Vyatka-vetluga archaeological culture (comb-cord ceramics) of ananyino cultural and historical area

In the beginning of the early Iron Age, the banks of the Vyatka and Vetluga rivers were populated by the carriers of a material culture belonging to the Ananyino cultural and historical area. One of the brightest elements of this culture was ceramics decorated with comb and cord ornaments. In the 1990s and the early 21st century, a name was suggested for the Vyatka antiquities of the initial phase of the early Iron Age, which reflected this very element of its material culture – the Ananyino culture of comb and cord ceramics. This paper features the results of an analysis of ceramic complexes from the Vyatka sites of the Ananyino period. The authors noted that throughout the entire existence of the culture, the number of comb and cord vessels was small and rarely exceeded the threshold of 16%. In addition, they established that comb and cord ceramics was widely spread only at the early stages of the culture’s existence; at later stages, the tradition associated with its manufacture had been lost. The discrepancy between the name and nature of the culture suggested that the authors should correct its present name. Instead of the currently used term – the Ananyino culture of comb and cord ceramics, it was proposed to introduce a new name – the Vyatka-Vetluga culture

Weapon complex of ananyion period from tanaika forest

© 2020. The paper features an analysis of a set of bronze items of weapons discovered in 2018 by a local resident in Tanaika forest near Elabuga. The set includes the following items of substantial scientific interest: a spearhead, a celt, a dagger with a cruciform handle, and a buterol. During an examination of the place of discovery, it was identified that it corresponds to the location of the Gremiachii Kliuch site, and human bones were discovered on the river bank. Due to this, it was concluded that the set of items represents the remains of a burial inventory from a destroyed burial or sacrificial complex. The celt and the spearhead are characteristic of male burials of the Ananyino cultural and historical area of the Early Iron Age. The Ananyino set of items in the complex of artifacts under study also was supplemented by a dagger with a cruciform handle, which has analogies discovered in the North Caucasus. The cumulative dating of the items has made it possible to determine the burial period of the set of items within stage I-2 of the early period of Ananyino cultural and historical area (mid- 8th - first quarter/first half of 7th century BC). All items were examined by means of emission spectral analysis, which allowed to establish that the metal of the studied findings belongs to the antimony-arsenic alloys of tin bronze and represents the Volga-Kama metallurgical group. The identified differences at the microelement level in the metal composition of the Tanaika dagger in comparison with North Caucasian analogies allow the authors to suggest its local manufacture

«I only dream peace»: For the anniversary of E.M. Chernykh

© 2020 Academy of Sciences of Tatarstan, A.Kh. Khalikov Archaeology Institute. All rights reserved. The article is dedicated to the anniversary of the prominent Russian archaeologist Elizaveta Mikhailovna Chernykh. The authors reveal her early scientifi c career, which began with the archaeological club at school and has continued until the now day at Udmurt State University, where she works as a professor. The range of scientifi c interests of E.M. Chernykh cover a wide period from the Early Iron Age to the New Age. Elizaveta Mikhailovna focuses on the study of the Ananyino Cultural and Historical Area, which is the topic of a signifi cant number of her publications. The territorial range of fi eld studies by E.M. Chernych is remarkable, as she has worked at the sites of Kaliningrad, Kirov, Rostov, Tver and Perm Regions, and of course the Udmurt Republic

Non-Gaussian noise effects in the dynamics of a short overdamped Josephson junction

The role of thermal and non-Gaussian noise on the dynamics of driven short overdamped Josephson junctions is studied. The mean escape time of the junction is investigated considering Gaussian, Cauchy-Lorentz and L\ue9vy-Smirnov probability distributions of the noise signals. In these conditions we find resonant activation and the first evidence of noise enhanced stability in a metastable system in the presence of L\ue9vy noise. For Cauchy-Lorentz noise source, trapping phenomena and power law dependence on the noise intensity are observed

Ten millennia of hepatitis B virus evolution

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~20,000 and 12,000 years ago, with the virus present in European and South American hunter-gatherers during the early Holocene. After the European Neolithic transition, Mesolithic HBV strains were replaced by a lineage likely disseminated by early farmers that prevailed throughout western Eurasia for ~4000 years, declining around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. The only remnant of this prehistoric HBV diversity is the rare genotype G, which appears to have reemerged during the HIV pandemic