Pages: 531-543

This article is in Russian
Dogs are the humans’ earliest companions. Their images of different periods, including Trypillia culture, are of great interest. Depictions of dogs within the décor of Trypillia clay artefacts has very narrow time frame: Trypillia CI, and as an extremely rare exclusion — CI–CII. Depictions of dogs have been attested on pottery, on a “binocular” and on a building model. There is a large literature on the depictions of dogs on Tripillia pottery and the aspects of their symbolism and significance. This essay concerns the morphology and style of the drawn dogs of Tripillia.
A set of drawings has been collected from publications and museum holds (114 images on 71 clay artefacts). Most of the dogs are black, although there are red ones with a black outline and just outlined. In most of the cases the dogs are shown in profile. There are cases of a head turn when both ears are visible.
Most of the images belong to pottery — bowls, chalices, craters, amphorae, biconical and pear-like vessels. There are variations of encounter rate of dog depictions on different typologies of vessels. On craters only, high fit dog depictions were found. A great variety of dogs were depicted on other vessels, yet higher dogs dominate. It is quite possible these dogs have a link to hunting. Medium and small dogs are seen way less often. It seems dogs’ specialization could be noted in Trypillia. It could have existed earlier but wasn’t documented in imagery.

Keywords: Trypillia CI, vessels, dogs, profile depiction, black, red, outlined

Information about author:

Vera Balabina (Moscow, Russian Federation — Sofia, Bulgaria). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dmitry Ulyanov St., 19, Moscow, 117292, Russian Federation
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID: 0000-0001-8239-8582