Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

i6 THE PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS
The neolithic painted pottery of the Ukrainian or Tripolye type,
so called from a hamlet near Kiev where Chvojka found the first
examples, belongs to a group of Central and South European pottery
which we call spiral and maeander pottery. Wherever it is found, it is
partly painted and partly incised. Its presence has been observed in
several districts, from the shores of the Adriatic to the shores of the
Black Sea. Its expansion coincides approximately with the basins of
the Danube and its tributaries, of the Dniester, the Bug, and the
Dnieper. I cannot deal with all the difficult and delicate questions
which have been raised by the various types of this ware : which
came first, incised or painted decoration ; what was the principal
centre, the shores of the Adriatic, or the shores of the Black Sea ;
what is the relation between this pottery and the different racial groups
which subsequently formed the population of Western Europe.
What concerns us chiefly is the generally accepted fact that the
Tripolye type of painted pottery—the pottery of South Russia,
Gahcia, and Rumania—is the richest and most highly developed
branch of the family, and the most original as well. The shapes show
great wealth and variety compared with those on the Danube and its
tributaries. The ornamentation is by no means restricted to spiral
and maeander. As in the contemporary pottery of Susa, the geometric
decoration is combined with geometrizing animal and vegetable decoration
which uses as ornaments figures of men, animals, and plants.
Even the arrangement of the ornament in parallel zones, and the
so-called metopic style of decoration, is not unknown in the painted
pottery of South Russia. In South Russia, as everywhere else, the
spiral and maeander pottery is accompanied by numerous clay figures
of very various primitive types, representing human beings—especially
women—animals, pieces of furnittire, and sacred implements.
The systematic excavations of Chvojka and of Volkov on the
Dnieper, of Ernst von Stern in Bessarabia, of Hubert Schmidt in
Rumania, and of Hadaczek in Galicia, have shown that the men who
produced the painted pottery were by no means wholly primitive :
they were no longer hunters or nomads: they dwelt in villages,
sometimes fortified ; owned houses of a common neolithic form,
half cave, half hut ; lived on agriculture ; and had a great number of
domestic animals at their disposal. We have no decisive evidence as
to their mode of burial. The best-preserved pots and figurines were
found neither in houses nor in tombs, but in curious structures
suggesting, on the one hand, a Roman columbarium, on the other,
a temple for religious ceremonies connected with funerals. These
structures are sometimes of considerable size ;
and
they were roofed, and