BEGINNING OF THE STUDY OF HISTORY OF THE NORTHERNERS
The Northerners (Severyane) were one of the largest East Slavic unions of tribes before the unification of Rus’. Concurrently, they were descendants of the similarly named tribal union dated to the mid of the 1st millennium AD, which great Slavic expansion scattered to various ends of the Slavic world (to Poland, Bulgaria, Rus’); the Severyane constituted its largest and prime part. Notably, it was exactly the excavations of their burial mounds that stimulated a large-scale archaeological study of the history of ancient and medieval Slavs. Foundations laid by the first weighty research of the Severyane done by I.D. Belyaev and D.Ya. Samokvasov became the key to the successful study of the Severyane’s lands of by V.V. Mavrodin, N.M. Bagnovskaya and many other scientists of the past and present.