The emergence of potter's wheel-made ceramics in the south of Western Siberia in the Late Bronze Age

This article aims to address the issue of the emergence, during the Late Bronze Age, of wheel-made pottery in the territories of Kazakhstan and southern Western Siberia. Although such pottery is scarce, it is consistently documented in the primary Sargary-Alekseyevka and Begazy-Dandybay assemblages, finding direct parallels in materials from the Central Asian region. T o resolve this issue, the authors turn to the materials from the Burla 3 settlement, located in Northern Kulunda (forest-steppe Altai), where the proportion of wheel-made vessels in the ceramic collection significantly exceeds that of hand-formed pottery. Through a comprehensive study of a series of wheel-made ceramics from the settlement, an analysis was conducted of vessel forms and ornamentation, their raw materials, molding pastes, and construction techniques. The results obtained allowed for a detailed characterization of the studied ceramic series from the settlement, enabling a comparison with published materials from Kazakhstan and Central Asia. As a result, the authors conclude that the origin of wheel-made pottery at the Burla 3 settlement was local rather than the result of trade between the region's population (primarily the Sargary-Alekseyevka culture) and Central Asia. The features of the wheel-made pottery identified during the analysis, along with its abundance at the site - contrasted with its scarcity in other contemporaneous settlements of southern Western Siberia and Kazakhstan - clearly indicate that the settlement's population was foreign. Thus, the emergence of wheel-made pottery in the Late Bronze Age at sites across the steppe belt of Kazakhstan and southern Western Siberia, in the authors' view, serves as a clear marker of the direct infiltration of small, distinct population groups from Central Asia who possessed the skills to produce potter's wheel-made ceramics. At the same time, the study of the wheel-made ceramic collection from the Burla 3 settlement revealed several aspects indicating the transformation of pottery traditions that had originally formed in Central Asia or Kazakhstan before their bearers migrated to the Altai region. These adaptations include the incorporation of ornamentation motifs traditional to the Late Bronze Age population of the region, the use of atypical additives in molding pastes, and innovative vessel construction techniques, such as the appearance of vessels assembled from patches and coils using a base-to-body construction method, demonstrating the adaptation of these traditions to new living conditions and surroundings. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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