The paper presents a typological analysis of a dagger from a Late Bronze Age settlement in Southern Siberia. The find has analogues among weapons of this type from South-Eastern Europe (hoard of Getin, random collections). A sample from the Kovachitsi-Vinogradi burial site makes it possible to attribute daggers of this type to the Gava culture. It is suggested that such daggers are not typical for South-Eastern Europe. The origin of the artifact is connected with the cultural genesis of the Bronze Age of the Black Sea region. A hypothesis about transit exchange between the population of Europe and Southern Siberia at the end of the Bronze Age is proposed.

Keywords: dagger, Luskus hillfort, Gava culture, Bronze Age, Irmen culture, Western Siberia, South-Eastern Europe.

The Museum of Archeology, Ethnography and Ecology of Siberia of Kemerovo State University keeps a bronze dagger found in 1982 by an employee of the Department of Archeology A.M. Korotaev. According to him, the dagger lay on the Lyuskus hillfort in the cultural layer of the collapsed wall of the excavation in 1978. This monument was opened in 1972 on the high right bank of the Tom River, at the confluence of the Tom River. Luskus. In the first half of the 1970s, the ancient settlement was examined by A.V. Tsirkin, G. A. Maksimenkov, and B. N. Pyatkin, and in 1976-1978 excavations were carried out on the fortified settlement under the author's supervision.

There is no doubt that the monument belongs to the Irmen culture: ceramic dishes characteristic of this culture are common on the territory of the object. Few finds from the cultural layer belong to two later historical periods : the Hunno-Sarmatian epoch (Kulai culture) and the Early Middle Ages (Lachinovo culture) (Bobrov, 1979). Among the materials of the ancient settlement dating back to the Late Bronze Age, there are many objects made of non-ferrous metal, which is not typical for the settlement complexes of the Irmen culture, however, as well as other cultures of the Bronze Age in the forest-steppe zone of Western Siberia. The found artifact is undoubtedly associated with the Irma archaeological complex of the settlement, although it is not typical of the developed and Late Bronze Age cultures of Siberia and Central Asia.

The dagger was cast in a double-sided tin-bronze mold and then carefully processed. The length of the product is 21.7 cm, the blade-14.5 cm, the handle-6.8 cm. In cross-section, the handle is oval, smoothly expanded in the middle part, where there are narrow transverse depressions. The pommel of the handle is made in the form of a flat oval with dimensions of 2.5×1.5 cm. At the base of the blade is a raised arc-shaped roller, which serves as a guard. Under the guard, the blade is additionally separated from the handle by side recesses. The blade is flat, slightly asymmetrical. Along it, almost in the center, there is a rib (Fig. 1; 2, 1).

Similar daggers were found in Hungary and Serbia. Of the seven European daggers belonging to the same type of morphological features, five are close to the find from the settlement of Luskus, the similarity is evident even in the asymmetry of the blade, which is not due to any functional features.,

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1. Dagger from the Lyuskus settlement.

2. Bronze daggers. 1-Luscus; 2-5-Hetine (according to [Hampel, 1886]).

3. Dagger (1) and vessel (2) from border 5 of the Kovachitsi-Vinogradi burial ground (according to (Bukvip, 1994)).

neither technologically. Four daggers of this type are from a treasure found near the village of Getin (old name - Tamasfalva) (Figs. 2, 2-5), the rest are from random collections. At the end of the 19th century, four daggers from the hoard were published [Hampel, 1886] and a dagger found in the town of Dombovar in Hungary [Wosinszky, 1896, Taf. 4]. 70 years later, the Hungarian find was again published in scientific publications, in which it demonstrated an independent type of daggers from the Late Bronze Age in the South-eastern part of the country.Eastern Europe [Patek, 1968, Taf. LXXVIII, 17; Müller-Karpe, 1980, Taf. 385, Д 4]. Interest in the hoard in the village of Hetin was revived by the discovery in 1976 of a similar type of dagger in a burial urn in the town of Kovachitsi-Vinogradi (Fig. 3) [Bukvih, 1994].

During the long-term history of the archaeological study of the Bronze Age of South-Eastern Europe, daggers of this type (let's call it the Geta dagger) were found only a few. Perhaps they are not typical for the territory of Hungary and Serbia, or for Europe as a whole. Such daggers are also not typical for the cultures of the steppe and forest-steppe zones of North and Central Asia. The dagger from the Luskus hillfort stands out among its own kind by the design of the handle and guard. The peculiarity of the blade, despite the functionally predetermined simplicity of its shape, is given by the side recesses below the guard (daggers with an intercept at the base of the blade). This feature can be traced in daggers distributed over a vast territory-from the Black Sea region to the Middle Yenisei. It remained in this space for a long time.

For the first time, such dagger blades appear in the cultures of the ancient mountain community. Their interception is still weak. More distinct outlines on the daggers he gets in the subsequent time on the south

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territories of Eastern Europe, for example, in the area of the Poltavka culture. It is possible that intercept blades in the forest-steppe and steppe regions of Eurasia did not lose their relevance in the Seimin-Turbine era. They are represented, for example, in the materials of the Shaitanskoe Ozero II monument located in the gorno-taiga region of the Middle Urals (Serikov, Korochkova, Kuzminykh, and Stefanov, 2009, Figures 4, 16, 17). The spread of this type of blade eastward through the forest-steppe and steppe regions to the middle Yenisei is associated with the migration of the Andronovo (Fedorovsky) population. Daggers with an intercept probably existed from the middle of the second millennium BC to the pre-Scythian time. They are represented in the Srubnaya, Pozdnyakov, Abashevskaya, and Prikazanskaya archaeological cultures (Bader and Popova, 1987, Figures 65, 11-13; Popova, 1985, p. 121, Figures 2, 8; Pryakhin and Khalikov, 1987, Figures 60, b). In the west, within the Black Sea region, daggers of the so-called Cimmerian type with an intercept at the base of the blade were among the weapons items. In the east, in the forest-steppe Ob region and on the territory of the Minusinsk Depression, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, the tradition of making such dagger blades begins to fade. This may be due to the spread of more effective Karasuk daggers with an all-metal handle (Chlenova, 1976). However, in the northern forest-steppe regions of Western Siberia, such as the Krasnoyarsk Forest-steppe, the Andronovo tradition of making dagger blades was preserved until the Early Scythian period (Maksimenkov, 1961, p. 305; Kulemzin, 1974). To the east of the Yenisei, daggers with an intercept are not recorded in the monuments of either the Bronze Age or later periods.

As for the typological features of the handle, they are not typical for materials from the area of blades with interception. But this conclusion should be supplemented with a remark: since the hilts of daggers were often made, most likely, of wood, they did not survive. The all-metal dagger handles of the Late Bronze Age, known in the steppe and forest-steppe zones of Eurasia, are morphologically completely different; they differ from the dagger from the Luskus settlement. The exceptions are daggers of the Sabatino culture and the Sosnovomazinsky type. Their handle as a whole is not similar to the handle of the samples of the described series from the Danube region, although it is similar in the shape of the pommel and in the expansion in the middle part. It should be noted that J. Koledin also points out that daggers of the Hittite type are related to Sabatin daggers (Koledin, 2001-2003, p. 30). The latter were widespread in the area of the Sabatino culture, but they are probably more associated with the territory of the Northern and Northwestern Black Sea coast.

Thus, we can assume that the type of daggers, which is a syncretic variant, was formed in the culture of the population of the Black Sea region and the Transcarpathian region. In this connection, V. A. Dergachev's concept of South-East European and East European factors in the kulyurogeny of the Bronze Age and historical processes in the territory of the Carpathian-Transnistria is interesting [1999, p. 212-218]. The appearance of peculiar daggers on the eastern periphery of Western Siberia can traditionally be explained by an exchange. However, the places where these daggers were found are several thousand kilometers apart. In this connection, it should be noted that the dagger of the Sosnovomazinsky type is one of those collected on the territory of the Minusinsk Depression (Grishin, 1971, p. 46). Another dagger of the same type was found in border 3 of mound 9 of the Tanai-7 Irmen culture burial ground in the Kuznetsk Basin (Bobrov, Mylnikova, and Mylnikov, 2004, p. 18, Fig. 7, 1). The long-term use of this dagger is indicated by the severe wear and tear of the blade. If daggers of the Khetinsky and Sosnovomazinsky types are not a random phenomenon in the Siberian expanses, then we can assume that a transit exchange was carried out through this territory in the Late Bronze Age. This is probably confirmed by the distribution of horn psalms with holes in the same and in different planes from South-Eastern Europe to Transbaikalia and China. According to N. Borofka, psalms of this type were known before the Middle Volga basin (Borofika, 1998, p. 109). However, they are also recorded in more remote eastern regions. And if in materials from monuments in the territory of Transbaikalia and China such things are isolated, then in collections from monuments of Lugavskaya culture they are represented by a significant series. The appearance of peculiar core psalms in the Middle Yenisei region occurs in the Late Bronze Age, more precisely, at the end of the II-beginning of the I millennium BC.

The presented version of the interpretation of individual finds does not contradict the concept of N. L. Chlenova about the existence of a community in the Late Bronze Age in the steppe belt of Eurasia (from the area of the Karasuk culture to the area of the Hallstatt culture) [1972]. This concept is based on some common features of the material culture of societies within this space.

In connection with the discussion of the dagger from the fortified settlement of Luskus, it is necessary to return to the problem of dating the developed stage of the Irmen culture. According to most researchers, the culture existed in the first third of the first millennium BC; this definition is most convincingly substantiated in the work of N. L. Chlenova [1994] . L. Bukvit refers the burial with a dagger from the Serbian Danube region to the Gava culture, which existed from the Bronze Age D (Br D) to the period B of the Hallstatt culture (Na C) [Bukvih, 1994, p. 39]. T. Klementsei justifies the point of view that the Gava culture belongs to

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XI-IX centuries BC [1986, pp. 130-131]. The lower chronological boundaries of cultures whose ranges are separated by a considerable distance clearly do not coincide. According to most experts, the time of existence of the Irmen culture is the X-VIII centuries BC. According to the results of comprehensive studies of the Chicha settlement in the Barabinsk forest-steppe, the Irmen culture dates back to the XIV-XI centuries BC (Molodin, 2008; Molodin and Parzinger, 2009). Modern data obtained by traditional archaeological methods, stratigraphic and planigraphic observations, as well as a large series of radiocarbon dates allow us to synchronize the Irmen culture with the Gava culture and, probably, other cultures of South-Eastern and Central Europe. The dagger of the Khetian type from the fortified settlement of Lyuskus and other materials confirming the version that Western Siberia was a transit exchange zone fit seamlessly into the chronology of the final bronze, proposed by V. I. Molodin and G. Parzinger.

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The article was submitted to the Editorial Board on 10.03.10.

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