ABSTRACT
The written sources of Kievan Russia provide no references to building organizations, therefore all information about their existence, structure and social character must be deduced from architectural and archaeological studies of the remains of their work, i.e. studies of monuments. In scholarly literature teams of builders are usually called an artel', though this term is purely conventional, since it is a later one not mentioned in medieval sources.1 In the Kievan period such teams were probably called a druzhina, which was certainly the case in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.2
