New materials from fortified settlements dating to the final period of the Early Iron Age: revisiting the issue of the «1st century war»

The paper publishes a set of items obtained during investigation of three Dyakovo hillforts. All the sites have been discovered in the basin of the Oka right bank not far from the town of Zaraysk in the Moscow region (Fig. 1). Items from the Argunovo fortified settlement (Fig. 2; 3) date from the 1st-2nd centuries AD. Items from the Vlasyevo hillfort (Fig. 4: 12-14) and the Aponitishchi hillfort (Fig. 3: 1-11) are almost contemporary with them. A similar set of jewelry and weapons has been found at Strakhovo-2, Sloboda, and Malaya Strekalovka, which are hillforts of the Tula region. The origin of the assemblages from the Tula region fortified settlements is linked to the antiquities of the Andreevskoe-Piseralsk type and the Pyany Bor culture, the items from these assemblages got into the Tula region during the events known as «the 1st century war» (Vorontsov, Stolyarov, 2019). The article notes that, despite some similarity between the artifacts found at the sites near Zaraysk and those discovered at the fortified settlements near Tula, the ceramics from these two groups of sites differ drastically (Fig. 5). This circumstance calls into question the idea that the dissemination of one-type jewelry and weapons across this vast area was caused by «the 1st century war».