Russia

The prevalence of pregnant-woman sculptures - talismans of productivity and growing riches - may suggest a society in which women were valued more than men. Certainly, the women were productive in ways other than child-bearing. They gathered food, made yarns, and engaged in a variety of other handicrafts as well as providing care and comfort. However, any such superior valuation is unlikely to have lasted into times when the men’s brute strength and strategic sense were needed for defence — whether against the elements or against other men. It was this need that put men at a premium and precluded the development of matriarchy, and there is evidence that it coincided with the advent of metal technology. From this period on the idols are of men rather than women.

The technological revolution associated first with copper and then with bronze occurred about 3,500 years ago in the Russian land. Evidence of copper ore and copper-smelting, as well as a range of objects including copper knives, ornaments and sickles, has been found in the Volga basin of eastern Russia. Bronze axe heads and spear heads have been found both near the Baltic and in the south — and male figures are characteristic of the votive objects and ornaments found. ⁸ Then, about 3,000 years ago, the Iron Age arrived in Russia, and the pace of change quickened.

Trading networks, usually running along rivers, connected Russia both with the Mediterranean and with western Europe, which shared in the Iron Age culture. Even so, iron metallurgy is thought to have developed more or less independently in Russia. In any case, traders did not necessarily travel long distances — although some of the objects they traded in did. Commerce tended to be incremental, one group trading with its neighbours, and they with others, until commercial chains were formed along which travelled the commodities from which traders profited. A chain lasted until a cheaper or better alternative source was found, or until the consumers in the market learned to produce the goods themselves.

Though old technology often persisted alongside the new, metal technology speeded the pace of agricultural development. In areas where the use of such iron implements as the sickle caught on, more land could be cultivated and the community became richer. At the same time the makers of sickles forged swords, spear heads and axe heads, and made armour, allowing war to be waged more effectively. Iron culture made a society more attractive to predators; it also permitted a more effective defence. Certainly, with the advent of iron both settlements and society changed. Forts, albeit rudimentary at first, began to appear on hills overlooking farming land, and society became more differentiated both in function and in status. A variety of specialists appeared - metalworkers, people skilled in handling heavy weapons (like large axes), and organizers. But the new and larger society became more dependent on farming.

At the same time iron helped speed the extension of settlement northward into the forest zone, thanks to the iron axe head, which allowed trees to be felled more efficiently. It also contributed to swidden agriculture. This method of taming the forested wilderness and extending the area of farming was suggested by nature itself. Late-summer storms accompanied by lightning occasionally set fire to tracts of dried-out scrub and trees. The ashes provided a nutritious seedbed for plants, and the proto-Russians learned to exploit the phenomenon.

The swidden (or, more dramatically, ‘slash-and-burn’) method of farming, though simple, required patience and, in the initial phase, some heavy work. This would normally begin in early summer, when axe-men would hack down trees in a selected area of forest — probably near a river where the ground was flat and firm - and leave the timber to dry out until late the following spring. Techniques changed according to conditions: in conifer forests the bark was often stripped off to dry out the trees before felling. Such wood as was needed to make tools, build huts and use as fuel would be taken out; the rest would be burned, together with the undergrowth. The women and the weaker men would then set to with the sowing. Sometimes they scattered the seed directly into the ashes once these had cooled, though more often they used wooden hoes and forked scratch-ploughs, fashioned on the spot, to prepare a tilth before sowing.