This year has been especially rich in our area with the discovery of monuments of prehistoric and historical antiquity. On the one hand, their discovery was favored by a happy accident, on the other hand, by a noticeably increased interest in archaeological research, which we owe to the 3rd Archaeological Congress, which drew the attention of the intelligent part of society to the scientific significance of monuments of prehistoric antiquity. Thanks to this circumstance, we can name 5 excavations during the year that were undertaken for scientific purposes, whereas previously scientific excavations were undertaken very rarely and, for a long time, the mounds were only damaged by treasure hunters or amateurs. We also owe it to the influence of the congress that we were able to collect information about both the finds and the excavations being carried out, thanks to the enlightened assistance of many people who willingly provided us with all the information related to archaeological finds.
The oldest monument of prehistoric antiquity, studied this year, are caves located on the northern outskirts of the city of Eiev, in a ravine located near the Kirillovsky Monastery. The caves near the Kirillovsky Monastery represent the largest group of cave structures on the banks of the Dnipro, but they do not constitute a special, isolated phenomenon.
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Along the entire middle course of the Dnipro: from the mouth of Pripyat to the mouth of Tyasmpna, the right bank of this river consists of a series of steeply sloping hills, rising 40 fathoms above the level of the Dnipro. These hills consist of layers of Tertiary Eocene formation, the base of which is blue brick clay, the upper layers of which contain brown coal and amber. On top of the layers of the Eocene formation are layers of diluvial sediment: of these, deeper than the others lies a layer of red or variegated clay, on top of it is a layer of yellow sand and, finally, on top, directly under the chernozem, a layer of yellow clay or so-called forest. All three layers of diluvium contain erratic blocks and mammoth bones 1). The forest is a layer 2-21.2 fathoms thick, but in places, in the depressions that represented the surface of the upper layer of the Eocene formation, it reaches a thickness of 4 fathoms or more; The forest has two special physical properties: it does not allow water to pass through and is stable in consistency, so that if you dig a narrow passage in it, arched in the upper part, then this arch does not collapse and represents a dry and safe corridor for passage.
These properties of the forest were taken advantage of in primitive times by the first inhabitants of the banks of the Dnipro and on the mountainous bank of this river, where the edges of the hills, as a result of landslides, represented an exposed layer of forest, they dug the first human dwellings in a series of narrow, long, caves with a vaulted ceiling. Although many of these caves have remained intact to this day, only a few can be discovered and explored. The reason for the difficulty of studying these caves is that over time they were filled with sediment, consisting of a mixture of black soil and forest particles, deposited in the caves by streams of rainwater that penetrated into them over many centuries through the entrance hole, moreover, the latter for the most part turns out to be filled up with collapses of hills, in the cliffs of which the caves were built. The opportunity to find and explore the cave appears mainly in the spring, when, after the snow melts, parts of the coastal plains
') Geological data on the composition of the mountainous bank of the Dnipro were reported by Professor A. S. Rogovich.
V. V. ANTONOVICH,