Research on the left bank of the Irtysh in eastern Kazakhstan

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 cemeteries near the villages of Izmailovka and Belokamenka and began research on the Izmailovka II burial ground (Tavri district). In the Izmailov burial ground, which has 32 burial and four ritual structures, 29 were excavated dating back to the Late Bronze Age, the transitional period from the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, Early Saka and Turkic times.

The burial mound with a barely noticeable earth mound and two looted burials made in earth pits on the back with a western orientation is dated to the Late Bronze Age. The inventory included the bones of a bull's legs and shoulder blades, a stone arrowhead and three bone petiolate, flattened tetrahedral, two stone balls, and paste beads.

Of the four excavated burials of the transitional period from the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, we will mention the burials of an adult and a child. The first was made with a western orientation under a low mound with a rounded stone fence in a cist (2.7x1.9 m) made up of granite slabs. In the cist, a tetrahedral pillar about 1.2 m long (sides 40 cm wide) lay obliquely, and human bones, animal ribs, and fragments of ceramics were found at different depths. Human vertebrae and ribs lay in situ at a depth of 1.5 m along the northern wall. Six clay vessels were found in the grave (whole and in fragments): two linen and easel jugs with a narrow neck and a strongly swollen body and pots, including one with an ornament in the form of a horizontal zigzag of nail impressions. A pot with a stone lid was found among the stones of the fence. A children's burial was cleared on the eastern side of the fence, made in a ground grave lined with stones, crouched on its right side with its head to the southwest. It was accompanied by a miniature easel gray-clay vessel with a spherical body and a slightly bent top. By design, the burial structures of the transitional period in this burial ground are close to the Dandybai-Begazy complexes (Bylkyldak I, Enbek-Suygush, Narbas). Proximity with them is also observed in ceramics. Vessels have analogies in the sites of the Karasuk time of Altai and Southern Siberia, the Bolsherechenskaya culture on the upper Ob, and in Tagisken.

Two Early Saka burial mounds have been unearthed. A mound with a single burial in a soil pit filled with slabs and stones had a ring of quartz stones and a lining above the pit. The buried lay stretched out on his back, with his head to the northwest. A necklace of 150 paste flat ring-shaped beads and five carnelian beads with inlay was put on the neck. In the second mound, at the bottom of a pit filled with stones, a cist of granite slabs was discovered, above which the main accumulation of human bones was found. On the east side, three burials adjoined the stone ring. One of them, oriented to the north, was arranged in a cist of slabs, the other was placed in the pit with a headpiece of slabs, where the buried lay stretched out on his back, with his head to the north-northeast. A bronze mirror with a handle and an image of a panther curled up into a ring was found on the pelvic bones.