Очерки хазарской археологии

by Светлана Плетнева

Книга Светланы Александровны Плетневой посвящена археологии Хазарского каганата - государственного образования VII - X вв., которое объединяло многие земли и народы юга Восточной Европы, от Нижнего Поволжья и Северного Кавказа до Нижнего и Среднего Поднепровья. В этом отношении Хазарию можно считать предшественницей средневековых государств - Древней Руси и Золотой Орды. Книга не только подводит итоги полу столетнего изучения древностей Хазарского каганата, но и ставит новые исследовательские задачи. Они связаны и со спасательными работами на уничтожаемых памятниках, и с публикацией огромного накопленного археологами, но неизданного материала.

364 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 1999

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a description of the Saltovo-Mayaki archaeological culture by the second of the two most prominent experts on it in the twentieth century. The Saltovo-Mayaki culture is associated with the Khazar Khaganate in the seventh through the ninth centuries, but not so much with the Khazars themselves: the empire was multiethnic and this archaeological culture is subdivided into notably different variants across what is now Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus, and the southern Russian steppe. Pletneva therefore divides the book into chapters on each of these variants, and at the end of the book are dozens of illustrations of excavation finds and maps.

As a linguist working on the Alanic language, I was mainly interested in the chapter on the Don forest-steppe variant, which is typically associated with an Alanic population that moved from the western Cis-Caucasus region to the northern borders of the Khaganate. I must admit that I was initially sceptical of this ethnic identification, but Pletneva presents all the evidence of distinctly Alan-type pottery, burial traditions and skull shapes.

Though most of this book remains solid, it is slightly obsolete. The book ends with a discussion of where the Khazar city Itil may have been located, and the difficulty of carrying out excavations in the Volga delta. Since the completion of this manuscript in the 1990s, claims have been put forth regarding Itil’s exact location and, though they have not found acceptance, a reader today would want to have some discussion of that controversy.