The shapes of clay vessels of the Srednedonskaya Neolithic culture from site Dobroe 9 on the Upper Don

Abstract

The paper describes the main types of pottery forms and some results of their analysis for vessels of the Srednedonskaya Neolithic culture from site Dobroe 9. Until recently, only a few settlements of the Srednedonskaya Neolithic culture with a traced stratigraphic position on the Upper Don were studied. At site Dobroe 9, a homogeneous lithological layer was revealed, containing only the materials of this culture: pottery, bones, stone products. At the moment, 109 m of the site were researched by the excavations. We established the date of the pottery collection of the site as the last quarter of the VI millennium BC. Earlier, A.T. Sinyuk put forward the thesis that the cylindrical shape of vessels with a relatively smooth transition of the walls to a sharp bottom is characteristic of the Middle Don culture, but in the collection of site Dobroe 9 closed-type vessels predominate. The comparative analysis of the shapes of ceramic vessels of two settlements with the greatest variety of vessel shapes (site Universitetskaya 3 and site Dobroe 9) of the Srednedonskaya Neolithic culture has shown that its material culture influenced by other archaeological cultures is not particularly homogeneous. This is manifested not only in ceramics, but also in stone tools.