Oldest Fortress in the World Discovered by Archaeologists

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of what may be the world's oldest fortified site in a remote region of Siberia, according to a study.

A team of researchers investigated a western Siberia site known as Amnya that is regarded as the northernmost known Stone Age fortification in Eurasia. The prehistoric fortified settlement is one of several in the region—featuring palisades, banks and ditches—that experts had generally assumed to be too advanced to have been built by hunter-gatherers. Amnya was generally believed to date to the Stone Age but was not considered to be more than 6,000 years old.

But the latest study, published in the journal Antiquity, has revealed that the earliest parts of Amnya were likely constructed around 8,000 years ago when people in the region still sustained themselves by hunting, gathering and fishing

The findings indicate that hunter-gatherers in the taiga of western Siberia—a region characterized by vast, flat coniferous forests—constructed complex defensive structures around their settlements this far back in time, which challenges our understanding of early human societies. These fortified settlements were constructed many centuries before comparable structures first appeared in Europe.

"This challenges conventional beliefs that only agricultural communities built such monumental structures, pushing back the timeline of sophisticated architectural capabilities in human societies," Tanja Schreiber, an archaeologist with the Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology at Freie Universität and a co-author of the study, told Newsweek. "From our Eurocentric Western perspective, there was a prevailing belief that hunter-gatherers were incapable of significantly shaping their environment."

Archaeological narratives have traditionally associated the rise of social and political "complexity"—including the construction of permanent, fortified settlements like the one at Amnya—with the emergence of agricultural societies.

"However, this framework neglects the innovations of the hunter-gatherer populations occupying the Siberian taiga 8,000 years ago, including the construction of some of the oldest-known fortified sites in the world," the authors wrote in the study.

They went on: "The building of fortifications by forager groups has been observed sporadically elsewhere around the world in various—mainly coastal—regions from later prehistory onwards, but the very early onset of this phenomenon in inland western Siberia is unparalleled."

In 2019, the archaeologists, led by researchers from Germany's Freie Universität Berlin, conducted fieldwork at the Amnya site.

"Through detailed archaeological examinations at Amnya, we collected samples for radiocarbon dating, confirming the prehistoric age of the site and establishing it as the world's oldest-known fort," Schreiber said in a press release.

The team's findings revealed that the prehistoric inhabitants of western Siberia led a sophisticated lifestyle, exploiting the abundant resources of the taiga environment. It appears they caught fish from the Amnya River and hunted animals like elk and reindeer using bone- and stone-tipped spears. They even manufactured elaborately decorated pottery to preserve surpluses of fish oil and meat, according to the researchers.

"The environment of western Siberia now seems to us rather harsh and unfriendly, but for hunter-gatherers and fishers it was a real paradise," Ekaterina Dubovtseva, a researcher with the Institute of History and Archaeology at the Russian Academy of Sciences and a co-author of the study, told Archaeology magazine.

The abundance of natural resources in the Siberian taiga, which includes annual fish runs and migrating herds of animals, likely played a key role in influencing the construction of the fortified settlements by hunter-gatherers, the study suggests.

The settlements overlooking rivers may have served as strategic locations to control and exploit productive fishing spots. Competition for resources between hunter-gatherers in the area could have also prompted these prehistoric peoples to fortify their settlements for protection from rivals. When the fortified sites emerged, the region apparently experienced a dramatic increase in the local population.

"At present, cannot definitively state whether these structures were built under the direction of those in power or by the entire community as a means of defending people or valuables," Schreiber told Newsweek.

The Amnya site includes wooden palisades, ditches, banks and features seen as evidence of long-term dwellings. Researchers have also documented evidence indicating that the settlement was repeatedly destroyed by fire—a phenomenon also observed at other early enclosed sites in the region and thought to be connected to violent conflict.

The features observed at Amnya and similar sites in the region suggest advanced architectural and defensive capabilities, challenging the traditional view that permanent settlements, accompanied by defensive structures, emerged only with farming societies—or that agriculture and animal husbandry were prerequisites for societal complexity.

According to Schreiber, the results of the Antiquity study, have "significant implications" for our understanding of human prehistory and the nature of hunter-gatherer societies. The latest findings from Siberia also chime with other examples from around the world, such as the renowned prehistoric site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, that suggest the development of societies from "simple" hunter-gatherer groups to "complex" agricultural societies was not always so linear and could take different paths.

"It's important to note that this developmental model does not hold true in regions, such as Siberia, where this progression is non-existent because farming never developed there," Schreiber said. "The discovery challenges stereotypes of such societies as simple and mobile, revealing their ability to create sophisticated structures. The research contributes to a global trend in archaeology challenging established timelines and paradigms."

"We can now see there are many societies in the archaeological record who are hunter-gatherers but have many of the features we traditionally assumed were associated with farmers," University of Cambridge archaeologist Graeme Barker, who was not involved in the study, told Science magazine.

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Update 12/20/23, 4:02 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional comments from Tanja Schreiber.