Country of Towns

For a place similarly called "Realm of Towns", see Garðaríki.

In the archaeology of Russia, the Country of Towns (Russian: Страна городов, strana gorodov) is a tentative term for a territory in Southern Trans-Urals where a number of middle Bronze Age (~2,000 BC) fortified settlements of Sintashta culture have been found in 1970-1980s. [1]

Origins of the term and criticism

Since the discovery of the Sintashta culture, the aerial photography revealed that there is a compactly grouped number of town-type settlements (over 20) in the northern steppe of southern Trans-Urals, within the area of about 350 km. Therefore in 2000s the principal investigator of this area, Gennady Zdanovich,[2][3] grouped them under the tentative term "Country of Towns". Since then while some archaeologists recognize this term as a metaphor, others insist on the literal understanding.[1]

A colleague of Zdanovich, Fyodor Petrov criticizes Zdanovish's views on the described territory as a unique compact object and considers the apparent compactness as an artifact of the incomplete and uncritical archaeological research. He mentions that earlier Zdanovich himself reported even more compact archaeological groupings of this type. He also writes that there are more Sintashta-type settlements discovered on Orenburg Oblast, so that when taken into an account, they will significantly blur the "clearly defined" boundaries of the "Country of Towns".[4]

References

  1. 1 2 Andrey Bersenev, Andrey Epimakhov and Dmitry Zdanovich, SINTASHTA BOW OF THE BRONZE AGE OF THE SOUTH TRANS-URALS, RUSSIA, in: "Bronze Age Warfare: Manufacture and Use of Weaponry", 2011, ISBN 978 1 4073 0822 7
  2. ↑ Zdanovich, G. B. and Zdanovich, D. G. 2002. The‘Country of Towns’ of Southern Trans-Urals", in: Ancient Interactions: Wast and West of Eurasia, pp 249–263. Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
  3. ↑ Зданович Г. Б., Батанина И. М. Аркаим — Страна городов: Пространство и образы: (Аркаим: горизонты исследований), Челябинск, Южно-Уральское книжное издательство, Издательство Крокус, 2007, 260 pp. ISBN 978-5-902165-18-7, ISBN 5-7688-0964-3
  4. ↑ Fyodor Petrov, Поселение Аркаим в культурном пространстве эпохи бронзы, 2009, II. Страна городов - мифы и реальность
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