The Settlement of Bodaki – a Tripolian-Culture Centre of Flint Exploitation in Volhynia

Abstract

During the early metal periods, flint continued to be used widely in many regions of Europe as the main raw material for tools. The deposits of large Cretaceous flint nodules start being exploited at this time. Their mining was carried out in open pits as well as in mines and adits. Studies of Tripolian culture sites in the northwest of Ukraine showed that workshop settlements focused on production and exploitation of these raw materials were situated near the Volhynian flint deposits. The settlement in Bodaki, Ternopol district, is one of these sites. A complex study of flint materials from this site has provided interesting results. Use-wear and planigraphy analyses showed that the pre-processing of raw materials was undertaken outside the settlement. Flint knapping was done in a special workshop and on an open working platform where the majority of tools found was connected with flint knapping. There were cores, spherical hammerstones, punches, retouchers and ridge blades. In dwellings, on the contrary, the majority of tools were connected with the processing and production of final products. These are scrapers and borers for processing skins, saws, burins, drills, knives for planing wood, bone and anthler, and knives for cutting meat. Other finds included tools used in agriculture, such as sickle inserts and grinding stones. These results testify that Tripolian-culture communities had specialized workshop settlements for flint processing, and at the same time, within the site, the complete cycle of economic activity, characteristic for the economy of this time, was carried out. In the Eneolithic period in Bulgaria, in the Dobrudja district, workshop settlements that completely provided flint products to settlements in others areas, for example the Black Sea area, were also registered. Specialized objects related to flint mining were examined in England, Belgium, France and Poland (Małecka Kukawka 2011, 2014; Małecka-Kukawka and Werra 2011; Werra and Małecka- Kukawka 2017), but a lack of usewear analysis of the assemblages from those sites precludes presently the characterization of their economic features

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