CULTURAL SPACE OF THE BRONZE AGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CULTURESIN THE SOUTHERN CIS-URALS
The Abashevo cultural and historical communion is believed to be one of the most geographically and culturally significant formations of the Bronze Age in forest-steppe Eurasia. This communion is characterized by a mosaic area of distribution and includes three archaeological cultures, distinguished by their territory of residence i.e. the Don-Volga culture, the Mid-Volga culture and the Ural culture. By now, various theories have been suggested concerning the origin of these cultures and their chronological status is still hotly debated. There is an opinion that the Don-Volga assemblages should be treated as the most ancient. However, some scholars advocate the idea that the Mid-Volga and the Ural findings are older than the Don-Volga ones. Despite the existing questions, the significant influence of the Abashevo cultural and historical communion on the number of the archaeological cultures of the Bronze Age is undeniable. Each of the three cultures, constituting the communion, has their own documented limits of distribution. Besides real area of distribution, every culture also has a virtual space, characterized by its own influence. Thus, in the west the aforementioned influence led to the emersion of archaeological sites of the Pokrovka and Potapovka types. In the east, it resulted in the appearance of the Sintashta-Petrovka archaeological sites. The virtual space of the communion is characterised by a number of impact mechanisms, from borrowing and adopting processing techniques to introducing a range of social and cultural principles of the Abashevo tribes, which served as donors, to their numerous recipients. Therefore, the study of the cultural space of the Abashevo cultural and historical communion results in the need to make more detailed assessments of historical and cultural process in the forest-steppe Eurasia in the Bronze Age.