The Beginning of Academic Archaeology in Bashkortostan

During the post-war period, archaeological research was rapidly advancing in the Soviet Union. After the All-Union Archaeological Conference in 1945, the Moscow Branch of the Institute for the History of Material Culture (henceforth IHMC) became the main center for archaeological research and organizer of field studies throughout the USSR. At a meeting of the Department of History and Philosophy in 1951, together with a plenum of IHMC and the USSR Academy of Sciences, a decision was made to expand archaeological research across all regions of the country. An archaeological team is forming at the Bashkir Scientific Research Institute of History, Language, and Literature, which was part of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1951. In 1953, a sector of history, archaeology, and ethnography was created, and archaeological expeditions were launched. Initially, field research was conducted as part of the Bashkir Archaeological Expedition under the leadership of IHMC. Since 1957, independent archaeological units have been formed. In 1959, a department of archeology and ethnography became part of the IHLL. The same year, a collection of articles dedicated to archaeological studies in Bashkortostan were published for the first time. In 1978, an independent sector of archaeology appeared, the successor of which is the Department of Archaeological Research currently operating as part of the IHLL. Thus, in 2023–2024 it will be 70 years since the beginning of archaeological research in the IHLL. It is also the anniversary of the beginning of systematic academic research of the territory of the Southern Urals and the design of Ufa as the center of archaeological research in the region. In addition to documentary evidence of the formation of the archaeological structure in the IHLL, the article provides statistics on archaeological expeditions in the territory of Bashkortostan. An analysis of these data shows that, between 1955 and 1963, units organized by academic institutions of the IHMC (Institute of History of Material Culture) and IHLL dominated among them. Due to active fieldwork, by 1970, information had been obtained on 2,059 archaeological sites located within the BASSR and data on these sites had been systematized into the academic catalog “Archaeological Map of Bashkiria.” In general, the mid-1950s to 1960s can be characterized as the period when a systematic archaeological survey was being formed on the territory of Bashkortostan. The main focus of this process was the IHLL