HOARDS OF THE STONE AGE AS ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOURCES

Hoards are a rare and informative type of archaeological sources. Different definitions of hoards are given in dictionaries and in special literature: “hoards-treasures”, “hoards of the caster”, “trading hoards”, “household hoards”, “cult hoards”, “sacrificial hoards”, “votive hoards”, “ceremonial-votive hoards”, “hoards-offerings”, “production hoards”, “hoards of raw materials”, “hoards of the master”, “hoards-satchel sets”, etc. Hoards are often found by accident and usually not by archaeologists. At the same time, the hoard is not always passed to specialists in full. A finder of the hoard can remove one or more items from it or, on the contrary, add items lying nearby to the hoard. All these factors reduce the degree of information content of hoards found by random people. The location of the hoard in relation to the relief and borders of the archaeological site is not always fixed. Also, the mineral raw materials of products from the hoard are not always described. Some researchers do not provide images of all the finds from the hoard in their publications and do not indicate the metric indicators of the items in the hoard. Quite often, any accumulation of finds on the site is considered as a hoard without additional arguments. But the accumulation of objects in the cultural layer of sites may be not a hoard, but a production set at a home workshop. It is proposed to refer to the actual hoards, first of all, the hoards found outside the cultural layer of settlements (sites). Hoards are also tightly packed products, which indicates that they were in some kind of container. Accumulations of products buried in a hole and covered with a stone or slab can also be called hoards. In other cases of the accumulation of items interpreted by the author as a hoard, the word “hoard” must be taken in quotation marks. Failure to comply with special requirements for the study and publication of hoards reduces the information capacity of hoards as archaeological sources.