FEATURES OF THE SETTLEMENT OF THE CARPATHIAN REGION IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The oldest monuments of the Stone Age on the European territory are known until the early 1970s from studies in Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. The discovery of Ukrainian archaeologists not only significantly changed the traditional ideas of the settlement of the Danube-Carpathian area, but also pointed to the Ukrainian Carpathians as the place from which the settlement of people on the territory of modern Ukraine began. As scientists traditionally believed, its settlement took place from the south of Central Europe through the Balkans to East Asia. Based on the discovery of new Paleolithic monuments in the north-eastern foothills of the Eastern Carpathians, Oleksandr Chernysh confirmed that settlements in the Acheulean period (1 million – 850 thousand years ago) spread not only bypassing the mountain range, but also directly through passes – Uzhok and Verecke ones 1 . Primitive people, having crossed them, moved further east, inhabiting Transnistria and the Northern Black Sea coast 2 . The reason for hopes of finding traces of a Stone Age person in the heart of the Carpathians was the discovery of O. Chernysh in the adjacent areas of Chernivtsi region, and especially Mykhailo Klapchuk’s one in some areas of neighboring Ivano-Frankivsk region 3 . More than 50 archeological monuments of the Stone Age in the 1960–80s were studied in Deliatyn (Nadvirnianshchyna, Prykarpattia) 4 . Traces of life found here are about 40 thousand years old, when the Neanderthals of the European continent created the Mousterian culture. The main tools at that time were flint chisels, scrapers and chips of massive forms. Traces of early Paleolithic settlements were discovered on the territory of the Drohobych district of Lviv region. Here, in particular, a collection of tools was collected: chippers, choppers, chisels, massive chips of cutting devices, chips and fragments of plates. According to the processing technique and