Settlment of the late antiquity in the Altai: cartographic and the planigraphic features

At the present time in the territory of forest-steppe and foothill Altai there are registered 46 monuments dated to the era of late antiquity or the beginning of the Middle Ages period (the first half of the 1st thousand AD); these monuments have signs of sites of ancient settlement - ditches, swells and escarpments. The sites of ancient settlement are structured into fortification ensembles and have similar geographical conditions of location (a border of pine forest and a flood plain of rivers and lakes). The studied features of their placement on terraces and the planigraphic characteristics allow to draw preliminary conclusions on their functioning as fortresses and to sort out three lines of defense: an abatis, a glacis and the main enceinte of a fortress (a wall, an escarpment). The first and the second lines of defense correspond to fortification concept of the main fortress position (or the main defensive position of a fortress) which is understood as an external belt of fortress fortifications remote from the central enceinte. On this position the garrison of a fortress would show the most persistent resistance to the attacking enemy. By the most modest calculation the average main fortress position of an ancient settlement of forest-steppe Altai had a circle of 11,5 km and the area about 120-150 thousand sq.m. If the enemy overcame this position, he found himself in front of the third line of defense. The third line of defense was a fortress wall. It could be a log fence or a stockade. Both a stockade and a log fence in fortifications of forest-steppe Altai are propped up from within by rather large dwellings almost in all the monuments. It is not ruled out that their roofs or sections of roofs were used as a scaffold for defending shooters, some kind of a battle move. A component element of the main fortress enceinte of an ancient settlement ensemble is an escarpment - an abrupt artificial cut of the coastal edge that adjoins a wall or that is a wall's segment on horseshoe-like sites of ancient settlement. Part of the monuments is supplied with entrances on the defended territory, and these gaps in fortification are often separately protected. On one of the largest objects of the region, Biysk settlement 3 (which has the area about 20 thousand sq.m with the length of the fortification line of 500 m), there is a huge rectangular hollow in the area of 70 sq.m in a place of an exit. No dwelling of a similar size is known during this period on Altai (altogether 520 dwellings on 43 sites of ancient settlement). This fact allows assuming the existence of a gateway non-passage tower near the entrance on the territory of a fortress. In several cases various annexes, internal fenced constructions of various forms, dual lines of fortification, etc. are met. Thus, even the initial analysis of the saved-up and published material showed very serious prospects and topicality of studying of "wood" terraced sites of ancient settlement which were powerful and almost insuperable centers of resistance. The further directions of studying of this type of monuments are defined.

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