near the Novosvobodnaya settlement For a long time, the graves of Novosvobodnaya were considered to belong to a late stage of
Maykop culture. The British-Australian archaeologist
Gordon Childe (1952) pointed out the connection between the pottery of Novosvobodnaya and the pottery of the
Globular Amphora culture of Central Europe. The archaeologists N. A. Nikolaev and Vladimir Safronov were the first to distinguish the Novosvobodnaya sites from the Maykop culture and define Novosvobodnaya as a separate archaeological culture associated with the group of
Funnelbeaker culture,
Corded Ware culture and Globular Amphora cultures of Central Europe.
Aleksey Rezepkin, who led the excavations at the Novosvobodnaya settlement, also noted the similarity of Novosvobodnaya's pottery with the ceramics of the Northern European Funnelbeaker culture. But unlike Childe, Rezepkin dated them to the end of the 6th millennium BC. According to Rezepkin, Novosvobodnaya's main distinguishing features as an independent culture were the megalithic tombs, black polished pottery, and bronze objects (axes, daggers, spears), which differ from the more archaic objects of the Maykop culture. The pearl-like decoration on axes, as well as on bronze and earthenware vessels, is absent from the Maykop culture. These hypotheses were accepted and expanded by other scholars such as Aleksandr Gej, who distinguished a "steppe-Novosvobodnaya culture". According to Rezepkin, the difference between the Novosvobodnaya and Maykop cultures was that the Novosvobodnaya shows unmistakable Western European connections at an early stage, while the Maykop culture was mostly related to the cultures of the
Near East. :"In Rezepkin’s view, the older Maikop Culture stood under the influence of Mesopotamia, whereas he postulates influences on the younger Novosvobodnaja Culture from the milieu of the Funnel Beaker Culture." Some archaeologists, including
Sergei Korenevsky, prefer the hypothesis of the existence of a more general Maykop-Novosvobodnaya cultural community, that included many local variants such as found at the Galyugayevskaya settlement (
Kursky District, Stavropol Krai, Russia). More recently, excavations at Novosvobodnaya have been continued by Viktor Trifonov of the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, and Natalya Shishlina of the
State Historical Museum in Moscow. == Paleogenetics ==