ABSTRACT
Not too long ago, the Russian archaeologist Igor Gavritukhin attributed a few sites in southern Belarus and northern Ukraine to what he called the “grade” or “phase 0” of the Prague culture. The arrows on Gavritukhin’s map of the “regions of the Prague culture” point only to the south and to the west (into Ukraine), not to the north (into Belarus). One would therefore expect to find in those lands sites dated to the late 5th or the first half of the 6th century, the presumed period of the Slavic migration from the Urheimat. The existing evidence strongly suggests that assemblages with pottery of the so-called Prague type appear almost simultaneously in various parts of western Ukraine, but without any precedents that could be dated to the first half of the 6th or to the late 5th century. More settlement sites with pottery of the so-called Prague type have been found farther to the north between Belarus and Ukraine.
