Ukraine’s Drained Reservoir May Hide a Lost Bronze Age City

For nearly seventy years, a lake covered 200,000 hectares of southern Ukraine along the lower Dnipro. When the Kakhovka dam that held it back was destroyed in 2023 and the reservoir drained away, it did not just leave behind mud and dead fish. It exposed a landscape that had been lived on for thousands of years, from prehistoric river communities to Bronze Age settlements, a Golden Horde city, and the strongholds of the Zaporizhian Cossacks.

A Landscape Erased, Then Exposed

Before the dam and its reservoir were built in the 1950s, archaeologists had a brief window to survey the valley. Kherson historian and archaeologist Serhiy Nemtsev, who is currently serving in Ukraine’s armed forces, says that work only scratched the surface. The lower Dnipro offered rich pasture, fish, and hunting grounds even when drought hit the surrounding steppe, which made it an unusually attractive place to settle for thousands of years in a row.

“The beauty of archaeology is that you never know what you’ll find,” Nemtsev said.

The Settlement That Redefined a Bronze Age Culture

One of the most significant sites lost to the original flooding was Babino III, a Middle Bronze Age settlement on the Dnipro’s left bank dating to roughly 2100 to 1600 BC. Archaeologist Sofia Berezanskaya had only two years to excavate it before the water rose.

Those two years turned out to matter enormously. Distinctive pottery recovered from Babino III’s semi-subterranean dwellings gave researchers a reference point for identifying the same culture elsewhere, including under burial mounds scattered across the Ukrainian steppe. That culture is now understood to have spanned most of modern Ukraine outside its western regions, from Polissia to the Black Sea, over roughly two centuries. A settlement excavated in a hurry, just ahead of rising water, ended up anchoring the archaeological map of an entire nation.

A Golden Horde City and the Lost Cossack Sich

The reservoir bed also holds far more recent history. Part of a Golden Horde city on the Dnipro’s left bank toward Zaporizhzhia was submerged while another section stayed above water, and the flooded portion sat in the lowest part of the floodplain, ground that may preserve material unlike anything found on higher terrain nearby.

The area was also central to Cossack life. The Velykyi Luh, or Great Meadow, was so closely tied to the Zaporizhian Cossacks between the 16th and 18th centuries that an old saying called the Sich the mother and the meadow the father. Bazavluk Island, south of Nikopol, held the Bazavluk Sich from the period before Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s 1648 uprising, and other Cossack centers, including the Kamyanska and Oleshky Siches, have also survived. Nemtsev believes more of these self-governing military camps may still be waiting in the newly exposed ground, alongside the Kamyanske fortified settlement, tied to the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya culture, which may hold some of the earliest known stone construction anywhere in modern Ukraine.

War and Looting Threaten What’s Left

Large-scale excavation of the former reservoir bed is not possible right now. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, only two archaeologists worked in the Kherson region: Nemtsev and Denys Sikoza, who now monitors damage to monuments for the regional heritage protection inspectorate. Nemtsev joined Ukraine’s military in 2024 and serves with anti-tank forces.

The fighting itself endangers these sites twice over. Ancient settlements tend to sit on the same elevated, defensible terrain that modern armies want for trenches and bunkers, so fortifications built along the Dnipro have already cut through archaeological layers at multiple sites. Meanwhile, the exposed reservoir bed has drawn illegal treasure hunters, sometimes called “black archaeologists” in Ukraine, whose metal-detector finds increasingly surface on online marketplaces and social media. Nemtsev argues that enforcement against this trade remains weak, with prison sentences rare.

The damage goes beyond missing objects. An artefact’s value to researchers comes largely from its context, the soil layers, structures, and surrounding material it was found with, all of which disappears the moment it is dug up illegally. In 2022, authorities seized a vast antiquities collection, reportedly including Scythian akinakes, ancient ceramics, coins, and Byzantine material, from the Kyiv property of former Crimean official Valeriy Horbatov, a case Nemtsev points to as an example of how much unregulated material has been circulating.

Nemtsev’s own unfinished work waits at Skelka, an ancient Greek settlement near Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region dating from roughly the fifth to third centuries BC, first recorded in 1895. He began excavating there in 2019, only for the project to be interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and then halted entirely by the 2022 invasion. For now, the scientists who would normally be uncovering southern Ukraine’s past are occupied defending its present.

Source: HeritageDaily, reporting an interview with archaeologist Serhiy Nemtsev.