Early European Cultures

The crossover between the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic in Europe (and more specifically Northern Europe) took place about a millennium after the wide-ranging Magdalenian had faded. The later Swiderian culture which was so important in this specific instance was centred around modern Poland, with extensions both eastwards and southwards.

On the Eastern European fringe of the Swiderian, and of the Epigravettian which was initially so strong in Southern Europe, there appeared a number of more or less contemporaneous Epi-Palaeolithic (Late Old Stone Age) and early Mesolithic cultures. This mainly took place in the steppe zone across the northern Black Sea region, but activity was also taking place between the Vistula and the Ural mountains.

Changes of living space seem to be particularly highly traceable in Ukraine's north-western Polissya region. People of the Swiderian and late Ahrensburg cultures would have found this reindeer-dominated landscape of pine and birch forest to be very familiar, interspersed as it also was with swampy and steppe-like spaces. These hunters and their families transmigrated here several times from what is now Poland, beginning in the Younger Dryas period of about 9000-8000 BC.

Unlike the people of the Bilolissya, these newcomers remained for a longer period of time, until the middle of the Preboreal, around 7500-7200 BC. Throughout this time they preserved their mode of life based on the collective hunting of reindeer. The flint industry of most of their sites displays traditional tool processing traits from both traditions.

People of the Molodova-Kichkine culture migrated from the middle Dniester region to the Crimean foothills during the period at and after the end of the Younger Dryas (and by about 6400 BC) for much the same reason of improved hunting grounds.

Later, at the end of the Proboreal and beginning of the Boreal (around 7100 BC), the same situation can be supposed to be true for the appearance of traditions which belonged to the Komornica and Janislavice (Janisławice in Polish or Yanislavitse in Russian) in the Ukrainian Polissya region. Both cultures are characterised by their hunter-gatherer lifestyles and distinctive flint tools.

The Janislavice is believed to have emerged in Early Poland during the early to mid-Holocene period, roughly around 8300-7200 BC and on the eastern edge of the Maglemosian. Precise start and finish dates can vary slightly depending upon the specific region and archaeological evidence, although the given dates are generally acceptable. Sometimes categorised as the Janislavice technocomplex or the Vistula cycle, the culture was labelled by Stefan K Kozłowski in 1964 for the Janislavice site near Skierniewice.

Flint artefacts were made using local Cretaceous flint which is fairly abundant in the moraine deposits in the south-east of the Kaliningrad oblast, including from the Vishtynetskaya 1 site on the north-western shore of Lake Vistytis. Small flint pebbles have been noted at many places on the modern lake's shoreline.

These flint artefacts have many similar late Mesolithic versions of them in today's neighbouring countries. Characteristic of the Janislavice culture is its single platform cores for blades, and quantities of irregular scrapers, trapezes, narrow scalene triangles, and microburins. Features such as conical blade cores, numerous end scrapers, numerous burins, Stawinoga-type backed pieces, and retouched microblade inserts are specific to the northern Janislavice group, which has enough differences from its southern group (which entered Ukraine) to be labelled a 'Northern Janisławice' culture.

Some finds bear similarities with artefacts from the Neman culture (from 5100 BC), although they appear to have been locally produced. The possibility cannot be excluded that a dune which was suitable for a settlement was visited by people of both cultures but, even if the finds are divided typologically, it is impossible to distinguish a normal artefact assemblage at this site either for the Janislavice or Neman cultures.

This, however, makes it possible to propose a hypothesis in which contact between people of the 'Northern Janislavice' and those of the later Neman occurred at this location and resulted in the formation of the aforementioned assemblages, which have some features of each of them but lack important cultural identifiers such as Wieliszew-type points and tanged points.

If such contact actually did occur then it is is possible to follow the change in hunting weapons, where trapezes and slotted bone points with flint inserts begin to replace traditional arrowheads. However, more finds are needed to resolve this question. The Maksimonys group, long held to be part of the Janislavice along the middle Niemen and Biebrza basins, has been proposed as a culture in its own right due to yet more tool differences appearing there.

As for the southern Janislavice group, single finds which can be connected to the Central European lowland (such as those from the Janislavice) can also be found on the Pontic steppe, displaying some expansion - possibly only short-lived - southwards from the Polissya region. This region hosted various other cultures, including the Sozh and Pesotchniy Riv along the Desna, plus the Zimivikvisk and Darkveti.

The fact should be underlined that, in the many sites in the area including stratified ones for which datable material can be extracted, such finds can often represent two, and often more than two, of the local archaeological cultures.

European Kingdoms

Early Cultures

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