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Soviet archaeology in the steppe zone: Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

V. M. Masson
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 191041 Leningrad, Dvortsovaya naberezhnaya 18, USSR
Timothy Taylor
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 191041 Leningrad, Dvortsovaya naberezhnaya 18, USSR

Extract

The steppe region, the temperate grassland of the Asian land-mass that runs the thousands of kilometres practically from the coast of the Atlantic to the coast of the Pacific, is one of the great zones of human settlement. It offers archaeology on the large scale, where local adaptations link to a grander picture. Most of the steppe falls in the Soviet Union and is studied by Soviet archaeologists, much of whose work is inaccessible to those many of us who have no Russian.

The steppe is novel in a second way also, for Soviet archaeology has a distinctive flavour in its ideas and how it works with them; there are concerns and terminologies that do not quite correspond with the common concepts of west European scholars.

Type
Special section
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1989

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