The ceramic items made of vessel walls from the eneolithic sites at the Upper Don

In October 2025, the scientific community would celebrate the 70th anniversary of the famous scientist and archaeologist Alexander Vitalievich Utkin. An important role in his long archaeological journey was the study of the Eneolithic problems of the Upper Volga region. Our article was a tribute to him and a short summary of the results related to the study of products made from the ceramic walls of broken vessels obtained at the archaeological sites of the Upper Don region. Many dozens of archaeological settlements and underground burial grounds of the Eneolithic era are known in this territory: Nizhnedonskoy, Srednestogovskoy and Repinsk archaeological cultures, sites of the Ksizovsky type. It is noted that not all of the products from the Upper Don monuments belong to the type of fishing weights, as previously thought. Their research showed that, probably, some of these objects were ceramic scrapers, and some, with a hole in the middle, could also be used as spinning wheels. For some of the artifacts we studied, a technical and technological analysis was carried out, confirming the similarity of the technology of making ancient dishes and products made from it. The tracological analysis of the surface made for some of the objects made it possible to understand the technology of their use as skin scrapers and fishing weights. All of them belong to the Eneolithic era and date back to the IV millennium BC.