Arheobotanical and Phytolith Research in the Settlement Novoilinka-3 (North Kulunda)

The settlement Novoilinka-3 is situated in the Habarsk region of Altai Krai, 8 km to the west from the village Novoilinka in the southern part of a small hill, formed by the oxbow lake of the river Burla. The territory of archaeological works belongs to the province of the steppes of the West Siberian Plain, subprovinces of the Kulunda steppe. The bones of animals from the settlement Novoilinka-III provided a series of radiocarbon dates that allows the materials to be dated to the middle - the 2nd half of the third millennium BC. Calibration of these dates by nearly a thousand years increases the ancientness of the formation of the cultural layer of the significant site. In 2011 soil samples were selected for biomorphic analysis. According to the phytolith analysis, it can be assumed that the settlement during its existence was situated on the edge of a pine forest. In all samples the coals of woody plants can be met, that indicates the anthropogenic character of the fires in the area. In most samples occur sponge spicules and rare diatoms. These are the indicators of the short time flooding in the settlement near the oxbow lake of the river Burla during the spring. The analysis of the distribution of phytoliths allows to reconstruct the landscape that was different from the modern one - pine or birch-pine forest. Such settlements were characteristic for the Eneolithic cultures of the Ural-Irtysh interfluve. The materials from the settlement Novoilinka-3 have much in common with the collections of the «kiprin type» from the territory of the Upper-Ob region. The analogies to the ceramic complex settlement Novoilinka-3 can be traced in the materials of the Neolithic-Eneolithic settlements of the southwestern Altai, Baraba and the southern taiga area of Western Siberia. Very close parallels can be found in the eneo-lithic materials of the Ural-Irtysh interfluve. The highest similarity is observed in the materials of Botaya. The significant sites of Novoil-inka-3 and Botaya are synchronous and very close in time and both refer to the same epoch - the Eneolithic Age. Most likely the people, who left these monuments, belong to different archaeological cultures, but to the one cultural-historical community of a higher order. V.F . Seibert noted that in the postbotaya time the economis crisis had beginned, and as a result the botaya population migrated to the similar ecological areas in the Urals, near the river Irtysh and Altai keeping the traditional way of living. The disposable materials are not simply a consequence of the relocation of the botaya population on the territory of Altai, but the result of a complex processes, which involved the botaya-tersek population and the Neolithic population of the South of Western Siberia (the keepers of comb-patching ornamental tradition).

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