Saltovo-Mayaki culture

The culture takes its name from two sites explored at the beginning of the 20th century: the hillfort and catacomb cemetery at Verkhny Saltov on the Seversky Donets near Kharkiv, where the local teacher V. A. Babenko found the first catacomb in 1900, and the Mayaki hillfort where the Tikhaya Sosna flows into the Don, excavated in 1906. In the narrow sense it is the culture of the forest-steppe of the Don and Donets, whose bearers were Alans who buried their dead in catacombs like those of the North Caucasus; in the broad sense it also covers the steppes of the lower Don and the Sea of Azov, the Taman peninsula and eastern Crimea, the lower Volga and Caspian Dagestan, with a steppe variant of pit graves conventionally called Bulgar. Since Mikhail Artamonov and Svetlana Pletnyova it has usually been regarded as the culture of the Khazar Khaganate, though some scholars question the equation. Pletnyova and Murad Magomedov linked the appearance of the Alans on the Don with their resettlement by the Khazars from the North Caucasus during the Arab–Khazar wars.

The Saltovo people were not only nomads: more than a hundred settlements with extensive traces of farming are known, along with pottery workshops and ironworking. They built strongholds: the stone citadel of Verkhny Saltov stood within a fortified town of some 120 hectares, the walls of the Mayaki fortress, whose citadel dates from the 9th century, were built of chalk blocks, some carved with runic inscriptions whose reading remains disputed, and under the emperor Theophilos, about 833–841, a Byzantine engineer built the Khazars the brick fortress of Sarkel on the Don. Umayyad and Abbasid dirhams, mostly struck in the 8th century, are found in Saltovo graves, and between the 780s and the 830s local imitations of dirhams were struck in the forest-steppe between the Don and the Dnieper.

The dates are archaeological: Pletnyova placed the culture between the middle of the 8th and the beginning of the 10th century, other works between about 700 and 950. Its decline is connected with the weakening of the Khazar Khaganate and the passage of new nomads, the Magyars and the Pechenegs, across the steppe.