Kalinovka Petroglyphs

The Kalinovka petroglyphs (Петроглифы Калиновка) are rock carvings on a single boulder in the Amur floodplain, near the village of Kalinovka in the Ulchsky District of Khabarovsk Krai, 10 km upstream from the village of Sofiysk, close to the mouth of the Pochtovy Amur channel and not far from the Amur Estuary. The boulder is a block that broke off a cliff and was carried downstream by ice drift.

What is carved on the stone

The boulder bears three anthropomorphic figures and twelve boats with rowers, the rowers shown as vertical strokes ranging from five to thirty-three per boat. The images are outlined, figurative, in places stylized and schematic, and cover the whole surface of the stone, following its natural boundaries.

The faces on the Kalinovka boulder stand out among other Amur rock-art faces: instead of the usual curvilinear treatment, straight lines dominate here. One figure has a trapezoidal facial outline with triangular eyes; another has a cut-off chin, a face crossed by straight lines, and a mouth shown as a rectangle. Researchers consider the subject mythological, likely connected with the idea of carrying the souls of deceased ancestors to the afterlife.

History of research

The boulder was first described in 1898 by archaeologist G. Fouke, a staff member of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a participant of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. His material was published only 68 years later, in 1966, in the journal American Anthropologist.

In the 1930s the site was studied by ethnographer A. M. Zolotaryov, who researched the life of the Ulchi people in 1934–1936; he wrote about the Kalinovka boulder in his monograph "Rodovoy Stroy i Religiya Ulchey" ("Clan System and Religion of the Ulchi"), and in 1939 he described the petroglyphs from tracings and photographs provided by V. A. Avrorin and M. D. Muska.

In 1935 archaeologist A. P. Okladnikov visited the Amur with a team from the Amur Expedition of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences; he continued studying the Kalinovka boulder in 1968, when members of his expedition re-documented the carvings.

Scholars date the Kalinovka faces to the metal age, presumably to the late 1st millennium BC or the early 1st millennium AD. Sites with petroglyphs and rock carvings in the Amur region have long been considered sacred by the Nanai and other indigenous peoples of the area. Kalinovka is one of six known sites of rock art on the Lower Amur, alongside Sikachi-Alyan, the carvings near Khabarovsk on the Kiya River, Sheremetyevo on the Ussuri, and the site near the former Maya camp.

Getting there

The Kalinovka petroglyphs are reached by boat along the Amur River: the landmark is the mouth of the Pochtovy Amur channel near the village of Kalinovka, 10 km upstream from the village of Sofiysk in Ulchsky District. Visits are best planned for the warm season, from June to September.