by One day in August, Oleksandr Koslov, of the 79th Air Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces, was digging a trench in the forest near the Siverskyi Donets river in eastern Ukraine.
It was hot and humid. There were mosquitoes everywhere. From the other side of the river “the Russians were always chipping away”.
He and his group of four were taking a break from this dangerous back work when one of them mentioned that he had seen fragments of pottery in the soil. Koslov took a look; perhaps they were modern potsherds washed up by river floods, he thought.
But then more things started to turn up. Flint tools. Animal bones. Ceramics. A neatly made arrowhead.
The 32-year-old history graduate, who worked as a retail manager before volunteering for the Ukrainian military, realized that they would be harvesting something very old – bronze age, maybe even Neolithic. However, it was not really an option to stop studying what they had achieved.
“Under the conditions,” he said with a certain understatement, “you must dig the trenches as quickly as possible.”
However, the group collected what artifacts they could. Later, Koslov made a makeshift “museum” out of an ammunition box, labeling the objects to show his senior officers. He also called Dr. Serhii Telizhenko at the Institute of Archeology of Ukraine.
According to Telizhenko’s assessment, Koslov and his fellow soldiers had stumbled upon an ancient burial site dating back perhaps 5,000 years to the stone age, but containing material from the Enelite or copper age, and the “catacomb culture” of bronze age. it flourished in the steppe in the third to second century BCE.
Ukraine is a wonderfully rich country in archeology, whether of the Scythians, with their horses and finely crafted gold, who crossed the steppes from the ninth to the second century BC, or of the interesting culture of Cucuteni-Trypillia from the stone age, which resulted significantly. , elaborately decorated ceramics and huge city-scale “megacities”, or the Greeks, established trading emporiums on the Black Sea coast.
But in a country that already has limited resources for the protection of culture, Russia’s all-out invasion meant the destruction of this rich record of the past.
The full extent of the damage cannot be accurately estimated. Research published this month in the journal Antiquity shows the difficulty of assessing land even in free areas such as Chernihiv oblast in the north and Kharkiv in the east due to the danger of land mines and unexploded ordnance.
Meanwhile, museum collections from occupied cities such as Melitopol, Kherson and Mariupol have been built and wholesaled to Russia and the Crimea. Cultural heritage of all kinds, including churches and other monuments, has been targeted for destruction “at a rate not seen since 1945”, according to the authors. Digging trenches is “destroying underground cultural heritage at an alarming rate”, they say. The authors consider archaeological sites of particular concern, as sites “more problematic and less understood” than other forms of cultural heritage.
Telizhenko is an expert on the extraordinary archaeological landscape of eastern Ukraine, especially the Luhansk region, whose grasslands are dotted with distinctive “kurgans” or ancient burial mounds that stand proud above the flat steppe landscape.
Archaeologists and linguistic experts have linked this prehistory to speakers of the lost Proto-Indo-European language, which gives rise to languages spoken in countries from India to Scandinavia and Britain.
Telizhenko’s own fieldwork in Luhansk oblast was disrupted by the Russian-backed separatist takeover of parts of the region in 2014 and has been completely disrupted by Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Instead of digging, he is now using open source satellite imagery to track the destruction and damage of burial mounds by shelling and other military activities. Since 2014, he said, speaking from his office in Kyiv, 1,863 kurgans have been disturbed. Especially before the widespread use of drones, the mounds were useful command points for the militaries of both sides, he said. The damage is a great loss, he said, not only for archeology locally; this is of global importance”.
Against the destruction, however, there are many discoveries like Koslov’s. Telizhenko, who wants to bring good practice to Ukrainian troops, is the author of a military manual called Archeology and War Monuments, which offers instructions on what to do if soldiers find an archaeological site. Published in 2019, the manual has been distributed to officers in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The guide begins with a reminder of the Hague convention, the 1954 multinational treaty dedicated to the protection of cultural property in times of conflict. Ideally, the manual advises, the military should avoid interfering with archaeological sites altogether.
However, “If the destruction process is already irreversible, and in the absence of a threat to the life and health” of military personnel, there are procedures to be followed.
The manual advises soldiers on how to photograph the site from multiple angles, using a smartphone compass app to establish orientation and placing a stick to indicate north. Precise coordinates should be taken using GPS. Objects should also be photographed, then packaged – “trash bags or supermarket bags are best” – and taken to the nearest safe museum or the National Institute of Archaeology.
Last year, a group of Chechen volunteers fighting in Sheik Mansur’s battalion on the Ukrainian side sent “a group of medieval Khazar dishes and fragments of bronze age vessels” to Telizhenko. They found them by chance, he said, in the village of Lopaskine in the Luhansk region. The Turkic Khazar people founded the medieval empire north and east of the Black Sea.
The Chechens took the objects carefully against the background of an ammunition box. Without a ruler, which is usually included for scale in archaeological paintings, they used the other standard items they had on hand: a bullet and a toothbrush.
“I haven’t heard from those fighters since February,” Telizhenko said. “They may not have done it.”
Despite such examples of good practice, however, theft of cultural heritage is widespread.
When the Khakova dam in the Kherson region blew in June, for example, causing catastrophic flooding, the massive, 832-square-mile reservoir drained away, revealing a trove of archaeological artifacts in the silt.
“There are open discussions with the national police forces trying to do something about it, but YouTube is full of videos where people are crying, despite the dangers,” said Telizhenko. Items illegally taken from the area, despite the dangers of shelling and mines, he said, included stone and bronze age objects, Roman potsherds, and medieval and Cossack artifacts.
These opportunities are often called “black archaeologists” on both sides of the conflict, military and civilian. It’s a phrase that Telizhenko rejects: “What would you call me then?” he said “A white archaeologist? Gold archaeologist? These people are just looters.”
