Weaving. Olonets

Weaving. Totma

Weaving. Solvychegodsk

Weaving. Kargopol

Weaving. Kargopol

Weaving. Kargopol

Weaving. Pineega

Weaving. Dvina

Weaving. Dvina

Weaving. Tver

Weaving. Tambov

Weaving. Dnieper

The next group of the oldest ornamental motifs on the territory of the European part of our country is represented by a rhombus and rhombic meander, first appearing on products from mammoth tusks originating from the Mezinsky Late Paleolithic site in the Chernihiv region. As noted earlier, paleontologist V.

Bibikova in 1965 suggested that the meander spiral, torn meander stripes and rhombic meanders on objects from Mezin arose as a repetition of the natural pattern of mammoth tusks of dentin. From this, she concluded that a similar ornament for the people of the Upper Paleolithic was a kind of magical symbol of the mammoth, embodying (as the main object of hunting) their ideas about wealth, power and abundance.

Mezin Ornament

It is the Mezin ornament, which has no direct analogies in the Paleolithic art of Europe, which can be placed “on a par with the perfect geometric ornament of later historical eras, for example, the Neolithic and copper-bronze, in particular, the Tisza and Tripoli cultures.”

Once again, I would like to emphasize that, comparing the Mezinsky ornament with North Russian weaving, V. A. Gorodtsov exclaimed in 1926: “reminiscence (a vivid memory) of the most ancient universal human religious secrets is hidden in the patterns of North Russian skilled craftswomen symbols. And how fresh, what a solid memory!”

The Mesolithic period that followed the Paleolithic remains, until today, a white spot in the history of ornamentation. At this time, the researchers note, there was a widespread transition of the population of Eastern Europe from settledness to a mobile, wandering existence, which is probably due to the disappearance of the mammoth, which was the main object of hunting. Thus, products from tusks and mammoth bones were no longer produced, while ceramics appeared only in the Neolithic. But we have no reason to believe that the Paleolithic ornamental motifs, in particular the meander ornament of the Mezinsky site, disappeared forever. Probably, in the Mesolithic ornamental tradition continued to exist and develop on products made of such materials as leather, birch bark, wood, plant fibers. This is evidenced, for example, by patterns on wooden products of the Mesolithic age (7—6 thousand BC) found in the 1st Visa peatland near Lake Sindor in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. These patterns of zigzags, parallel lines and oblique mesh are repeated without changes then on the Neolithic Kargopol ceramics.

Kargopol ceramics

Only the preservation of the ancient Paleolithic ornamental traditions in the Mesolithic can explain the fact that the Neolithic ceramics of the vast region from the Dnieper to the Balkans and the Northern Caspian Sea have the same meander patterns and their various modifications as on the Mezin bone products (Table 1).

At the many Neolithic sites of Ukraine, one of the most common at that time was a positive-negative meander ornament: fragments of ceramics from the Mitkov and Bazkov islands, from the settlements of Gayvoron-Polizhok, Vladimirovka are decorated, as a rule, with a complex meander pattern (Table 2.3). Published these materials V. N. Danilenko noted that such ornamentation is only partially modified, without disappearing for millennia. He writes: “There is no doubt that such an ornament is preceded by a spiral meander ornament of the later stages of the development of the agricultural Neolithic. At the same time, it is obvious that precisely such ornamental compositions, despite their exceptional antiquity, are already close to Early Tripoli. The last circumstance has to be explained not so much chronological how much ethnocultural proximity of the local early Neolithic with Tripoli.”