Research in the Semipalatinsk region

In the interfluve of the Shulba and Uba (right tributaries of the Irtysh), a detachment of the Shulba expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR examined archaeological sites of different times. The main work was concentrated in the burial ground of Kogaly I, 7 km west of the Uba-Forpost of the Novoshulbinsk district, on the first floodplain terrace of the Irtysh. The cemetery includes about 30 objects.

The monuments of the transitional period from the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age include complexes with stone cistes inside round fences, composed mainly of white quartz. The surviving inventory is represented by earthenware, typical for that time, and a bronze adze (The beginning of the 1st millennium BC). Two burials of teenagers in soil pits are dated. One of them was committed on the right side, head to the south-southwest and let into the fence with a stone cist (2.2 m to the north-west of it). A rectangular gold plaque with two bulges was found on the frontal bone. Another burial was made in a shallow (0.35 m) pit on the left side, with slightly bent legs, head to the west. It contained 60 mutton astragalus (30 each at the right and left legs), pasterns, shank and shoulder blades of a sheep, pasterns of a horse and a cow, as well as a bone sewn-on plaque with rounded ends and semicircular cutouts on the sides. Probably, the mound with a double fence and a composite stone cist, covered with tightly fitted slabs, belongs to the era of the early nomads. The grave, oriented to the north-northeast, became a cenotaph.

A series of burial mounds of the 9th-10th centuries has been studied. Mound 8 had a rectangular (4 x 3.3 m) fence made of slate slabs laid flat in three or four layers, erected around an oval grave with a single burial, strongly tapering towards the bottom. The buried lay on his back, head to the east. In the region of the temporal bones, round earrings made of bronze with an admixture of silver were preserved, and fragments of an iron object were found in the legs. Two mounds belong to the so-called long mounds, which are characterized by a rectangular fence around the central grave and an annex, rectangular or oval, with burials in soil pits, sometimes in holes with lining or stone cist. As a result of additional structures on the southern and northern sides of the main mound, an impressive ensemble was formed, oriented along the long axis in the meridional direction. The number of graves in such mounds ranges from three to eight; in addition, there are burials of horses. In several cases, steles stood on the eastern side of the graves and at the corners of the central fence (Kogaly I, Mound 9). Let us note a stone (75*50*50 cm) on the western side of the fence of mound 10, on which images of goats, a horse, and a wolf converted into a goat are carved.

4 km east of Pyany Yar, two destroyed mounds (Sandykkala burial ground), synchronous with the above-mentioned ones, were investigated. Earrings, glass beads, a triangular amulet made from a fragment of a bronze mirror with a circular ornament on the reverse side, a bronze pin with a zoomorphic (dog?) pommel and a breastplate in the form of two opposing birds, silver braids, iron ring-shaped buckles, bits, knives, arrowheads, bone products, remnants of tissue were found in different graves.