One of the oldest ocher workshops, 2000 years old, was found in the Khabarovsk Territory
One of the oldest ocher workshops was found on the territory of the Devil's Reach monument in the Khabarovsk Territory. Her age was at least two thousand years, writes KP.RU.
This place was found back in 2023, but the evidence that this was an ancient workshop was only confirmed now. Archaeologists turned to the Institute of Tectonics and Geophysics, Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where, after research, the true significance of the object became clear.
In a workshop built during the Iron Age Polish culture, people worked with the oldest pigment – ocher. The head of the archeology department of the regional center for the protection of historical and cultural monuments (OPIK), Evgeniy Chernikov, suggested that this was a “local place.”
Several thousand years ago, a hearth pit was made there, after which it was covered with birch bark. By increasing the heat in the pit, it was possible to produce yellow-orange ocher. “We also found massive pebbles with spots of ready-made pigment in a beautiful crimson color,” the specialist added, explaining that it was extracted from soil with a high iron content.
It is claimed that ocher was used to create petroglyphs. In the Devil's Reach there are a large number of images on stones. At the same time, archaeologists believe that in Polish culture the significance of the pigment was not limited only to painting, but for now this is just another thousand-year-old mystery.
Earlier, in the Timashevsky district of the Krasnodar Territory, archaeologists found two Sarmatian burials of the 2nd-1st centuries BC. One of them contained the remains of a warrior with a rare blade from the ancient Roman era.
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