Archaeology & Numismatics

Description

This volume ushers in a new series of monographs devoted to the publication of Scythian and Sarmatian burial-mounds. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of these sites: they constitute our main source of information regarding the history and culture of the ancient nomads of the Eurasian steppes. Mikhail Rostovtsev in his day was already referring to the need to bring out a Corpus of these sites. Since then, a good deal of work has already been carried out: a considerable range of books has been published devoted to the publication of both the famous élite burial-mounds (Solokha, Chertomlyk, Tolstaya Mogila, the Kelermes burial-mounds et al.) and also the more modest burial-mound necropoleis for the common population. Yet the number of excavated burial-mounds of the Scythians and Sarmatians is constantly growing, thanks to the intensive excavations currently being undertaken in the Ukraine and southern Russia. Despite the slower pace of this research in the last decades stemming from the sharp drop in financial support, the investigation of burial-mounds is still going on and yielding new interesting results. The publication of such results, however, all too often fails to keep up with the excavations themselves: many important sites have languished unpublished for decades or are only being published in part in the form of short reports in the academic literature or even in exhibition catalogues, in which attention is focused only on the most eye-catching ‘museum’ objects. Even some of the most famous ‘royal’ burial-mounds excavated as long ago as the 19th or early-20th century (the Aleksandropol, Oguz and Kozel burial-mounds) have not been published in full, not to mention the numerous, no less important (although sometimes less sensational) sites, which have been excavated in recent decades. We hope, that this new series will go at least some way towards rectifying the situation outlined above. It will include new publications of Scythian and Sarmatian burial-mounds regardless of when they were excavated. The term “Corpus” indicates the endeavour to bring within the framework of this series the largest possible number of publications of burial-mound sites executed in keeping with requirements common to the series as a whole. These are first and foremost the comprehensive nature of each publication (which must include all available information on the site to be published) and its high academic standards. The series cannot, of course, claim to become a “Corpus” in the full sense of the word, i.e. to publish all the burial-mounds. It will not, for instance, include burial-mounds, which have already been published thoroughly and to a sufficiently high academic standard (for example, the above-mentioned Kelermes burial-grounds or Chertomlyk) or those which are due to be published in the future outside the confines of this series. Insofar as the aims of this new series coincide to a considerable degree with those of the series Steppenvölker Eurasiens, which we started bringing out in 1997, we have decided to publish this Corpus of Scythian and Sarmatian Burial-mounds as a sub-section of the former series.

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