Modern South Ural region is well known not only for its metropolises, but for its mono-industry towns as well. An iron and steel works is a town-forming enterprise, in the suburbs of which mines are located to produce ore and coal, and on the outskirts – a forest of high-rise residential districts and, of course…a cemetery.
Surprising as it may seem, but something similar could be found in our area already back in the Bronze Age. For example, an ancient mine Vorovskaya Yama (Thieves’ Pit), discovered by Gennady Zdanovich, Viktor Zaykov and Anatoly Yuminov in the early 1990s.
Let us outright explain that the “Thieves’ Pit” toponym is by no means related to ancient times, it is just that according to legends, Gipsies were hiding stolen horses in this hollow about a century ago.
For several dozen years, this archaeological object remained untouched. In the 2020s the excavation at the Thieves’ Pit were resumed by archaeologists from Chelyabinsk, Miass, Orsk, Ekaterinburg, Tyumen, and Saint Petersburg. Many organizations joined their forces (together with the SUSU History students and staff, the work was carried out by specialists from the South Ural Federal Research Centre for Mineralogy and Geoecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Tyumen Scientific Centre of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and other institutions) due to a simple reason: the object of research belonged to Geoarcheology, so it required attracting various specialists and performing a ton of analysing. The excavation was headed by Candidate of Sciences (History) P.S. Ankusheva.
Scientists managed to discover a residential settlement right near the mine. They found remnants of buildings and traces of fireplaces, which could have been used both as smelting furnaces and household ovens – to heat dwellings and cook food. The village had apparently been a place where miners lived and performed primary treatment of ore (refuse heaps, tools and other finds work as proof of that).
Mines combined with settlements in times of the Bronze Age can be found not that often, there are only two examples: in the Orenburg Region and in the Volga Region.
“In the summer of 2024, we have organized the third season of works at the Thieves’ Pit,” shared Deputy Head of the Institute of Media, Social Sciences and Humanities, managing the practical training of the History students, Andrey Epimakhov. “Together with our colleagues under the RSF grant, we expanded the research space, and in addition to the main pit we found a mine as well. We couldn’t reach the bottom, but it is already clear that it was a Bronze Age mine. The stratigraphical data show how the mine had been developed, and where the heaps had been located.”
The fragments of pottery discovered in the mine and at the settlement proved the dating – this is a monument of the Alakul culture dating back to the XVIII–XVI centuries B.C. (later than the emerging of Arkaim).
Among the shards of vessels, the archaeologists singled out a series of unusual objects – “ceramic disks”. These are round-shaped, 5–7 centimetres in diameter and have no holes. Their designation is not clear. Approximately a couple dozen such disks were found in one place, in a mine filling. The ancient miners had carefully backfilled their pit with refuse, thus leaving traces of several fireplaces at different levels for us.
We also found an ore treatment site: here the ore had been sorted, big green stones had been selected and then grated and ground.
We were really lucky to find a casting mould: it looked similar to the two other casting moulds of the same period already known to archaeological science. This mould had most likely been used to cast tunnelling tools of the chisel type – an iron tip with a plug.
“Obviously, those, who developed this mine, produced the tools for mining here as well,” said Doctor of Sciences (History) Andrey Epimakhov. “Though we haven’t found the tools themselves yet.”
The scientists found and analysed remnants of slag and small pieces of metal, which the ancients had cast. Those were copper alloys of course.
Yet another mystery was that there is no water source near the settlement. In any case now the river runs two and a half kilometres off the site. Earlier, together with his colleagues from Miass and Ekaterinburg, Andrey Epimakhov had studied the diet of the miners from this settlement. They had mostly been eating meat, which they had primarily stocked up during warm seasons: which obviously means that they had not bred cattle at the settlement, but had rather purchased adult slaughter animals.
Excavation at the Thieves’ Pit is still in progress, and the Ural archaeologists are yet to unveil new mysteries of the Bronze Age miners. This research being is conducted thanks to the funding from the RSF grant under the Science and Universities national project.