Europe to Asia

Abstract

This chapter surveys cultural developments in the European part of the Russian Federation. Geographically this landscape varies from coniferous forests in the north, to steppe and semi-desert in the south, the Urals forming a natural eastern border to Europe. Chronologically the chapter covers the period from 900/800 BC through to the Great Migration of the third/fourth centuries AD. Although the pace of technological advance varied in different regions, the transition to iron was everywhere accompanied by the formation of new cultural and social types. Three principal cultural spheres existed: (1) the nomadic world, which greatly influenced Iron Age cultural and social developments elsewhere; (2) the forest cultures of the upper and middle Volga, Oka, and Dvina rivers; and (3) the world of Cis-Ural forest zone. Their major technological, economic, social, political, and ideological components are analysed, together with internal and interregional interactions and movements.