The Ukraine: In Search of Submerged Late Palaeolithic Sites on the North-Western Black Sea Shelf

Abstract

The continental shelf offshore of the Ukraine coast represents one of the largest areas of submerged landscape in the Black Sea, comparable to the extensive shelf areas of Northwest Europe. The general region has a long history of Palaeolithic occupation and numerous archaeological sites associated with the major river systems draining from the north, including many famous Palaeolithic settlements. The submerged landscape exposed during periods of low sea level would have offered an extensive and attractive extra increment of land. Underwater archaeological survey in the Black Sea has so far failed to produce convincing evidence of pre-Holocene sites, but the expectation that the Ukrainian shelf harbours Late Upper Palaeolithic sites is strengthened by the presence of occasional flint artefacts in sediment cores recovered from the shelf area during geological surveys. This chapter develops a predictive model for identifying target areas in the search for Late Palaeolithic sites on this submerged landscape. We focus on the Dniester-Kuyalnik region and analyse the location and distribution of on-land Late Palaeolithic sites in relation to the topographic and palaeoenvironmental features of their local surroundings to identify key determinants of site location. We then use the maps produced by the many hundreds of sediment sequences recovered by drilling and coring on the shelf, many radiometrically dated, to identify similar features on the submerged landscape. We also assess the likelihood of site preservation and visibility under different scenarios-rapid or gradual-of sea-level rise. A preliminary test of the model was attempted with remotely operated vehicles, video and acoustic equipment, but was terminated prematurely by logistic problems, and further investigation awaits improved funding.

Hunter-gatherers across the great Adriatic-Po region during the Last Glacial Maximum: Environmental and cultural dynamics

“…The general decline in population of Central Europe during H2 (Maier and Zimmermann, 2017) also explains human absence in the Great North Black Sea region until 25 ka cal BP, when Epi-Aurignacians settled the western part of Ukraine and the plains east of the Azov Sea for few thousands years until 23 ka cal BP, hunting bisons, but still leaving uninhabited the southernmost areas of the region. Predictive models have been proposed for testing the expectation of finding submerged Late Palaeolithic settlements in the watershed plateau, river terraces and slopes, river valleys and hills around the Dniester-Kuyalnik interfluve (Kadurin et al, 2020), far from the marshy lowmarine coast. Starting from 23 ka cal BP, the early Epigravettians populated the steppic region basing their subsistence on the hunting of bisons (Demidenko, 2008) and extended their presence in south-eastern Europe.…”

Toward an understanding of human responses to environmental change in the Caspian-Black Sea-Mediterranean Corridors (IGCP 610 final report)

“…The project also (9) established the Reference List of main publications on Project subjects; a majority of which are published in Russian, and their titles required transliteration and translation into English, (10) collected data set on chronometry in the "CORRIDORS"; (11) assembled a reference collection of Ponto-Caspian foraminifera (supplemented by SEM images) and mollusks; (12) developed a method for search and discovery of submerged archaeological sites (e.g., Öniz and Dönmez, 2018;Kadurin et al, 2019); (13) reconstructed water exchange and faunal migrations during the Quaternary (e.g., Yanko et al, 1990;Figs. 8, 9); (14) established interactions between two different realms in the Marmara Gateway (Büyükmeriç et al, 2016(Büyükmeriç et al, , 2018; (15) determined Eastern Paratethys -Mediterranean connections during the Neogene and Quaternary; and (16) formulated the Ponto-Caspian biostratigraphy, sea level, and salinity reconstructions using mollusks and benthic foraminifera as the main tool (Figs.…”