On the transition of production models n the Early Kulai casting tradition

Socio-economic stability of the society is a determining factor in the development of social production.The periods of absence of specific social upheavals are marked by study forms and by a range of manufactured products that correlatewith some material manifestation of such a fundamental concept as an "archaeological culture". The signs of a common production tradition,represented by the unity of the style and technology of manufacture, are characteristic of the archaeological culture. If the stability of the state ofthe society is violated, amplitude of various changes increases producing transitional forms to other production models that depend on the natureof factors disrupting the social stability. Thus, bronze objects of military equipment in the environment within forest cultures of Western Siberiaare replaced by iron ones during a relatively short historical period of the final stage of the Early Iron Age. Hence, the character of the flat cultcasting is changing. System changes did not occur simultaneously throughout the distribution of the basic production model. Most likely, theyrepresented a flexible substance that included external borrowings of more advanced manifestations of other production models on the one hand,and their internal re-shaping with the adaptation to local socio-economic conditions on the other hand. The faster the socio-economic changesoccurred in the local social formations, the faster this adaptation was in them. At the same time traditional flat casting correlated with theVasyugan stage of the Kulai culture could still exist and maintain its conventional significance together with flat continuous casting in the SarovEra; it disappeared completely with the vanishing of the Kulai culture. According to T.N. Troitskaya and I.A. Durakov "the two openwork picturesof an elk from the Parabel treasure are the most striking evidence of the gradual transition from an openwork to a continuous casting".Animal heads are made in a realistic way with fine attention to details; the trunks, however, are made schematically, in a customary way foropenwork casting. The authors define the presence of simultaneous manifestations of different technological schemes in these items, namelymodel and non-model casting. However, with a careful visual inspection of the casted elks from the Parabel treasure technological integrity oftheir entire surface without soldered and transitional areas is recorded although they should have been noticeable in the places of the detailslinking when they are moulded in different ways. The author analyses the compositional semantic component of ancient castings in the article,not restricting himself to the analysis of their external characteristics. At the same time he notes, that the model way of production was not characteristicfor the early Kulai cult casting. The prevalent non-model way of production of such castings was primarily conditioned by their purpose.As a result, the author of the article has come to a conclusion that manifestation of transitional forms from non-model casting to the modelone should be searched for not in the technological symbiosis of different ways of casting, but in the external manifestations of functionallyimportant features of products.

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