Excavations in East Kazakhstan

Over the past four years, the Department of History of the Ust-Kamenogorsk Pedagogical Institute has conducted archaeological practice for first-year students. Excavations of burial mounds have begun in the Shemonaikha district of the East Kazakhstan region. In 1968, excavations continued at the burial ground located on the right bank of the Irtysh, 5 km northwest of the village of Zevakino. There are more than 300 burial mounds in the burial ground. The studied sites of the Bronze Age are represented by rounded fences made of stone slabs set on edge or laid flat and earth mounds with a stone ring at the base.

Intra-grave structures consisted of stone boxes, cysts, or wooden frames. The buried lay in a crouched position on their side, with their heads to the west or southwest. The composition of the inventory (clay vessels, bronze pendants, stripes, beads, gold and bronze earrings with a socket) is typical for the Fedorovo and Alakul stages of the Andronovo culture.

        The excavations of the Karasuk sites were continued. In quadrangular and rounded enclosures adjacent to each other, single and paired burials were discovered in a crouched position, with their heads to the southwest or southeast. Typical implements that accompanied the dead were bronze knives of the Karasuk type with a mushroom-shaped hat, an "arch on a bracket," and bone handicrafts. Pottery was utterly absent. Animal bones were found in separate graves. In contrast to the synchronous sites of Siberia and Khakassia, the absence of ceramics is, apparently, a reflection of the ethnic characteristics of the tribes of East Kazakhstan.

The burials of the Early Iron Age were made in wooden "boxes" without a bottom, set in deep (up to 3.5 m) graves. In one barrow, the walls of the "box" were reinforced with stone slabs, and the bottom of the grave was lined with flat pieces of slate. In two cases, on the step along the northern wall of the grave pit, above the deceased, there was the skeleton of a horse. Accompanying inventory (clay jug-shaped vessels, bronze and iron knives, bone and bronze plaques, paste and carnelian beads, a bronze earring, gold stripes, a hryvnia and a bone arrowhead) makes it possible to date the entire complex to the 5th-1st centuries BC.

Among the Late Iron Age monuments, there are mounds with cremations and corpses. Under the stone embankment of the first group of mounds at the level of the ancient horizon around the accumulation of calcined bones lay iron eight-shaped stirrups, an ax, arrowheads of three-bladed and bullet-shaped arrows. Nearby, in a specially dug hole, bones of a horse (skull, leg bones) and a cow (skull) were found. The material obtained finds a complete analogy in the ancient Khakass burial mounds of the 9th-10th centuries.

The second group of burial mounds had a stone or earthen mound, under which the buried layer was in an extended position "on his back" in the unpaved Grave, with his head to the east or west. Nearby, with a reverse orientation, a bridled horse was laid. There were knives, ceramics, a bow, a socketed spear, a saber, figure-of-eight bits with bone cheek-piece, stirrups, fragments of a saddle, and bronze plaques from a horse's belt and harness. The entire complex dates back to the 8th-9th centuries.