scholarly journals Late Eneolithic and Bronze Age Prologue Pontic Societies. Forest-Steppe Middle Dniester and Prut Drainage Basins in the 4Th/3Rd-2Nd Millennium Bc: A History of Investigations

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svetlana V. Ivanova ◽  
Gennadiy N. Toschev

Abstract The paper presents a historiographic context helpful in the current investigations of the cultural contacts between the societies of the east and west of Europe in the borderland of Podolia and Moldova in the Late Eneolithic and the prologue of the Bronze Age. The focus is on the state of research (chiefly taxonomic and topogenetic) into the sequence of taxa in the age of early ‘barrow-building’, identified in the funerary rituals of societies settling the forest-steppe of the northwestern Black Sea Coast in the 4th/3rd-2nd millennium BC.

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (8) ◽  
pp. 2260-2267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andra Iulia Suceveanu ◽  
Anca Pantea Stoian ◽  
Irinel Parepa ◽  
Claudia Voinea ◽  
Razvan Hainarosie ◽  
...  

Gut microbiota plays a major role in the process of food absorption and low grade inflammation, two key steps in obesity and diabetes mellitus occurrence. Gut microbiota metabolites, such as short chain fatty acids (SCFA), have an important impact over the metabolic pathways like insulin signalling, incretin production and inflammation. [1-3] We aimed to study the microbiota patterns in obese and T2D patients from Black Sea Coast region, considering the ethnic mixture, environmental and geographical particularities, involving diet or various habits in this area. 100 patients and 100 controls matched by age, gender and ethnicity were studied regarding feaces predominance of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species. We compared the results of microbiota patterns from patients to those obtained in a similar control group of healthy subjects. The standard pour plate 0.05% L-cystine enriched method was used to obtain the bacterial cultures and anaerobic conditions. Morphological and biochemical tests were used to identify the Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium spp. Fecal organic acid concentrations were explored in frozen samples. The association between bacterial counts/organic acid concentrations and independent variables, including age, diet, ethnicity and other risk factors were calculated using multivariable linear regression analysis. Pearson�s correlation coefficients were calculated to detect associations between fecal bacteria counts/organic acid concentrations and laboratory variables (serum biomarkers, body mass index, age, and severity of obesity/T2D according to international scales). Junk and sweet diets, lack of physical activity and familial aggregation of hypercholesterolemia and diabetes were significantly more often present in our T2D/obese patients than in controls. The bacterial counts of the L. acidophilus, L plantarum and L. reuteri subgroups of Lactobacillus sp were significantly lower among patients with T2D and obesity than in controls. The counting of Bifidobacterium spp revealed a higher presence of B. bifidum in controls than in obese or T2D patients. Diet type (junk food and sweets), BMI (]25) and personal history of metabolic disorders were associated with decreased counts of L acidophilus and increased counts of L. fermentum and B. adolescentis in T2D patients. Ethnicity, metabolic disorders history and junk and sweet diet were associated with low counts of L. acidophilus and L. reuteri and low counts of B. longum. Junk and sweet diet was associated with low counts of B. bifidum. Romanian ethnicity and metabolic disorders were associated with low counts of B. choerinum at obese patients, independent of age or previous antidiabetic treatments. The concentrations of acetic and butyric acids were significantly lower in all patients groups, while the concentrations of valeric acid were significantly higher in patients with untreated T2D and obese patients compared to the controls. Low counts of L. acidophilus and L. reuteri were positively correlated with the increased levels of HbA1c, LDL cholesterol, TG and inflammatory markers such as CRP, ESR and IL-6, no matter of diet, age, ethnicity or metabolic disorders history. Also, low counts of B. bifidum and B. infantis were positively correlated with high levels of CRP, IL-6 and TG. In obese patients, statistic analysis results showed that low counts of L. acidophilus, L. plantarum, L. johnsonii and L. reuteri were positively associated with increased levels of CPR, IL-6 and TG, while low counts of B. bifidum, B infantis and B. breve were positively correlated with higher counts of CPR, LDL cholesterol and TG. Low counts of B. bifidum and B choerinum were positively correlated with low counts of HDL cholesterol in Romanian ethnicity patients and in those with previous metabolic disorders. Low bacterial counts of some particular strains of Lactobacillus spp and Bifidobacterium spp were positively correlated with diet type, BMI, Romanian ethnicity and personal history of metabolic disorders obese and T2D patients from Romanian Black Sea Coast Region.


The Holocene ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon E. Connor ◽  
Ian Thomas ◽  
Eliso V. Kvavadze

2020 ◽  
pp. 664-675
Author(s):  
Dmitry S. Tkachenko ◽  

The article analyses the corpus of documents from the fonds of the Russian State Military History Archive, formed in the 1830s during the General Staff officer Feodor Turnau’s expeditions of to the Black Sea coast zone, which lay outside the Imperial control. Although his activities among the Circassian tribes can be termed one of the best Russian secret scouting missions and his memoirs published in 1864 are still considered an important source for studying the military and political history of the region, materials and reports of the survey missions have never been examined in modern Caucasus studies. The author compares the data included by Turnau in his secret reports to the Imperial authorities with what he mentioned in his memoirs. It shows which issues the Imperial authorities and the Caucasus Army command were interested in during the Russo-highlanders confrontation of the second half of the 1830s. The materials collected by F. F. Turnau can be useful not only in terms of clarifying certain aspects of his personal activities, but also in demonstrating the running of secret survey scouting in unexplored and dangerous ethnic territories off the Imperial frontier. They show high erudition and good training of the candidates selected from the ranks of the General Staff officers to run these scouting missions. The correspondence of the Caucasus Army commander with the central authorities in St. Petersburg on the issue of Turnau’s captivity shows differences in their understanding of the Russo-Caucasus relations. The author comes to the conclusion that the corpus of collected materials on topography, ethnography, political and cultural description of the Transkubanian region peoples could have formed a basis for a revision of the Imperial stand on the subjugation of tribal groups. Although this political alternative was missed, the materials collected by Turnau became a precious addition to the Caucasus studies source base.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-36
Author(s):  
Stanislav Grigoriev

Abstract Andronovo culture is the largest Eurasian formation in the Bronze Age, and it had a significant impact on neighboring regions. It is the important culture for understanding many historical processes, in particular, the origins and migration of Indo-Europeans. However, in most works there is a very simplified understanding of the scientific problems associated with this culture. The history of its study is full of opposing opinions, and all these opinions were based on reliable grounds. For a long time, the existence of the Andronovo problem was caused by the fact that researchers supposed they might explain general processes by local situations. In fact, the term “Andronovo culture” is incorrect. Another term “Andronovo cultural-historical commonality” also has no signs of scientific terminology. Under these terms a large number of cultures are combined, many of which were not related to each other. In the most simplified form, they can be combined into two blocks that existed during the Bronze Age: the steppe (Sintashta, Petrovka, Alakul, Sargari) and the forest-steppe (Fyodorovka, Cherkaskul, Mezhovka). Often these cultures are placed in vertical lines with genetic continuity. However, the problems of their chronology and interaction are very complicated. By Andronovo cultures we may understand only Fyodorovka and Alakul cultures (except for its early stage); however, it is better to avoid the use of this term.


2021 ◽  
pp. 234-272
Author(s):  
Marina I. Shcherbakova ◽  

The article presents an outline of the life of Hieromonk Arseniy (worldly Aleksandr Minin) — founder and first builder of the New Athos Monastery named after Simon the Canaanean. According to the preserved sources, his path is traced, which preceded the trip to Athos. Upon arrival at the Holy Mountain of Athos, Aleksandr Minin carried out various assignments of the elders in the monastery. The return to Russia was associated with a new taking of God’s orders by collecting donations for Panteleimon Russian Monastery on Athos. Vigorous activity about Arseny consisted in the arrangement of a permanent monastery courtyard in Moscow, a chapel, where the Athonite shrines brought by him were preserved. Fr. Arseny stood at the origins of the publishing activity of the Athos Saint Panteleimon Monastery, founded in 1878 in Moscow its periodical “The Soul-Saving Reflections” (“The Soul-Saving Interlocutor”). He himself wrote a lot, mainly spiritual and moral instructions, instructive letters. In the mid- 1870s Fr. Arseniy’s taking of God’s orders was supplemented with one more, more difficult one — the response to the oppression of the Russian monks on the Holy Mountain, he was instructed to find a place on the Black Sea coast where a monastery could be built, a certain prototype of Russik, where its monastic traditions and Rule would be observed. Fr. Arseniy found such a place near Sukhumi, where there was a destroyed church in the name of St. the Apostle Simon the Canaanean. In 1875 the dispensation of the New Athos Monastery named after Simon the Canaanean began. For the history of the monastery, information about its founder is of absolute value.


Author(s):  
Hong Xu

This chapter introduces Erlitou as the first dynasty of the Bronze Age by reviewing differing opinions and the basis for identifying the Erlitou Culture as that of Xia, ca. 2100–1600 bce. After tracing the historiography of excavations and definitions the chapter reviews connections with the preceding and overlapping Longshan era, particularly Taosi in Shanxi province. Finally analysis focuses on the history of excavations and finds (1959–present) and the current state of research on the significance of the Erlitou culture. Due to the elusiveness of any transmitted textual data to verify the historicity of Xia, the debate surrounding the “Xia dynasty” goes on.


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-66
Author(s):  
Anca Dan

AbstractThe presence of Pygmies in Thrace is neither a misunderstanding nor a fantasy of Pliny the Elder: this reference, confirmed by Stephanus of Byzantium, can be explained through the history of the Pygmies, mythic people mentioned in theIliadand integrated in the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance descriptions of the inhabited world. The modern historian can reveal the reasons that made the Greeks and Romans locate these little men in the northern country of the cranes: the indigenous, under-earth houses of Dobrodgea and the abandoned caves in the region of Yailata as well as the Greek toponymy imported from the Aegean nourished the imagination of the Greeks and their stories about the Euxine Pontus, colonized by Milesians and Megarians. These observations contribute not only to a better understanding of the geography and ethnography of the western Black Sea coast, but also throw light on the process of “inventing” foreign peoples, at the center but also at the periphery of the civilized world, on the basis of racial, geographic and historical otherness, by taking into account the everlasting authority of the literary tradition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-94
Author(s):  
Christopher Stedman Parmenter

This article argues that descriptions of the Black Sea found in the Archaic poets, Herodotus, and later geographers were influenced by commercial itineraries circulated amongst Greek slave traders in the north. Drawing on an epigraphic corpus of twenty-three merchant letters from the region dating between c. 550 and 450 BCE, I contrast the travels of enslaved persons recorded in the documents with stylized descriptions found in literary accounts. This article finds that slaves took a variety of routes into—and out of—slavery, and that fear of enslavement was widely felt even among Greeks. Law courts might have been as important as “barbarian” warfare in ensnaring captives for export, and even slave traders themselves risked enslavement alongside their victims. Reconstructing the travels of individual slaves allows us to pursue a study in the spirit of what Joseph C. Miller has called the “biographical turn” in the study of slavery, privileging the experiences of the enslaved over the accounts of their masters. Although the lands around the distant Black Sea were never the leading source of slaves for Aegean cities, the wealth of primary testimony from the region puts it at the forefront in the history of slavery in ancient Greece.


2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannes Laermanns ◽  
Giorgi Kirkitadze ◽  
Simon Matthias May ◽  
Daniel Kelterbaum ◽  
Stephan Opitz ◽  
...  

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