Like most Srubnaya settlements in the Samara Oblast, KS was located at the edge of the first terrace.

It overlooked the floodplain, covered here by a sequence of marshy oxbow lakes.

The Samara River moved away from this terrace edge during the terminal Pleistocene. A buried soil A-horizon located about 1m beneath the surface on the bank of the modern Samara River was dated 8240-7970 calBC AA41033

Dr. Arlene Rosen (UCL) found and sampled the buried A-horizon. Because it sits on top of a series of more active alluvial deposits and beneath the modern overbank alluvial sediments, it should indicate when the Samara River settled into its modern channel. Between this channel and the KS settlement were about 2 km of older abandoned channels and oxbow lakes.

During the LBA, the KS settlement was located at the northern edge of an unusually large expanse of marshes and oxbow lakes that had existed for more than 7000 years at this location, refreshed at regular intervals by spring floods. Even today spring ice-jams in the Samara River can make the river swell briefly from its normal 30m-wide channel to a 4km wide lake.

In order to obtain a radiocarbon date for the initial conversion from an active river channel to a marsh, we secured a raft about 200m offshore from the Krasnosamarskoe settlement in a carp-pond that had been a marsh before it was dammed and filled. Cores were taken by Suzanne LeRoy from the bottom of the pond. A soil sample was taken from the core in the bottom-most layer of gley, just above the extremely hard subsoil of clay. The basal layer of marsh gley gave a sediment date of 9895± 58 BP, or about 9390-9240 BCE; and a marsh-grass plant fragment taken from the gley gave an independent date of 9534± 95 BP, or about 9140-8740 BCE (Table 1). The river had moved away from this location and marsh soils and vegetation had developed by about 9000 BCE.

Dates of about 9000calBC ( Table 1) for the gray gleys at the bottom of the marsh sediment nearest the KS settlement indicate that it was already a marsh, not an active channel of the Samara River after about 9000 calBC. Between about 9000-8000 calBC the Samara River created and abandoned the channels that now lie between the KS settlement and the modern river.