GARG ON BUH — A JUNCTION OF ROADS AND COMMUNICATIONS

Abstract

The multi-layered settlement and burial ground of Gard are located on the right bank of the Southern Bug at a distance of 2.5 km south of the Bohdanivka Village, Voznesensky district, Mykolaiv region. The site is placed in the lower part of a wedge-shaped slope, bounded by two bayrach ravines with a streams, on the edge of a terrace-like ledge of the bank which corresponds to the level of the first terrace above flood-plain, 4—14 m higher of the summer water level.

For a number of the cultures represented at the Gard settlement (Bug-Dnister, Seredni Stoh, all stages of Trypillya, Usatove, Antique, Kyivan Rus), the Granite-Steppe Southern Bug area was the marginal province of their settlement or spread of influences. This region is separated from the main territory inhabited by the people of those cultures by many tens and even hundreds of kilometers. Their cultural layers are characterized only by deposits of ceramics, flint, animal bones, etc. These sites do not have dwellings or other objects of settlement infrastructure which indicates them as the temporary, possibly seasonal, and not permanent settlements, sits, overnight stays of trade caravans at crossings or the centers of exchange and trade of goods, and their inhabitants did not engage in traditional farming, and performed some special functions.

In our opinion, Granit-Steppe Southern Bug area attracted people of different cultures and different times due to its close proximity to the estuaries and lakes of the Northern and North-Western Black Sea region — potential sources of self-growing salt and strategic location at the intersection of ancient trade routes.

Written sources describe the gathering of salt and its trade by Olviopolitans from the 5^th century. BC, in the Byzantine period, by the Ukrainian population in the times of Rus-Ukraine, Zaporizhzhya Sich and the 18^th—19^th centuries. Finds of artifacts from this time in Gard record the directions of trade routes.

The presence of Usatove culture settlement, a burial ground, and a sanctuary in Gard may indicate the existence during the turn of the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age some «factory» here, a place for the exchange of goods (perhaps seasonal). It seems that a main place in this exchange should have been occupied by salt as a product that the inhabitants of the practically salt-free territories between the Bug and the Dnieper really needed.

It is likely that the Late Neolithic population of a culture unknown to us (no Neolithic sites have yet been found there) that lived somewhere in the neighborhood with the estuaries or the coast of the Black Sea was engaged in the production and transportation of self-grown salt. Arguments in favor of this version can be served by the numerous finds in Gard of a special group of pottery — the so-called Cardium ceramics, made with impurities of Ostracoda crustaceans and ornamented with imprints of the edge of the Cardium sea shell (figure), which could have came to Gard together with salt.

In the same way, the Neolithic inhabitants of Gard could be engaged in the output and delivery of salt by the organization of long-term expeditions. Indirect evidence of this possibility is a number of Bug-Dniester culture sites Girzhov, Karpove, Katarzhine 1 and 2, Mainova Balka, etc., located along the ancient trade route, which in the ancient times led from Dobrudja to crossings across the Danube and Dniester and than north of Khadzhibey and Tyligul estuaries went out to the Bug, and further, through the headwaters of the Inhul and Inhulets rivers, it forwarded to Dnipro. Apparently, these temporary sits arose as a result of repeated visits by groups of Bug-Dniester culture people on their way to the Kuyalnytsky and Khadzhibey estuaries.