The experience of interpretation of archaeological materials with use of integrated approach in N.I. Vitkovsky's works

The first attempts of the integrated approach in study of an archaeological material date from the time of formation of prehistoric archaeology. N. I. Vitkovsky, a researcher of the Siberian Stone Age, applied it in his investigations. Having studied a series of sites in the basin of the Angara River, he obtained significant materials in ancient history of this territory. The name of Vitkovsky had become wider known after the works on Kitoy Neolithic burial ground. The methodological base of N.I. Vitkovsky investigations was ideas of cultural evolutionism about successive development of culture from the lowest stages to the higher ones. Cultural evolution was regarded as a rupture of original inseparability of a human and nature, as a further isolating of culture and its alienation from nature, and eventually as a human domination over nature. According to these notions an initial stage in human cultural evolution is a stage of wildness which concurred with the lithic age in the archaeological periodization. In this stage a man was inseparably linked with nature and was living in compliance with those means that natural environment allowed to him for satisfaction his needs for food, clothes and dwelling. A man completely depended on natural environment, and it determined his way of life and a cast of culture. Therefore N.I.Vitkovsky couldn't do without natural-science researches in his archaeological investigations. An invariable part in his publications devoted to archaeological problems is a description of a relief and often climate, fauna and flora of the terrain where an archaeological sites was situated. Admitting the organic nature of culture, N.I. Vitkovsky obtained an opportunity to draw on results of archaeological investigations of other territories, often rather remote from Transbaikalia, for interpretation of Siberian materials. The idea about ubiquitous distribution of the lithic age and community of its manifestations regardless of territorial and chronological bounds allowed drawing direct analogies. In addition he considered it possible to use ethnographical materials since he supposed that a stage of culture defined similarity of customs on various territories and in different historical time. This was an interesting and promising way, and its cognitive possibilities allowed the researcher to attain to the intensional level of culture. The funeral inventory, special features of a burial etc. were interesting for the researcher not in themselves but as fulfilling a certain function, as elements of culture. The researcher devoted sections in his publications to its study, and he saw the final aim of archaeological investigations in this.

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