ABSTRACT
Moldova is one of the few European countries where the majority of anthropological studies have been conducted by foreign anthropologists: by Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian researchers. This is explained by the lack of local qualified specialists during a long period of time. The first palaeoanthropological studies in Moldova were conducted by the Romanian
anthropologist Alexandru Donici, who studied a series of skulls dated to Scythian (7th-3rd C. BC) times (Donici 1935). Some materials from excavations carried out in the late 19th century in Transdniestria, dated to the Bronze, Iron andMiddle Ages, were studied by the Russian anthropologist Georg Debets (Debets 1948). An important contribution to our perception of the physical appearance of the ancient
population in Moldova was made by the Russian researcher Marina Velikanova. She conducted detailed studies (morphological and demographic) of palaeoanthropological collections of different historical periods, starting from the late Eneolithic (3000-3500 BC) and ending in the late Middle Ages (17th-18th C.). The results of these studies were published in her monograph ‘Palaeoanthropology of the Prut-Dniester River Basin’ (Velikanova 1975). In the 1990s, palaeoanthropological finds from Moldova were studied mainly by Ukrainian
anthropologists Serghei Segheda, Ludmila Litvinova and Svetlana Kruts. Since 1999, a Moldovan anthropologist and geneticist, Alexander Varzari, has been contributing to these palaeoanthropological studies. Together with Ukrainian and Russian colleagues, he has minutely studied the Neolithic burial ground Sakarovka I (Kruts et al. 2003), as well as two skeletons from Eneolithic and Hallstatt burials in Tatarauca Noua (Varzari and Pezhemskii 2003; Varzari et al. 2005). Besides studies on skeletal remains, research on the physical variations in the modern popu-
lation have been carried out in Moldova. The first anthropological description of Moldovans was done by Russian anthropologist S.A. Shluger (Shluger 1936). Just before the Second World War, studies in Moldova (Bessarabia) were conducted by Romanian anthropologist Olga Nekrasov (Necrasov 1940). During the Soviet period, somatic variations in Moldovans were studied by Russian anthropologist Rachel Levman (Levman 1950) and Ukrainian researcher Vasili Dyachenko (Dyachenko 1965). Dyachenko’s research, besides Moldovans, also included
Ukrainians, Gagauzes and Bulgarians. Later, dermatoglyphic patterns were studied in the same ethnic groups by the Russian anthropologists Henrietta Khit’ and Natalia Dolinova (Khit’ and Dolinova 1990). Their colleague Natalia Khaldeeva described odontological variations in Moldovan dentition (Zubov and Khaldeeva 1989). A vast range of serologic and molecular genetic markers have been analysed in various ethnic groups living in Moldova, mainly by Alexander Varzari (Varsahr), with support from Russian and German researchers (Varsahr et al. 2001, 2003; Varzari et al. 2007, 2009). Studies in this field are still ongoing.
