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2.11 - The Later Prehistory of the Russian Far East

from V. - East Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2014

By
Andrei V. Tabarev
Edited by
Colin Renfrew  and
Paul Bahn
Andrei V. Tabarev
Affiliation:
Russian Academy of Sciences
Colin Renfrew
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Introduction

Geographically the southern part of the Russian Far East is an extensive territory (about 1,000,000 km2) comprising several big regions – the Amur region (including the Middle and Lower Amur), the Maritime region (Primorye) and Sakhalin Island (Map 2.11.1). The first archaeological investigations started here about one hundred years ago, and today archaeologists have a clear idea of the original cultures and traditions from the Upper Palaeolithic sites to the early states of the Middle Ages. The Neolithic Period – 13,000 to 3000 bp – is one of the most interesting and intriguing in the whole territory of the Russian Far East. For more than ten thousand years the inhabitants of the region created and developed specific economic models that were highly adapted to the variety of natural landscapes – forests, mountains, lakes, river valleys, sea banks, plains, and so on.

In the Russian Far East, archaeologists have made discoveries that have changed traditional points of view as well as our understanding of the Neolithic in its classic version (the so-called Neolithic Revolution). The arrival of agriculture was pretty late (about 5000–4500 bp), and food production was not the main strategy almost until the colonisation of the Far East by Russian settlers during the 19th and early-20th centuries ce. Starting from the end of Pleistocene, local cultures demonstrated a high level of technology and a number of innovations that reflected the dynamic evolution of economic and social structures in their society. Therefore, in many recent publications the term “Neolithic revolution” has been replaced by “Neolithisation”.

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The Cambridge World Prehistory , pp. 852 - 869
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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