Research in the Upper Irtysh

The detachment of the Shulba expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR continued excavations of burial mounds of the 1st millennium BC - 1st millennium AD in cemeteries located on the left (Dzhartas‚ Kovalevka, Temir-Kanka II) and right (Akchiy II) banks of the Irtysh in the East Kazakhstan and Semipalatinsk regions.

In the burial ground of Dzhartas, mound 10 of the Kula-Zhurga type (3rd - 1st centuries BC) was unearthed, containing a single robbed burial in a stone cist with an eastern orientation and two jars with a high neck, which are most characteristic of this type of early nomadic graves, placed at the head deceased. Mound 4 of the Akchiy II burial ground belongs to the same circle of monuments, however, the buried, lying stretched out on his back, with his head to the west, was enclosed there in a wooden frame. The inventory found in this undisturbed grave (an iron knife with an unmarked handle and a pot-shaped vessel with two horseshoe-shaped moldings on the neck with through holes in them) finds parallels in the inventory of the Altai and Tuva mounds, which clearly precede the Kula-Zhurga ones. Among the latter, we note the Dzhartas kurgan 41 with an additional burial at the outer edge of the original ground structure, similar to the main burial. Such graves are well known in the late nomadic sites of the Irtysh region.

Late nomad burial mounds have been studied in all of the listed cemeteries. Three burial mounds of the 8th-10th centuries have been excavated on the left bank with one grave in each, and on the right, in the burial ground of Akchiy II, a “long” mound (2) of the 9th-10th centuries was further explored with eight graves. Burial mounds erected in one step of the 8th-10th centuries. have a different design and size: a small single-layer laying out of small limestone (Dzhartas, mound 7), a multi-layered building of large slabs (TemirKanka II), but all of them belong to varieties of a mound with a solid multi-row fence, square with a rounded inner contour (in these objects ) or annular (in Kovalevka).

A combination of the same structures is the ground structure of the Akchiy "long" mound. In the center there was a rectangular (8.2 * 7.2 m) outside and oval inside, elongated from the west - southwest to the east - northeast, wide (1.8-2.2 m) and high (at least 2 m) boulder-slab fence. On its northern and southern sides, there were semi-oval in a plan, elongated meridional (by 1-1.4 and 10.2 m) fences-extensions with narrower (1-1.4 m) and low (up to 0.5 m) walls. One grave with scattered bones of three people and a horse was cleared in the central fence, three graves in the outbuildings. In five of them, single burials were made, in the sixth there was no skeleton. The outbuildings closest to the center had graves with sidewalls, going in one case under the northern wall and in the other under the southern wall of the fence (the sidewall with a dense slab headpiece was also discovered in Kovalevka). The eighth grave with a single burial at the bottom of the sidewall is a subburial one (behind the southern extension).

All the opened graves are elongated in the latitudinal direction. Five of them (including two left-bank ones) are not disturbed, in two more (including the Dzhartas one) the skeletons are partially disturbed. The position of the buried (adults and adolescents of both sexes, children) is elongated on the back, the orientation is east and northeast (one right-bank grave is from the west). The structures inside the grave are represented by a stone box (Dzhartas), a rustic frame (Temir-Kanka), floor and floor planks (Akchiy). We can mention fragments of bronze mirrors (amulets) and figured bone overlays on a quiver with a circular ornament from the inventory. Ethnic attribution of the described monuments is problematic, but belonging to some closely related tribes of the Kimak-Kypchak ethnocultural community is indisputable.