Bone items with images from lake Vechera and their analogies in the Mesolithic-Neolithic of Eastern Europe and the Urals

During extraction of gyttja clay from Lake Vechera in the Lyuban district, Minsk region, Republic of Belarus, ancient items were retrieved, and then collected, examined and published by N. N. Krivaltsevich. The assemblage included 125 bone and antler items. Comparison of these finds with Mesolithic and Neolithic artifacts from adjacent areas and items from Neolithic sites in Belarus that contained offerings made from bone enabled the researchers to tentatively single out items of Mesolithic and Neolithic types. Two daggers and four arrowheads are decorated with engraved line images. Besides decorated items of hunting weapons the assemblage from Ozernoye 2B includes two unique artifacts featuring zoomorphic and anthropomorphic images that were not intended for practical use. The examined East European and Urals analogies to the bone items and analogies to the images from Lake Vechera suggest that these artifacts were related to a circle of the Mesolithic and Neolithic East European and Urals cultures of the forest zone.