On 17 and 18 October 2019, the State Hermitage hosted an international conference on “The Cultural Layer and the Reconstruction of the Structure of Stone Age Settlements” that marked the 85th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Mikhailovich Miklayev.
For several decades, Miklayev studied Stone Age sites in the Dnieper-Dvina Interfluve. He laid the foundations of the underwater exploration of Neolithic sites, discovered the first pile-dwelling settlements in north-west Russia, and was one of the first to start conducting multi-disciplinary studies that laid the foundations of a new field – archaeological geography.
The conference was organized in conjunction with the University of Berne, the University of Lodz and the Trajectoires Department at the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne. More than forty researchers from Russia, France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Spain and Israel participated. The papers presented spanned a period of time from the very earliest settlements that existed 800,000 years ago on the shores of the ancient Lake Hula in the area of the Dead Sea Transform to the most easterly European pile-dwelling settlements from the 3rd millennium BC. The main topic of discussion was the cultural layer as a separate archaeological source with great informational potential and methods of study and interpretation appropriate to it alone. The formation of cultural layers is an exceptionally complex process, precise analysis of which is capable of radically altering the cultural-historical reconstruction of the materials found. On the other hand, the lithological deposits themselves are a separate source of information about the characteristics of the environment and the structure of an archaeological site. Wetland settlements are unique archaeological sites, the study of which, instituted by Alexander Miklayev in the early 1960s, is one of the most important directions within Hermitage archaeology.
