Preliminary results of the archaeological study of the Taye-1 quarry settlement in the Baraba forest-steppe in 2024

This paper presents the first results of a geoarchaeological study of the periphery of the Taye-1 Quarry settlement located at the intersection of the hollow-wavy watershed country and the lake-like extension of the left bank of the Tartas River known as the "Taye Tract” on topographic maps. Since 2017, the West Siberian Archaeological Expedition has been working at the site and discovered an Early Neolithic ritual complex, production and residential complexes of the Early-Middle Bronze Age, and a multi-temporal burial ground. In the 2024field season, an elongated trench of 48 m long was established to uncover sediments from the surface of the plain through the ledge of the erosion terrace to the level of the first above-floodplain terrace. The purpose of this trenching was to search for cultural layers in the periodicallyflooded lowlands of the Taye tract. As a result, this profile includes several buried autochthonous soils with traces of human activity, interlaid with archaeologically sterile layers of light gray sandy loam of subaerial genesis. Total thickness of the deposits is up to 2 m. The collected archaeological material (stone artifacts, animal bones, fragments of ceramics) belongs to the well- known local cultural and chronological horizons: the Early Middle Ages, the Bronze Age (Krotovo and Odino cultures, comb-pit cultural unity), and the Neolithic era (Artyn and Baraba cultures). This stratigraphic profile indicates that ancient people mastered not only high terrain areas, but also lake-like extensions subjected to periodic flooding. Probably, these territories were attractive for human economic activity in the pluvial epochs due to the proximity of water and meadow vegetation suitable for grazing. Further studies of the derived materials will be based on correlating the studied profile with the absolute chronology, as well as on comparing the available data with paleoclimatic and paleolandscape reconstructions for this region.