Research in the flood zone of the Shulbinskaya HPS
A detachment of the Shulba expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR investigated the Dzhartas burial ground, located on the ancient floodplain terrace of the Irtysh between the Yuzhnoye and Gagarin villages, Tavri District, East Kazakhstan Region. The cemetery includes more than 120 monuments of different times (from the Bronze Age to the Early Middle Ages). Four objects of the Bronze Age have been excavated. Fence 82, built of large quartz stones, contained an oval-shaped soil pit. In other enclosures built of slate slabs laid flat, burials were made in cists covered with two or three rows of gray coarse-grained sandstone slabs and oriented in the latitudinal direction with minor deviations. The graves have been looted. The inventory includes Andronovo vessels with geometric ornaments, a comb or smooth stamps, and bronze round sew-on plaques. In the early nomad barrows, burials were made in stone boxes. In barrows 49 and 50, the bones of children lay in a crouched position on the right side, in barrow 51, the skeletons of a man and a baby were stretched out on their backs with skulls to the east. On the floor slabs of the box there was a burial of a horse, committed on the left side, head in the same direction. Inventory: jugs (covered with red paint), socketed bone arrowheads (trihedral, bullet-shaped). The studied kurgans belong to the Kulazhurga sites (3rd-1st centuries BC) and are very similar to the Early Iron Age Gorno-Altai sites.
In the burial grounds of Dzhartas and Kovalevka, two deer stones discovered in 1977 were studied. On the front side of one of them, there are nine polished strips arranged obliquely. An open ring is engraved in the upper part of the front side of another stone, and an oval is engraved inside it. Marked necklace, earrings, belt.
A burial ground consisting of 29 mounds was surveyed 3 km west of the Azov-Tavri district. The opened burial gave material relating to the last centuries of the 1st millennium BC (a ring-shaped earring with a pendant made of thin bronze wire and fragments of an iron knife). Opposite Azov, on the right bank of the Irtysh, a new location of petroglyphs was studied. The most ancient images belong, apparently, to the Neolithic. These are few silhouettes of bulls and horses, rather deeply carved and overgrown with moss. A significant part of the drawings is made up of contour figures of bulls with wavy horns stretched forward, characteristic of aurochs. There are scenes of bull-hunting, ritual plots and cult actions connected, possibly, with the idea of fertility. Traditionally dynamic and realistic images of the Saka time are goats, deer, camels and wild boars. Rare engravings include images of a waterfowl (a goose or a duck?), a man with a dagger with a butterfly-shaped crosshair and a complex bow in gore suspended from his belt.