The changeless life of the, eastern Baltic tribes in the Dnieper basin was disturbed in the second century B.C. by the appearance of the Zarubincy, assumed to be Slavs (the name “Zarubincy” coming from the cemetery of Zarubinec south of Kiev on the River Dnieper, excavated in 1899). They invaded the lands possessed by the Milograd people along the River Pripet and up the Dnieper and its tributaries, and the southern territories inhabited by the Plain Pottery people. The Zarubincy were a peasant folk on a cultural level similar to that of the eastern Balts, but their archaeological remains contrast in every detail with those of the older population...
The intrusion of the Zarubincy must be interpreted as the first Slavic expansion northward from the lands lying in the immediate neighborhood. Their movements may have been prompted by the expansion of the western Baltic tribe, the Pot-covered Urn-Grave people, in the fourth–third centuries B.C., and the subsequent Celtic expansion to eastern Europe. The Milograd culture persisted alongside the Zarubinec throughout all the centuries of the occupation, from the second century B.C. to the second century A.D. A certain revival is discernible around the third–fourth centuries A.D., when Milograd sites appeared again on the Dnieper as far as Kiev in the south. Dating from around the third century A.D., finds of the Zarubinec type disappear and by the fourth–fifth centuries are replaced by another Slavic branch, pushing up the Dnieper from the south.
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