On 22 June 2021, a research associate of Bolgar Museum-Reserve Muhametshin I. D. held a lecture on “The Ananyino culture” for the students of Kazan State Institute of Culture. The audience became acquainted with the Ananyino culture – a unique historical period of the Middle Volga region.
In the history of Ananyino tribes of the Kama River region and Priuralie, there are three chronological phases: the early – VIII-VI centuries BC, the middle – VI-IV centuries BC and the late – IV-III centuries BC.
Ananyino tribes lived in patriarchal families, which consisted of several generations of relatives. Their towns with an average size of 2-2,5 thousand m² appeared to be villages of one patriarchal race numbering 50-60 people. Many towns has not a cultural layer. Maybe they were shelters in the case of military threat.
In Middle Volga and Lower Kama, on the riverbanks with wide fertile plains, carriers of the Ananyino culture were engaged in mixed farming, in which bottomland agriculture played a role. In the settlements, there are known finds of farm equipment: iron and bone hoes, sickles and stone grain graters.
In the more northern areas of the Middle Kama, agriculture was an extremely risky activity, a few farming implements were found there. Livestock rearing in large numbers was impossible because of the complexity of collecting appropriate amounts of fodder for the winter. Cattle breeding played only a supporting role. That is the reason why the Ananyino people were engaged in hunting and fishing there. Finds of fish vertebrae, scales, bone harpoons and big copper fishhooks in the settlements suggest the latter. Mainly a starlet, a sturgeon, a taimen, a whitefish and a pike were caught.
The final of the Ananyino culture falls on IV-III centuries BC. Population movement from the Southern Zauralye to the White river basin, movement of Sarmatian tribes to the more northern regions, resettlement of people of the Upper Volga to the Lower Kama and some kind of natural disaster, which covered the Middle Volga and the Lower Kama, played their role. In the view of A. H. Khalikov, such rare for the Volga and Kama region phenomenon as a strong earthquake that happened there in V century BC might be that cataclysm.

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