ARCHAEOLOGY, ETHNOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY OF EURASIA Archaeology Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 40/4 (2012) 106–115 E-mail: Eurasia@archaeology.nsc.ru © 2013, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aeae.2013.04.011 106 Introduction Although entire chapters of summarizing monographs address the cultures of the Bronze Age, very little detailed knowledge is available on Yakutia during this period, unlike the Neolithic (Okladnikov, 1949, 1955; Fedoseyeva, 1968; Arkhipov, 1989; Alekseyev, Gogoleva, Zykov, 1991; Alekseyev, 1996). Since the 1960s, only one culture belonging to this huge territory has been attributed exclusively to the Bronze Age, the Ust-Mil culture identiｿed by S.A. Fedoseyeva and Yu.A. Mochanov. The Ust-Mil culture was ｿrst identiｿed on the Aldan River and then in other regions of Yakutia (Fedoseyeva, 1970a, b, 1974; Mochanov, Fedoseyeva, 1976: 524). This culture is described in a monograph by V.I. Ertyukov (1990), who synthesized all Bronze Age materials collected in Yakutia up to and during the 1980s. Until recently it was believed that the Ymyiakhtakh culture was universally replaced by the Ust-Mil culture, although the date of the latter is still open to debate. The V.M. Dyakonov Institute of the Humanities and Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Petrovskogo 1, Yakutsk, 677027, Russia E-mail: dyakonov_vm@rambler.ru CERAMICS OF THE ULAKHAN-SEGELENNYAKH CULTURE, EARLY BRONZE AGE, YAKUTIA The principal diagnostic feature of the Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC) Ulakhan-Segelennyakh culture of southern, southwestern, and western Yakutia, which was ｿrst described by the present author, is pottery decorated with punched nodes in combination with dentate impressions and stamp imprints. This type of pottery differs from Ust-Mil pottery and resembles both ancestral Ymyiakhtakh ceramics and ceramics made by immigrants. The Ulakhan-Segelennyakh culture did not spread across all Yakutia, but occupied vast taiga regions in the basins of the Aldan, Olekma, Vilyui, and Middle Lena. Most immigrants were descendants of the Glazkovo people, and entered Yakutia along the upper reaches of these rivers. Keywords: Yakutia, Bronze Age, Ulakhan-Segelennyakh culture, ceramics, decorations. Ymyiakhtakh culture originated during the ｿnal Neolithic, while at the late stage of development, bearers of this culture borrowed bronze artifacts from their neighbors (Fedoseyeva, 1980: 215; Mochanov et al., 1983: 18). Later, descendants of the Ymyiakhtakh people mastered bronze technology (Khlobystin, 1998: 175; Everstov, 1999a: 53; Kiriyak, 2005: 11). Researchers have attributed the Ymyiakhtakh culture both to the Late Neolithic (Fedoseyeva, 1980: 215; Alekseyev, 1996: 55) and to the Bronze Age (Khlobystin, 1987). At different times, scholars have made attempts to divide the Yakutia Bronze Age into early and late stages (Okladnikov, 1955: Ertyukov, 1990), and to single out a speciｿc Chalcolithic period (Zykov, 1978: 37–38). S.A. Fedoseyeva, the principal investigator of Ymyiakhtakh, has recently attributed this culture to the Neolithic/Bronze Age transition (Fedoseyeva, 1999: 58– 59; Mochanov, Fedoseyeva, 2001: 32; 2002: 28). It is the author’s opinion that at the outset, the Ymyiakhtakh culture was intrinsically Late Neolithic, and then, due THE METAL AGES AND MEDIEVAL PERIOD