Of Scythians and Gold?

The Iron Age ‘Scythians’ of the Eurasian steppe are almost always characterized by their (usually, but not always male) warrior burials. This has left a noticeable void in explorations of status and the connections to broader considerations of gender in Scythian societies. While, the term ‘Scythian’ itself is historically problematic, more disturbing is the tendency to reduce these societies to the social actions of one gender and one profession/social position. The epoch of ‘Royal Scythians’, i.e., the Scythian Epoch, ca. 450 – 200 BCE, provides an intriguing, if not compelling, backdrop to investigate and, ultimately, discuss broader considerations of the links between status and gender in the Eurasian steppe Iron Age. Using the lower Dnipro River region as a primary case study, I identify and analyze spatial links between the burial mounds that are such a prominent feature of that social and natural landscape, and the material assemblages found within a select number of those mounds to better flesh out ideas of status and gender as inter-related factors in the social organization of nomadic pastoralist societies of the northern Pontic Iron Age.

Dr. James A. Johnson (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh 2014) began his archaeological career in southwest Germany excavating ‘Celtic’ Iron Age burial mounds as a part of the Landscape of Ancestors Project. In 2015, funded by the National Geographic Society, he started the Bil’sk-Gelonus Project in the Poltava Region of east-central Ukraine. Currently, he and his students are initiating the Comparative Iron Age Burial Mound Project, compiling and analyzing data regarding the use of earthen burial mounds, or tumuli, from France to Ukraine.

Host or Publisher The Denver Society of the Archaeological Institute of America