Editor's Introduction: Treasures of the Dead: Burials and Workshops from the Neolithic Urals to the Scythians, Early Balts, and the Golden Horde

Abstract

Treasures for archeologists represent far more than gold objects found in a grave, for the true treasure is usually an addition to extensive knowledge bases accumulated over years of painstaking digging in calculated sites, felicitous accidental finds, and diligent museum exponent research. The new, cutting-edge articles in this issue present “treasures” in multiple senses—discussing precious finds and placing them in new or adapted interpretive contexts. Chronologically their range and depth is considerable, since the territory of the former Soviet Union, today’s Eurasia, continues to yield diverse riches that span the Neolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages in the articles represented here. As usual for Eurasia archeology, these articles continue important themes in the literature, such as exploring how one determines a “people” or a “culture area,” understanding Scythian art, expanding the range of the Golden Horde, and interpreting interrelationships between nomadic and settled peoples in various time periods. Our lead article, by Aleksandr F. Shorin, Evgenii V. Vilisov, and Anastasiia A. Shorina, plunges us into the Late Neolithic, through an archeological complex beyond the Ural Mountains that raises important questions about how archeologists and anthropologists can designate a “people” and a “cultural complex” with mostly ceramic shards to go on, and only fragmentary evidence of dwellings, burial rites, or artifacts that might correlate to specific “cult” practices. One puzzle the authors