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 opposite bank of the river “the Russians bombed constantly.”
He and his group of four were taking a break from this exhausting and dangerous work when one of them mentioned that he had seen pottery shards on the ground. Koslov took a look; Maybe they were modern pottery pots washed away by the swollen river, he thought.
But then more objects began to appear. Flint tools. Animal bones. Ceramics. A carefully made arrowhead.
The 32-year-old history graduate, who worked as a retail manager before volunteering for the Ukrainian army, realized they had stumbled upon something really ancient: the Bronze Age, maybe even the Neolithic. However, pausing to study what they had stumbled upon was not really an option.
“Given the conditions,” he said with some understatement, “it is necessary to dig the trenches as quickly as possible.”
However, the group gathered all the artifacts they could. Koslov later made a makeshift “museum” out of an ammunition box, labeling the objects to show to his superior officers. He also called Dr. Serhii Telizhenko from the Ukrainian Institute of Archaeology.
In Telizhenko’s assessment, Koslov and his fellow soldiers had stumbled upon an ancient burial site that dated back perhaps 5,000 years, to the Stone Age, but also encompassed material from the Eneolithic, or Copper Age, and the “culture.” of the catacombs” of the Middle Bronze Age that flourished in the steppe between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC
Ukraine is a country spectacularly rich in ancient archaeology, whether from the Scythians, with their horses and finely worked gold, who roamed the steppes between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. C., or from the intriguing Cucuteni-Trypillia culture of the Stone Age, which produced notable, elaborately decorated ceramics and enormous city-scale “megasites”, or from the Greeks, who established trading emporiums on the Black Sea coast.
But in a country with already limited resources for cultural protection, Russia’s full-scale invasion has meant an avalanche of destruction for this rich history of the past.
It is impossible to accurately assess the full extent of the damage. Research published this month in the journal Antiquity points to the difficulty of conducting on-the-ground assessments even in liberated areas such as Chernihiv oblast in the north and Kharkiv in the east due to the danger of landmines and unexploded ordnance.
Meanwhile, museum collections from occupied cities such as Melitopol, Kherson and Mariupol have been removed and taken en masse to Russia and Crimea. Cultural heritage of all kinds, including churches and other monuments, has been attacked, with destruction “at a rate not seen since 1945”, according to the authors. Trenching is “destroying buried cultural heritage at an alarming rate,” they add. The authors consider archaeological sites with particular concern, as “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, standing proud above the flat steppe landscape.
Archaeologists and linguistics experts have associated this prehistory with speakers of the lost Proto-Indo-European language, from which languages spoken in countries from India to Scandinavia and Great Britain are derived.
Telizhenko’s own field work in Luhansk Oblast was interrupted by the Russian-backed separatist takeover of parts of the region in 2014 and halted entirely by Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Instead of excavating, it is now using open-source satellite imagery to record the destruction and damage to burial mounds due to bombing and other military activities. Since 2014, he said from his office in kyiv, 1,863 kurgans have been affected. Especially before the widespread use of drones, the mounds were useful command points for the military on both sides, he said. The damage, he said, “is a huge loss, not just for local archaeology; “This has global importance.”
However, compared to the destruction, there are many discoveries like Koslov’s. Telizhenko, interested in imparting best practices to Ukrainian troops, is the author of a military manual titled Archeology and Monuments in War, which offers instructions on what to do if soldiers discover an archaeological site. Published in 2019, the manual was distributed to officers of 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 during conflict. Ideally, the manual advises, the military should avoid disturbing 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 follow.
The manual advises soldiers how to photograph the site from multiple angles, using a smartphone compass app to set bearings and placing a stick to indicate north. Precise coordinates must be taken using GPS. Objects should also be photographed, then packaged (garbage bags or grocery bags are best) and transported to the nearest secure museum or National Institute of Archaeology.
Last year, a group of Chechen volunteers fighting in the Sheik Mansur battalion on the Ukrainian side sent Telizhenko “a group of medieval Khazarian plates and fragments of Bronze Age vessels.” They found them by chance, he said, in the village of Lopaskine, Lugansk region. The Khazarian Turkic people were the founders of an early medieval empire north and east of the Black Sea.
The Chechens carefully photographed the objects against the background of an ammunition box. Lacking a ruler, which is usually included in archaeological photographs for scale, they used other standard-sized objects they had on hand: a bullet and a toothbrush.
“I haven’t heard from those fighters since February,” Telizhenko said. “They may not have made it.”
However, despite these examples of best practice, the theft of cultural heritage is widespread.
When the Khakova Dam in the Kherson region burst in June, for example, causing catastrophic flooding, the vast 832-square-mile reservoir above it drained, revealing a treasure trove of archaeological artifacts in the silt.
“There is an open discussion with national police forces trying to do something about it, but YouTube is full of videos of people looting, despite the dangers,” Telizhenko said. Items illegally removed from the area, despite the dangers of bombing and mines, he said, include stone and Bronze Age objects, Roman potsherds, and medieval and Cossack artifacts.
These opportunists on both sides of the conflict, military and civilian, are often known as “black archaeologists.” It is a phrase that Telizhenko rejects: “What would you call me then?” he said “A white archaeologist? A gold archaeologist? “These people are just looters.”
