ДРЕВНИЕ КАМЕННЫЕ КОПИ НАДЫМ-ПУРОВСКОГО ВОДОРАЗДЕЛА: статья в сборнике статей

N the northern part of Western Siberia, Stone Age sites, particularly the Neolithic, are extremely few. Perhaps the obstacle to mass development of the territory was a shortage of stone raw materials. The West Siberian plain is folded with loose sediments, in which rocks are found in the form of fragmented material in moraine and water-glacial sediments, their exits to the surface are rare. Therefore, the Neolithic site of Et-to II is of great interest as a large conglomeration of multi-time and multi-functional objects. The site is located on the watershed of the upper reaches of the Nadym and Pyakupur (Nadym district of YaNAO) in the tract of Uvyr-pai. The tract is a forested oblong hill (4 x1 km), 30 m high above the surrounding treeless flat lake-marsh plain. Geomorphologically the hill is a drumline, the remains of a glacial plain. It is folded by moraine sediments - unsorted sands with a mixture of gravel-pebble-boulder material, forming extensive layers and lenses near the surface. The site occupies a narrow strip of 0.55 km long on the top ridge of the hill and includes 184 hollows of various shapes and sizes, usually with a ring soil heap. Most of them form a dense chaotic cluster in the eastern part of the site. To date, 13 in-depth structures in the eastern part of the site and two in the western part have been excavated. Only eight of them were marked on the surface by hollows, the rest were not traced in modern relief, being blocked by later structures or nearby soil heaps. Six objects are deep (2-2.5 m) rounded pits with steep walls and flattened bottom, admitted into the powerful layers of nodules. Four of them are located in a close group at a distance of 0.5-1 m from each other. Their diameter is 3-4 m on the upper edge and 2-3 m at the bottom. Their filling is characterized by layering and saturation of the pebbles. Stratigraphic data indicate they were not simultaneous. According to 14C analyses the pits date back to the first half of the 6th millenium BC. The finds are presented exclusively with stone artifacts, pottery is absent. The inventory lay around the pits and in the upper half of their filling, without forming compact clusters. More than half of the lithic collection is accounted for by varieties of flint and flint breeds of low quality (layered, heterogeneous composition, fissured), the rest are quartzite, quartz and chalcedony, roughly equal in numbers. Two-thirds of the collection consists of nodules with one or more flake facets, their fragments and primary flakes. The cores and core-shaped pieces represent the initial stage of percussion and retain the shape of the original blank. Natural sides or flake negatives have been used as striking platforms. Debitage, mostly small does not exceed 20%. Direct percussion with hammer-stones predominates over anvil technique. Implements (10% of all inventory) include mainly stone-processing tools - pebble fabricators, retouchers, abrasives, as well as a few retouched flakes and flakes with use-wear traces. The planigraphy of the site of Et-to II and the characteristics of the described rounded pits resemble the Neolithic flint mines of foreign Europe, Belarus, and Central Asia. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that the target in question was a fragmented (mostly low-quality) raw material from the deposits of glacial genesis. The peculiar inventory indicates highly specialized activity aimed only at testing and selection of raw material. Lithic-knapping workshops have not yet been found. The size of the Et-to II site shows that it had long served as a basic center for providing the local population with lithic raw materials.