Results of monitoring the early iron age settlement on the Urilsky island on the Amur river in 2019

In 2019, the team from the Center for the Preservation of the Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Amur Region and Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the SB RAS carried out a survey on a settlement on the Urilsky Island on the Amur River. This insular settlement has been known since the early 20th century. It was periodically visited by researchers of antiquities, and only in the early 1960s, archaeologists excavated five dwellings on the island. The collections gathered on the southern coast of the island, excavation materials, as well as similar artifacts from the Priamurie allowed Aleksey P. Okladnikov and Anatoliy P. Derevianko to identify the Urilsky culture of the Early Iron Age. Tools of iron and crude iron going back to the secind-first millennium BC were found on Urilsky Island for the first time on the Amur River. The paradox in the study of the settlement is that up until now its instrumental topographic plan is not available. Therefore, the main task of works in 2019 was to create such plan. In addition, it was necessary to assess the physical condition of the archaeological site due to repreated large floods on the Amur River. The works on the island have shown that the settlement has 31 pits remaining from ancient dwellings. Given the excavated five dwellings, 36 dwellings were preserved by the beginning of the 1960s. According to the location relative to each other, the pits from the dwellings were divided into three groups. The fourth group included excavated dwellings on the edge of the coast. Insignificant surface material on the coast of the island under the settlement and downstream of the river indicates that floods have not threatened the site yet, since the pits are located at some distance from the coastal cliff.