Bakhmutino Culture

(named after the village of Bakhmutino, Blagoveshchensk Raion, Bashkir ASSR), an archaeological culture that flourished in the third to the seventh centuries A.D. in the region between the Ufa and Belaya rivers and on the right bank of the middle reaches of the Kama River, where the first burial mound of the culture was discovered in 1911. The culture took shape in the third century as a result of the mixing of the culture of local tribes with the culture of newly arrived tribes of western Siberian origin. In the fifth century the culture was subjected to the influence of nomadic tribes that were descendants of the Sarmato-Alan peoples of the southern Urals region. Dugout dwellings, storage pits, and various tools have been found in the settlements of the Bakhmutino culture. Characteristic of the funerary objects found in the burial mounds are birch boxes with sets of sacrificial ornaments, hollow bronze bear figurines, clay round-bottom vessels with circular recessed ornamentation, and so forth. The population was engaged in farming, livestock raising, hunting, and fishing and was acquainted with metalworking. Investigators believe that the carriers of the Bakhmutino culture were tribes of Ugric origin. Subsequently, it is possible that some of them left the Urals region, while the remainder were assimilated by the Turkic-speaking Bashkir tribes that appeared at the turn of the ninth century.