In the 3rd millennium BC, territories between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea were covered by a network including the multi-directional circulation of peoples, ideas and innovations. This set of connections gradually involved an increasingly larger area, where agrarian and pastoral societies coexisted. In this context, it is possible to identify direct and indirect markers that indicate cultural and social transformation under the pressure of an intensification of in/intercultural contacts. These movements caused a development of the competitive environment in which the effectiveness of the social organization directly led to the success of every community and often posed a question of the physical existence of each. In this case, the question of conflict and its resolving became a life important issue and gave it a new qualitative value. To understand how these societies interacted, it was decided to choose the less well-studied (but not less important) material of this time and region, i.e. Volhynian flint, as it served as a high-quality raw material for the production of tools and weaponry. The significance of the artifacts and the raw material itself in everyday life together with an associated control of deposits as well as cults, conflicts and conciliations between different communities could provide us with an understanding of the processes, which took place in the Early Bronze Age.  

Baltic-Pontic connections. Hypothetical routes of Volhynian flint distributions.

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Project by Yevhenii Sliesariev ysliesariev@roots.uni-kiel.de