Excursion to Stone Age dwelling

• Tour to the Stone Age dwelling

These houses - homes botai culture of people that existed in the area of ​​North Kazakhstan for more than five and a half thousand years ago. Kind of these people were very European: a mixture of Mediterranean and Ural type - normal Ural guys only wild: metal did not know, used stone and bone.

That's what were their stone tools. Called microliths, size of a phalanx or even a fingernail - depending on the destination. These are interchangeable stone blades to wooden or bone tools. Inserted into the slots and secured with resin.

The archaeologists examined - it holds almost perfectly still. Almost - because in case of breakage of one of the blade it can be replaced, rather than throw the entire instrument as a whole.

Tips.

Well, having such a stout - by the standards of the Stone Age, of course - tools, built themselves botaytsy sturdy same - according to the same standards --huts house the benefit endlessly roam after the wild herds they did not need it: on the ruins of their ceramics traces koumiss.

Botaytsy first almost all the men domesticated horses - milk, you can only hand a horse - but it seems that still did not think of anywhere harness. Maybe Bush is not known. But riding like rides - found elements of the harness and traces of fished on horse teeth (and gnawed horse bones there are many - at first believed that the inhabitants of a hunted wild horses), but not wandering, and, it seems, simply grazed and bred horses for their meat and milk, as we have cows, and lived in the same place where had built six hundred years more than 250 round half-dugouts.

There happily.

The basis of the home was dug in the ground a round hole a meter and a half deep - so it was warmer to live. Within its walls can be positioned Niche-shelves for different things - primitive furniture.

On top of the dome was raised from the logs.

That caulked with moss and grass, then was covered with skins, and on top of all this is covered with adobe, clay and turf.

Top left smoke hole, which was located under the center - in a yurt or yaranga.

They slept in the loft residents of different levels - as residents in one such hut could be many families were large and it is not always clear who the father of a child - so ancient kinship system is considered not his father and mother.

Residence could be Large - when the family grew, the side just to attach another dome.

Next were similar production facilities in which botaytsy worked with stone, wood and skins, sewed clothes, made pots. From horse bones do bit for wood, from bird bones - needles for sewing clothes.

Meat harvested as follows: a pit dug to a depth of a meter into which the folded portion of the carcass horses, then closed and hides clay. Top diluted fire was burning until burnt out until all the oxygen. After cooking, the meat could be without access to air there for a long time.

In the photos it looks shabby and filthy, but inside, oddly enough, quite comfortable and roomy.

It is good to breathe - the smell of wood, fire and clay.

Light penetrates through the smoke hole enough to see everything and take off with it without a flash.

The reconstruction showed that the summer is cool and dry, and in the autumn-winter period is not observed strong changes in temperature and constant observance of the basic requirements for the care (timely snow removal, removal of flood waters), such semi-dugouts served an average of 15-20 years - until the rot through the overlap. Of course, every year it was necessary to lubricate the walls, floors, the inside of the pit.

It is clear that I would not want to live like that, especially with these botaytsami - we have different ideas about culture ... But, say, camp overnight in a slightly modernized and scoured the modern replica of the home would have been a very comfortable and romantic.