PEATBOG In the territory of the middle Trans-Ural several thousand archeological monuments have been discovered: sites, settlements, sites of ancient settlements, places of metallurgical production, places of worship and burial grounds. A special place among them is occupied by a complex of monuments of Gorbunov peatbog formed in the place of an ancient lake located in the suburbs of the city of Nizhni Tagil. Nataliya Chairkina, Cand. Sc. (Hist.), Head of the Section of the Stone Age and Archeological Source Studies of the Institute of History and Archeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, wrote in the Science of Ural newspaper that 38 archeological monuments were discovered in the course of a hundred-year history of peatbog studies. Excavations were carried out on 14 such sites. The collection of findings numbers dozens of thousands of units. They include articles made of stone, clay and metal of different chronological periods from the. Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic Age to the Early Iron Age (11th-1st mill. B.C.). The author notes that peatbog monuments are a special type of archeological sources, and their specificity is explained by the ability of peat, in the absence of air and high humidity, to conserve organic residues, especially, wooden and ivory articles, which are not conserved in mineral soils*. In the territory of Russia and countries of Eastern Europe a limited number of such archeological sites are known. Studies of the most famous monument of Gorbunov peatbog started more than 100 years ago. As early as in 1908, a Tagil regional ethnographer Toporkov addressed a letter to the Ural Society of Natural Scientists, in which he reported on ancient articles found in the course of peat development. In the past years the uniqueness of this archeological complex became evident and findings made by dozens of * See: N. Chairkina, "Top Secret", Science in Russia, No. 6, 2009.--Ed. The 6th open pit of Gorbun ... Читать далее