A soy field. A fresh trench. The fragment of a 2,500 year old Greek amphora. A scattering of Scythian pottery. The middle of Ukraine. The middle of war. A silence so profound beneath a summer sun that it seems pre-modern – before a Russia, before a 'Ukraine', before ballistic missiles and drones.
The UK has around 15,000 archaeologists. Like the Spartans, Ukraine has just 300. Half of those are enlisted, dead, wounded, or fled the country. Oleh, a professional archaeologist freshly discharged from a Territorial Defence unit, leads a team of 50 or so students and volunteers on this summer encounter with Ukraine's deep past.
These digs recover Ukraine's historic DNA which so distinguishes her from other countries. From the steppe farming Trypillian (5000 BCE) to late medieval, through the Vikings establishing the Kyivan Rus state before the rise of Muscovy; to Volodmyr and the adoption of Christianity in the 10th century. This dig, however, is a Scythian site from the 1st millennium BCE.
Scythians traded wheat with the Greek cities of the northern Black Sea, thus supplying perhaps half of ancient Athens' bread. In return, the Greeks sent wine! Herodotus wrote of drinking 'Scythian fashion,' which meant undiluted by water. Oh those barbaric Scythians... They also threw hemp seeds on camp fires and enjoyed the result. From the freshly dug archaeological trenches emerge 'sherds' of broken Greek amphorae.
In 1971, a team of Soviet archaeologists was excavating a 'kurgan' burial mound in the path of an expanding manganese mining pit. The lead excavator Borys Mozolevsky was scraping back clay when almost by chance he uncovered a tiny gold patch blinking back at him. The Scythian Golden Pectoral from Tovsta Mohyla proved to be the greatest of Scythian discoveries.
The three tiers of decoration can be read in terms of life, fertility, death, regeneration, cosmic order and the relationship between the human, natural, and animal worlds. More recently, because of the depiction of the Mediterranean acanthus plant, scholars have argued that the pectoral was most likely made in a Greek workshop in one of the coastal Greek cities of northern Black Sea which served as intermediary traders with the larger Greek world of the Mediterranean Sea.
A copy of the pectoral in the National Museum in the Pechersk Lavra monastery, Kyiv
Put a shovel almost anywhere in Ukraine and you'll find something. At Dnipro museum the staff showed me clay vessels dug by soldiers cutting trenches on the front lines. There are perhaps 100,000 burial mounds riddling the steppes here, 95% of which are unexplored. The lines of battle – current and past – cut across Ukraine's patrimony. In this trench, the ground has been disturbed by earlier explosions from WWII. A live shell is found, and the police called to dispose of it.
A lot of Ukrainian archaeology right now is 'rescue archo' – the mad scramble to protect, recover, or map sites and discoveries and archives to preserve or at the very least record them. War, dreadful in almost every way, destroys a patrimony which distinguishes a nation, but which reflects the human journey in its entirety. In Dnipro Museum, the director shows me an ancient skull and a Scythian pot found by soldiers digging a trench.
Skull and pot 'rescued' by troops digging a trench near Bakhmut. Now in Dnipro Museum.
Ask a Ukrainian soldier: they want to protect their families and houses, their land and monuments, their buildings and natural heritage. While they fight, they want their poets to write, their artists to paint, their scholars to learn and teach, their doctors to heal, their scientists and engineers to invent, their merchants to make commerce.
The rusted remains of Scythian 'scale' armour, 2500 years old. Dnipro Museum
