Discontinuity in the development of Neolithic mortuary traditions in Cis-Baikal: reality or illusion

   The problem has been first identified by A. W. Weber in 1995. According to the most recent account, formal cemeteries were used in the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic, they were absent in the Middle Neolithic, appeared again in the Late Neolithic, and continued through the Early Bronze Age. Explanation of this break has been the main goal the Baikal Archaeology Project (BAP). Over the last 10–15 years several papers appeared in Siberian archaeology, all quite critical of the “hiatus” concept itself and of the ideas and attempts by the BAP to explain this pattern. This paper is a response mainly to the publication “On the problem of hiatus – a discontinuity in the burial traditions of the Cis-Baikal Neolithic population” by I.M. Berdnikov et al., 2020 – the most explicit critique of BAP research. In response, we present archaeological foundations, the origins of the problem, and views of BAP researchers on the matter. We summarize the history of radiocarbon dating of human skeletal remains from Neolithic graves in Cis-Baikal – the empirical foundation for the “hiatus” concept and emphasize that there are already ~720 AMS radiocarbon dates, all corrected for the freshwater reservoir effect, and “filling-in” of the “hiatus” is not observed. Only 3–4 burials can be tentatively considered as belonging to the Middle Neolithic. We expose the lack of logic in the attempts to “fill-in” the Middle Neolithic “hiatus” in Cis-Baikal with the materials from Northern Angara and other neighboring territories. In sum, the critique by Berdnikov et al. shows many misunderstandings, errors, selective, and far from complete knowledge of publications, as well as of the theoretical, methodological, and analytical approach of BAP research, and insufficient knowledge of the modern methodology and theory of research on prehistoric hunter-gatherers in general.

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