One day in August, Oleksandr Koslov, from the 79th Air Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, was digging a ditch in the forest near the Siverskyi Donets River in eastern Ukraine.
It was hot and humid. There were mosquitoes everywhere. From across the river the Russians were “constantly shelling.”
He and his four-man group were taking a break from this grueling, dangerous work when one of them reported seeing fragments of ceramic in the ground. Koslov looked for a moment; Perhaps they were modern potsherds washed ashore by river floods, he thought.
But then more objects started showing up. Flint tools. Animal bones. Ceramics. A neatly made arrowhead.
The 32-year-old history student, who worked as a retail manager before volunteering for the Ukrainian army, realized they had struck something very ancient: the Bronze Age, perhaps even the Neolithic. However, pausing to study what they had tripped over wasn’t really an option.
“Under the circumstances,” he said with some understatement, “you have to dig the trenches as quickly as possible.”
Nevertheless, the group collected as many artifacts as possible. Later, Koslov made a makeshift ‘museum’ out of an ammunition box, labeling the objects to show his senior officers. He also called Dr. Serhii Telizhenko from the Ukrainian Institute of Archaeology.
By Telizhenko’s estimation, Koslov and his fellow soldiers had stumbled upon an ancient cemetery that may date back 5,000 years to the Stone Age, but which also included material from the Eneolithic, or Copper Age, and the Middle Bronze Age “catacomb culture.” flourished in the steppe in the third to second centuries BC.
Ukraine is a country spectacularly rich in ancient archaeology, whether it is about the Scythians, with their horses and finely worked gold, who stretched across the steppes from the ninth to the second century BC, or the intriguing Cucuteni Trypillia culture of the Stone Age, those remarkable, elaborately decorated ceramics and enormous ‘megasites’ on a city scale, or of the Greeks, who established trading empires on the Black Sea coast.
But in a country with already limited resources for cultural protection, Russia’s large-scale invasion has wreaked havoc on this rich legacy of the past.
It is impossible to accurately estimate the full extent of the damage. Research published this month in the journal Antiquity highlights the difficulty of on-site assessment, even in liberated areas such as Chernihiv Oblast in the north and Kharkiv in the east, due to the danger of landmines and unexploded ordnance.
In the meantime, museum collections from occupied cities such as Melitopol, Kherson and Mariupol have been liquidated and taken in large numbers to Russia and Crimea. Cultural heritage of all kinds, including churches and other monuments, have been targeted, with destruction “at a rate not seen since 1945,” the authors said. Digging trenches means “destroying buried cultural heritage at an alarming rate,” they add. The authors regard archaeological sites with particular concern, as “more problematic and less understood” than other forms of cultural heritage.
Telizhenko is an expert on the extraordinary archaeological landscape of eastern Ukraine, particularly the Luhansk region, whose grasslands are dotted with striking ‘kurgans’ or ancient burial mounds that rise proudly above the flat steppe landscape.
Archaeologists and linguists have linked this prehistory to the speakers of the supposed lost language of Proto-Indo-European, from which languages spoken in countries from India to Scandinavia and Britain are derived.
Telizhenko’s own fieldwork in Luhansk Oblast was disrupted by the Russian-backed separatist takeover of parts of the region in 2014 and has been completely halted by Russia’s large-scale invasion.
Instead of digging, he now uses open-source satellite imagery to map the destruction and damage of burial mounds from shelling and other military activities. Since 2014, he said from his office in Kiev, 1,863 kurgans have been affected. Especially before the widespread use of drones, the hills were useful command posts for the military of both sides, he said. The damage, he said, “is a huge loss, not just for local archaeology; this has global significance.”
However, in the face of destruction, there are many discoveries like Koslov’s. Keen to teach Ukrainian troops best practices, Telizhenko is the author of a military manual titled Archeology and Monuments at War, which provides instructions on what to do if soldiers discover an archaeological site. The manual, published in 2019, has been distributed to officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The guide begins with a reminder of the Hague Convention, the 1954 multinational treaty dedicated to the protection of cultural property during conflict. Ideally, the manual advises, the military should avoid disturbing archaeological sites entirely.
However, “If the destruction process is already irreversible and there is no threat to the life and health” of military personnel, procedures must be followed.
The manual advises soldiers on how to photograph the location from multiple angles, using a compass app on their smartphone to determine orientation and placing a stick to indicate north. Precise coordinates must be determined using GPS. Objects should also be photographed, then packed – ‘garbage bags or supermarket bags are best’ – and taken to the nearest secure museum or to the National Institute of Archaeology.
Last year, a group of Chechen volunteers fighting in the Sheik Mansur battalion on the Ukrainian side sent Telizhenko “a group of medieval Khazar vessels and fragments of Bronze Age ships.” They found them by chance, he said, in the village of Lopaskine in the Luhansk region. The Turkic Khazar people were the founder of an early medieval empire north and east of the Black Sea.
The Chechens carefully photographed the objects against the background of an ammunition box. Lacking a ruler, which is usually included for scale of archaeological images, they used the other standard-sized objects they had on hand: a bullet and a toothbrush.
“I haven’t heard from those fighters since February,” Telizhenko said. “It’s possible they didn’t make it.”
Despite such examples of best practice, theft of cultural heritage is widespread.
For example, when the Khakova Dam in the Kherson region was blown up in June, causing catastrophic flooding, the massive 330-square-kilometer reservoir above it emptied, revealing a wealth of archaeological artifacts in the silt.
“There is an open discussion going on with national police forces trying to do something about it, but YouTube is full of videos of people looting despite the dangers,” Telizhenko said. He said items illegally taken from the area despite the dangers of shelling and mining included Stone and Bronze Age objects, Roman potsherds, and medieval and Cossack artifacts.
Such opportunists on both sides of the conflict, both military and civilian, are often known as ‘black archaeologists’. It is a sentence that Telizhenko rejects: “What would you call me then?” he said, “A white archaeologist? A gold archaeologist? These people are just looters.”