A Rare Cimmerian Horse Harness Surfaces at Ukraine’s Kartal Hillfort
Igor Bruyako has spent 27 years digging at the same site on the banks of the Danube. This summer, it finally showed him something he’d never seen there before.
A Crossroads Occupied for Thousands of Years
Archaeologists excavating the Kartal hillfort near the village of Orlivka, in Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast, have uncovered Roman-era burials alongside a rare ceremonial horse harness dating to the Early Iron Age, adding new evidence of the many different cultures that occupied this strategically important stretch of the lower Danube over thousands of years.
Kartal has been under investigation for decades, with excavations led by Ihor Bruyako of the South Ukrainian K.D. Ushinsky National Pedagogical University in Odesa stretching back to the early 2000s. The site has already yielded a substantial Eneolithic-era Cernavodă I culture cemetery and a major Cimmerian-Thracian burial ground, known as Kartal III, dated to the Middle Hallstatt period around the ninth to eighth centuries BC, with more than 500 graves excavated there to date. This year’s campaign turned its attention to a section of the site that had long been off-limits, a plot previously inaccessible because of a vineyard growing on top of it.
A Find 27 Years in the Making
Working in that newly accessible section, Bruyako’s team uncovered a burial containing iron and bronze fittings from an elaborate ceremonial horse harness, tentatively dated to the Cimmerian period of the Early Iron Age. For an archaeologist who has spent nearly three decades working this same site, the find was something genuinely new.
“I’ve been excavating this site for 27 years now, but I have never once seen a horse harness in a Cimmerian-period burial, that is, from the Early Iron Age,” Bruyako said. “I can assume that the person buried here held special status. As I was clearing the grave, I could already see a long metal object, but at that point I still didn’t know what it was.”
Although the harness’s leather components decomposed long ago, many of the bronze and iron fittings survived in comparatively good condition. Researchers say the equipment appears to have been ceremonial rather than practical, deliberately placed in the grave as burial goods alongside the deceased.
Evidence of Two Civilizations Meeting
The Cimmerians were nomadic horsemen who fought across the Northern Black Sea region and Asia Minor, and they are among the earliest peoples in this region known from written historical sources, including cuneiform texts. Bruyako believes the newly found harness offers further confirmation that the Cimmerians were a genuinely distinct, real ethnic group, while also pointing to close contact with Thracian communities whose main territories lay across the Danube.
“A clash of two civilizations happened here, a creative clash, not a conflict, and out of it came a kind of symbiosis known as the Thracian-Cimmerian culture,” Bruyako said, describing the broader cultural pattern the Kartal III cemetery has long been associated with.
A Landscape Reused Again and Again
Bruyako explained that Kartal’s strategic position on the Danube meant the surrounding landscape was repeatedly occupied and reused by different peoples across several millennia. “People lived here starting from the Eneolithic period, roughly four to five thousand years BC,” he said. Over the centuries that followed, settlements belonging to different cultures rose up nearby, particularly to the west of the current excavation area, closer to Kamyana Hora.
“And since that time, settlements of different peoples and cultures who lived a bit further west, closer to Kamyana Hora, periodically appeared here,” Bruyako said. “On this particular territory, they either had their economic periphery, or they set up their cemeteries and burial grounds here.” The site’s long occupation history continued well past the Cimmerian period. Around the second century BC, a Celtic tribe settled the area and founded the town of Aliobrix, and from the first through third centuries AD, Roman-period communities further expanded the settlement.
A Roman Burial With a Curious Detail
This year’s excavation season covered two separate sections of the hillfort. In one area, closer to Kamyana Hora, a team working in June uncovered domestic storage pits, a kiln, paved surfaces, and an ancient burial. In the second section, closer to the harness discovery, archaeologists also found several burials dating to the second and third centuries AD, one of which showed evidence of deliberate post-mortem removal of leg bones, an unusual funerary practice that researchers have not yet fully explained.
Taken together, the Roman-era burials and the considerably older Cimmerian material illustrate how successive communities kept returning to the same patch of ground, using it in turn for settlement, economic activity, and burial, across a span of well over a thousand years.
More to Come
The discovery of the ceremonial harness is particularly significant because it offers direct physical evidence for cultural interactions archaeologists have long suspected took place in the lower Danube region, based mainly on more indirect evidence. Excavation of the harness burial was still ongoing as of the initial announcement, and researchers say further surprises may yet emerge from what Bruyako has already called an extraordinary, high-status grave.
Archaeologists plan to resume excavations at Kartal next year. Given the site’s layered, millennia-spanning history, researchers expect continued digging to reveal still more about the many different peoples who lived at, passed through, and were buried in this corner of the Danube over thousands of years.
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