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HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

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ARCHAEOLOGY OF KIEV 349of the period but nonetheless accepted them as models, to develop newstates and urban centers.Kiev's growth was not merely as a conglomerate of villages. Urbanizationbrought about a totally new situation. In research concerning thedevelopment of early towns in Kievan Rus', two theoretical models havebeen proposed. The first model can be called the Novgorod or koncy model(Janin and Aleskovskij 1971; Kolcin and Janin 1982, pp. 104-114).Advocates of this model maintain that the early centers of Kievan Rus'developed as a result of a synoecism of a number of earlier settlements.The second model is the bipartite one (Tolocko 1985, p. 5). Advocates ofthis model maintain that the fortified center (dytynec') with an adjoiningopen settlement (posad) is the original, basic structure of all urban centersin Kievan Rus'.It is difficult to maintain that the early northern towns of Rus' developedas a result of a synoecism between a number of closely situated settlements.As Tolocko has rightly put it, at that time in Eastern Europe the town was acompletely new social phenomenon (ibid., p. 12). In the case of Novgorod,there is a growing amount of evidence of an earlier center at Gorodisce, tothe south of Novgorod (cf. Karger 1947, pp. 145-48; Nosov 1985, pp.63-64), and there are as yet no indications of early settlements that couldlater have formed Novgorod. The dichotomy proposed in the second modelis not applicable to the earliest proto-urban and urban centers of NorthernRus', like Pskov, Ladoga, and Gorodisce (the precursor of Novgorod).Also, the second model is hardly ideal for explaining the early developmentof Kiev. The later phase, or what we tentatively date as the late tenth century,certainly brought an urban structure to Kiev, which conforms to thebipartite model. The earliest phase, however, does not fit the theory well.Even if it is assumed that the urban topography was strongly influenced bythe landscape, there was a marked difference between the layout of settlementin the early versus the late phase. Kiev in the late ninth and earlytenth century cannot be analyzed simply within the framework of thedytynec' -posad dichotomy. The earliest phase in Kiev was characterizedmuch more by a concentration of political power in groups of people thanby a single center. It then rapidly attracted economically specialized individuals.The development of Kiev is the change from an originally complex andfragmented settlement area to an enormous—for its time—urban centerwith a clearly bipartite structure. Late tenth- and eleventh-century Kievstrongly influenced the layout of many towns in Kievan Rus' that began todevelop in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. At that time it became themodel city for Kievan Rus'—it was in this sense that Kiev was the truemother of the towns of Rus'.Lund <strong>University</strong>

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