwark of the steppe’ against the East that is often suggested in traditional literature, it nonetheless served as a power center around which nomadic tribes and federations (the Bul­gars, Alans, Magyars, East Slavs) gravitated and in which they found it more advan­tageous to trade and to live in peace than to provoke war and conflict.

The Slavic tribes in the shadow of the Khazars

The Slavic inhabitants of central and southwestern Ukraine, protected by the Pax Chazarica, were able to move south along water routes as far as the Black Sea and to expand east of the Dnieper River. Out of the old Antes federation, several dis­tinct Slavic tribes evolved on Ukrainian territory: the Severians, in the northeast along the lower Desna and upper Seim and Sula Rivers; the Polianians (plains people), along the Dnieper River between Kiev and Roden'; the Derevlianians (forest dwellers), bounded by the Pripet and Horyn' Rivers; the Dulebians, in Volhynia, along the upper valleys of the Vistula, Buh, and Styr' Rivers; the White Croats, north of the Carpathian Mountains; the Ulichians, on the left bank of the Southern Buh River; and the Tivertsians, between the Dniester and Prut Rivers near the Black Sea.

As during the period of the Antean tribal leagues, the centers for these various Slavic tribes were hill forts known as horodyshcha or horody. At first, these were no more than stockades encircled by moats and ramparts where the surrounding agricultural population came for protection in times of danger. Eventually, the horody became towns where artisans produced wares and merchants conducted trade. By the ninth century, there were an estimated 400 horody in the Kiev area, 350 in Volhynia, 250 in Podolia, and too in Galicia. Among the more important were Kiev, the center for the Polianians, founded by their semi-legendary leader Kii (ca. 560); Chernihiv, the center for the Severians; Iskorosten' (Korosten'), for the Derevlianians; Volyn' (now Horodok, on the Buh), for the Dubelians; Prze- mysl, for the White Croats; and Peresichen', for the Ulichians. Initially, the tribal organization was in the hands of representatives of those families who had secured positions of power and influence on the basis of wealth, military prowess, or personal qualities. These representatives met in a council (viche) to decide important issues, and from time to time the most powerful of them became lead­ers or princes for the tribal group as a whole.

The primary livelihood of the Slavic tribes was agriculture and cattle raising. They harvested several different grains, fished, hunted wild animals, and collected honey and wax from bees. These were some of the goods they traded in the horody, where artisans had well-developed pottery, weaving, and metal industries, especially in iron. Besides supporting local commerce, Ukrainian lands became an important component of the Khazar international trading network.

In the early centuries of Khazar rule, the major trade route connecting Central Asia, the Arab world, and Byzantium with northern Europe passed through the Khazars’ territory - Khazaria - up the Volga River, then crossed several lakes to the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea (see map 6). The initiators of this northern trade were the Varangians, who, from their home base on the western shores of the Baltic Sea and outposts in northern (Staraia Ladoga) and north-central (Ros­tov) Russia, began during the eighth century to descend the Volga River to Kha­zaria. By the ninth century, a shorter route, from the Baltic through several lakes and rivers directly southward to the Dnieper River on to the Black Sea and Byzan­tium, had been opened. Not wanting to be outdone by what later became famous as the great waterway ‘from the Varangians to the Greeks,’ the Khazars strength­ened their presence in the middle Dnieper with a garrison at Kiev, which in turn was connected by an east-west overland route to the Khazar capitals at Sarkel and Itil. The result was that Kiev became the axis for major north-south and east-west trade routes along which goods flowed to and from Central Asian, Arabic, Byzan­tine, and Balto-Scandinavian markets. Along these and subsidiary routes, the East Slavic tribes in Ukraine exchanged their grain, wax, honey, and, sometimes, fur and slaves for fine cloths, gold, silver objects, wine, and pottery.

Although there were several Slavic tribes, they had much in common with regard to their basically agricultural way of life and their mythology or system of belief. Scattered in small groups across the vast plains and forests, the Slavs responded to their isolation and fear before the mysteries of nature by formulat­ing divinities who peopled the clouds and the earth, the forests and the rivers, and their own fields and stables. In personifying nature, they were attempting to communicate with it in ‘human’ terms and thereby to reduce the terror of the unknown. Since their system of beliefs is not set forth in a body of written texts, what we know of it derives from descriptions by antagonistic Christian writers and from latter-day folk customs that are presumed to retain remnants of pre­Christian Slavic mythology.

There seem to have been two categories of gods: major ones, who had control over the forces of nature; and minor ones, who inhabited local woods, fields, and rivers. The major gods included Svaroh, the sky, who gave birth to two children - Dazhboh, the sun, and Svarozhych, fire. Also of importance were Perun, the god of thunder, and Volos, the god of the animals. In the second, minor category were a whole host of spirits who inhabited the forests (Lesky), bogs (Jrisy), fields (polo- vyky), and bodies of water (rusalky). Others were associated with human emotion, such as larylo, the god of springtime regeneration and sexual passion, and Kupalo, the god of water, herbs, and flowers with their purifying powers. Sacrifices were made and rituals performed in the service of all these gods.

In general, however, the system of belief among the Slavs was personal, with no temples, statues, or priests. There were two exceptions, however, found among Slavs on the island of Rügen, in the Baltic Sea, and in Kiev. Both places had large statues of mythic gods. In Kiev, there was a large wooden statue of Perun, who as the personification of thunder became the god of war to whom Kiev’s earliest rul­ers and first Rus' princes paid tribute, as they did also to Volos, the god of beasts, before going off to war. On the island of Rügen, the Slavic Ranians had an even more elaborate ritual and temple-like setting for their ‘god of gods,’ Svantovit. Svantovit’s influence seemed to be widespread as well among West Slavic tribes north of the Carpathians, and an eight-foot (two-and-a-half-meter) statue believed to depict him was found in the mid-nineteenth century along the banks of the Zbruch River, in western Ukraine. With the coming of Christianity, the major Slavic gods and their statues were destroyed, but belief in the minor ones throughout rural areas remained strong - often flourishing through amalgama­tion with Christian beliefs - until as recently as the twentieth century.

Living within the protective shadow of the Pax Chazarica, the Slavic tribes on Ukrainian lands were spared for a while the worst nomadic invasions from the east, and, as a result, between the seventh and ninth centuries they were able to expand their agricultural and trading activities. But despite such protection, some Slavic princes began to resent their vassal-like relationship to the Khazar rulers. For the longest time, however, the Slavs were not united, and no individual tribe had the strength to confront the Khazar Kaganate. Building up the necessary strength became a possibility only in the mid-ninth century, with a new develop­ment in the region of Kiev. This development combined local forces with a group of leaders from Scandinavia - the Varangians - and the result was the eventual consolidation of a new power known as Rus'. How did this new phenomenon arise? Or, to cite the opening passage of the Primary Chronicle, the most famous dis­cussion of the subject, what was ‘the origin of the land of Rus', [and of] the first princes of Kiev, and from what source did the land of Rus' have its beginning?’