Research of the Novoshulba expedition

The expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR continued to work in the zone of the Shulba reservoir construction on the Irtysh. Five detachments carried out the work in the Semipalatinsk and East Kazakhstan regions. A Stone Age settlement at the confluence of the Shulbinka River with the Irtysh (headed by Zh. Taimagambetov), ​​a burial ground of the transitional period from the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age near Izmailovka (A.S. Ermolaeva), Karashat, Akchiy I and II burial grounds, near the village of Proletarka, Novoshulba district of the Semipalatinsk region (Yu. I. Trifonov, Z. S. Samashev). Below is information about excavations of group III of the Akchiy II burial ground near the Proletarka village.

Two mounds (1 and 2) were fascinating, located on arable land and barely visible on the surface. Earthen mounds 8-10 m in diameter, lined with large boulders, looked like a truncated pyramid with a subsquare base. The height of the structure is about 1 m. They contained one burial with a horse in a shallow (1-1.2 m) earth pit, subrectangular in a plan. In both cases, the horse was to the man's left and was oriented with his head in the same direction as the rider. In kurgan 1, an elongated male skeleton with an eastern orientation was located somewhat below the horse, in a shallow pit; in kurgan 2, on the contrary, the female structure lay noticeably higher than that of the horse, with the skull to the northeast. Both burials have been disturbed, but clothing material has been preserved in each of them. The remains of a saber in a wooden scabbard with bronze ornamented clips and a tip, fragments of a wooden quiver with arrow shafts, a long iron sword were found in the male burial, the remains of a saddle, stirrups and a bit with eight-shaped rings and horn ace-shaped cheek-pieces, one end of which is decorated in the form fish tail. Funerary food was found in both graves (a ram's sacrum on a wooden platter). The burial mounds most likely date back to the 9th-10th centuries.