Materials of bronze foundry of the Paleometal Epoch in the Kiya River valley and new data about elemental composition of bronzes from the Shestakovo I burial ground
Authors:   Federal Research Center of Coal and Coal Chemistry of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Savelieva Anna S. 
Published: February 2023

In the Mariinsk forest-steppe and on its western periphery in the valley of the Kiya River archaeological communities of the Upper Ob, Middle Yenisei, northern taiga and southern steppe interacted in ancient times. This historical and cultural region is commonly referred to as “contact”, “transit” or “marginal”. To study the influence of such specifics on bronze foundry, the author reviewed materials on bronze foundry production in the valley of the Kiya River and also studied bronzes from the Shestakovo I burial ground, the most western burial ground of the Tagar culture, to reveal whether the regional specificity affected the development of the Tagar metallurgy. The analysis of the sources on bronze foundry showed that bronze objects on the Bronze Age sites are rare - a fragment of a knife, a celt from the settlement Archekas III, copper splash and slag from the settlement Ustye-Kozhukha I, objects of an unclear fate from the settlements Novoaleksandrovka and Archekas II. To the east of the valley of the Kiya River, up to the Uryup River, the complex of relevant materials is wider and is represented by traces of metal production from the settlements Dvornikovo and Tambar III. The picture of the “metal content” of the sites of the Kiya River valley in the Early Iron Age is different. More than 600 bronze objects from the burials of the Tagar and Tashtyk cultures are dated to this time. Single traces of bronze casting are known from the settlements -slag, stone tools, a clay core for casting socketed products from the fortified settlement Shestakovo I and the settlement Shestakovo II. To the east of the valley of the Kiya River, things (thousands of objects) from burial grounds also predominate. Bronze objects from settlements come, for example, from Tretyakovo I, Utinka I. Thus, in the structure of data on bronze foundry in the northeast of Kemerovo Oblast, the sources are distributed unevenly both chronologically and geographically. This is the reason for the reconstruction of local non-ferrous metallurgy based on data on bronze objects and on the elemental composition of their alloys. Metal from the burials of the Tagar culture of the Kiya valley, the Shestakovo I burial ground, was studied for the first time (excavations by A.I. Martynov, 1968). The elemental composition of 39 shafthole pickaxes, adzes and knives from Kurgan 4 was studied. The chemical-metallurgical groups of “pure” copper, arsenic, tin and tin-lead bronzes were distinguished. Copper items and arsenic-bronze shafthole pickaxe come only from Grave 1. This is explained by its later relative dating. The alloying of copper with tin, fixed in the metal of Graves 2, 3 and 4, is traditional for the Saragashen Stage of the Tagar culture (5th-4th centuries BC). The metal of Grave 1 makes it possible to “catch” the emergence of a trend towards the manufacture of implements from arsenic bronze and copper, characteristic of the Lepeshkino Stage (3th-2th centuries BC) and later of the Tesinsky burial complexes (end of the 2nd century BC - 2nd century AD). Thus, this section of the Kiya River's basin saw the same process as the rest of the steppe and forest-steppe areas of the Tagar tribes, namely, a decrease in the proportion of bronzes alloyed with tin in the 3rd-2nd centuries BC.