Volyntsevo culture: the Slavs of the Dnieper Left Bank in the Khazar age

The culture was identified by the Ukrainian archaeologist Dmytro Berezovets, who excavated the settlement and cemetery at Volyntseve in the Sumy region in 1948–1950. Its sites stretch from the Desna and the Seim to the upper Seversky Donets, with a strip along the right bank of the Dnieper from Kyiv to Kaniv; layers of the mid-8th to early 9th century lie on Starokyivska Hill in Kyiv. Most scholars think it grew out of the earlier Penkovka and Kolochin cultures with the participation of newcomers who left sites of the Sakhnovka type — according to A. V. Komar, after two waves of Khazar incursions in the late 7th and early 8th century — but its origins and dating are debated: its beginning is placed anywhere from the mid-7th to the mid-8th century.

The Volyntsevo people lived in unfortified villages of semi-sunken houses with clay ovens, grew millet, wheat, rye, peas and hemp, ploughed with iron shares, kept cattle, smelted iron and worked non-ferrous metals. They cremated their dead and buried the ashes in urns without mounds. Most of their pottery was hand-made, but the characteristic black burnished pots with a high straight neck were thrown on the wheel in the tradition of the Saltovo-Mayaki culture — perhaps, as V. V. Koloda argues, by Alan potters. The only fortified settlement, Bitytsia on the Psel, is usually seen as a seat of power with an armed garrison. Islamic silver coins and silver ornaments are unusually plentiful at Volyntsevo sites.

The culture has traditionally been attributed to the Severians; others connect it with the Polans or the Vyatichi. Its area roughly matches the lands of the tribes that, according to the Primary Chronicle, paid tribute to the Khazars, and Vladimir Petrukhin sees in it a prototype of the later “Rus’ Land” of the Kyivan princes. Not later than the first quarter or first third of the 9th century — coin finds, the youngest a dirham of 813, date the catastrophe — the settlements were burned by attackers whom some archaeologists take for early Rus’, others for steppe nomads, while still others connect the disaster with turmoil in Khazaria. On the Left Bank the Volyntsevo culture was succeeded by the Romny culture.