Scythians
Habitations

Among the various Scythian tribes, the sedentary farmer tribes lived in western Scythia between the Danube and the Dnipro, while the nomadic pastoralist tribes lived in eastern Scythia between the Dnipro and the Don. Some of these sedentary farmers later moved into Crimea.

The more nomadic Scythians lived in habitations suited for nomadic lifestyles, such as tents of the same type as the more recent yurt of the Turkic peoples and the ger of the Mongolic peoples that could easily be assembled and disassembled to be transported to different locations, as well as covered wagons that functioned as tents on wheels. The walls and floors of these portable habitations were made of felt and the tents themselves were bound together using ropes made from horse hair.

The division of Scythian burial chambers into weapon-arsenals, kitchen areas, stables, and living rooms for the deceased family members and their servants, as well as their furnishings, were modelled on the habitations in which the Scythians dwelt during their lives.

At the site of Shyroka Balka, near Pontic Olbia, the local inhabitants built square and round pit hute before this region was Hellenised in the 6th century BC.

Beginning in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, the Scythians started building fortified sedentary settlements. The most important of these was the settlement of Kamyanka, which was protected by the steep banks of the Dnipro river on one side and by ramparts on the other. The houses of the Scythian upper classes, which were built from stone, were located on the acropolis of Kamyanka, and have yielded significant amounts of Greek pottery and imported jewellery.

The houses in these Scythian settlements, which were single-storeyed and had gabled roofs, were built from wooden beams, with the walls being made of beams stuck into the ground and covered with clay while felt fabrics were placed on their inside. Their sizes ranged from 40 to 150 metres square, and they could include multiple rooms. The settlements also contained square pit houses made of wooden posts.

The tripe of the Callipidae lived in rammed earth houses built on stone foundations located in open settlements and earthworks, and buried their dead in flat graves while their Scythian ruling class were buried in kurgans.

The tribe of the Aroteres were organised into small territorial units that lived in open undefended settlements and strongholds covering between 16 and 24 hectares, with the largest one covering 52 hectares, each possessing a large industrial quarter and functioning as industrial centres.

The large number of Aroteres settlements and earthworks suggests that they formed a large and dense population in the black-earth region of the steppe. The earthworks of the Aroteres contained within them kurgan cemeteries, lasting from the 6th to 3rd centuries, that each included up to 400 kurgans where their inhabitants were buried, showing that their settlements also had dense populations.
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