In the archaeology of Russia, the Country of Towns (Russian: Страна городов, strana gorodov) is a tentative term for a territory in the southern Trans-Urals where a number of middle Bronze Age (~2,000 BC) fortified settlements of Sintashta culture have been found in 1970-1980s.
Origins of the term and criticism
Since the discovery of the Sintashta culture, the aerial photography revealed that there is a compactly grouped number of town-type settlements (over 20) in the northern steppe of the southern Trans-Urals, within the area of about 350 km. Therefore, in the 2000s, the principal investigator of this area, Gennady Zdanovich, grouped them under the tentative term "Country of Towns". Since then, while some archaeologists recognize this term as a metaphor, others insist on the literal understanding.
A colleague of Zdanovich, Fyodor Petrov criticizes Zdanovish's views on the described territory as a unique compact object and considers the apparent compactness as an artifact of the incomplete and uncritical archaeological research. He mentions that earlier Zdanovich himself reported even more compact archaeological groupings of this type. He also writes that there are more Sintashta-type settlements discovered in Orenburg Oblast, so that when taken into an account, they would significantly blur the "clearly defined" boundaries of the "Country of Towns".