Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 43 (4) 2015

Annotation:  The Pleistocene Peopling of the North: Paleolithic Milestones and Thresholds Horizons In Northern Eu Transitional Middle to Upper Paleolithic Industries in the Rubas Valley, Coastal Dagestan Truncated-Faceted Pieces in the Paleolithic of Northern Asia Archaeological Sites on the Angara Bank from the Chadobets River to Boguchany: Findings of a Survey A Rare Bronze Sword from Lake Baikal Shore A Stone Abrasive Tile from Cheremkhova, Western Amur Region A Ceremonial Saddle from Altynkazgan, Mangyshlak Peninsula, Kazakhstan First Steps Towards a National Geographic Information System, “Archaeological Sites of Russia” Petroglyphs of Khabarovsk Territory: The Impact of the 2013 Amur and Ussuri Flooding Shakan: Kazakh 18th–19th Century Narrow-Bladed Battle Axes Mapping the Traditional Dress Types of Southwestern Siberian Old Believers (late 1800s–early 1900s) The Impact of Urbanization on the Transmission of Culture and Language of the Sakha People: A Sociol The Morphology of Human Teeth from Afontova Gora II, Southern Siberia, and Their Status Relative to A Paleogenetic Study of Pazyryk People Buried at Ak-Alakha-1, the Altai Mountains   

Shakan: Kazakh 18th–19th Century Narrow-Bladed Battle Axes

L.A. Bobrov.

This article describes the structural design and decoration of Kazakh “shakan” narrow-bladed battle axes from private and museum collections of Russia and Kazakhstan. Our results show that this type of striking-and-cutting weaponry originated from battle axes used by the Early and High Medieval Turkic and Mongolian nomads against armored enemies. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the shakan axes largely fell out of use because of the disappearance of metal body armor.

Keywords: Central Asia, Kazakhstan, nomads, weaponry, battle axes.