Kurhany na "Dzikich Polach" – dziedzictwo kultury i ostoja ukraińskiego stepu

Overview & Synopsis

A monograph devoted to burial mounds as natural objects, summarizing eight years of research on the flora of burial mounds in various climatic and plant zones of Ukraine, conducted by a Polish-Ukrainian team of researchers from the University of Warsaw and the University of Kherson. This publication was created in collaboration with specialists from other fields: archaeology, ethnobotany, and landscape ecology. The research area covered three steppe zones and the southern part of the forest-steppe zone. Today, when the number of burial mounds in southeastern Europe has drastically decreased, their importance is being reevaluated. There is a growing awareness of the absolute necessity to protect not only the archaeological and historical value of burial mounds, but also their natural value, especially given their importance for the preservation of species diversity and the role they can play in the regeneration of steppes. Ukraine is a veritable “land of burial mounds”: of the original half a million, around 100,000 have survived to the present day. The earliest information about the existence of burial mounds on the northern shore of the Black Sea was provided by Herodotus, who mentioned in his “Histories” a large burial mound on the Tyras River (Dniester), where a Cimmerian ruler was supposed to be buried. One of the most famous burial mounds is Tolstaya Mogila from the 4th century BC, where, among other things, the famous pectoral with an extremely intricate animal motif, so typical of the Scythians, was found, now exhibited in the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kiev.