Pages: 93-126

Kamenka culture sites have been the most outstanding settlements of the Bronze Age in the Crimea. This culture is famous owing to excavations of numerous settlements, but burials of this culture have been unknown yet. It occupies the eastern and south-eastern part of the Crimea and has been opposed in localization to another, partially synchronized culture known as the Catacomb culture. The Kamenka culture in the middle and late stages of its development is synchronous with the so-called Multiridged Pottery culture (“MPC”), dated by 17th-15th centuries B.C.
To a certain degree, population of the MPC and the Kamenka culture is considered to have been more mobile than population of the Catacomb culture. In 1250 – 1500 B.C. the MPC population replaced the Catacomb population on the territory spanning from the Don river to the northwestern part of the Black Sea Region.
This study should answer the question why several inhabitants of Northern Black Sea region steppes made an attempt to transit to the other type of vital process in the 1250-1500 B.C. and what roles possible contacts and the Kamenka settlement played in this process. Usually new achievements and discoveries, e.g. in the sphere of reproductive economy, as well as property-based stratification and, particularly, the emergence of battle chariots are noted. However, new needs must have occurred even for these transformations in society.
It is considered that nomads appeared in the Crimea in the early 1st millennium B.C. The author tends to consider that we should also use the term proto-nomads whom the Kamenka culture representatives belonged to.