Excavations of Nurtai burial ground

The Karaganda Museum of Local History expedition explored the Bronze Age burial ground on the left bank of the Taldy River, 5 km northwest of the Taldinka station of the Karaganda region. The burial ground includes 21 earth mounds, two mounds with stone mounds and a stone lining. 15 earth mounds 3-10 m in diameter and 0.1-0.3 m high have been excavated. The diameter of the enclosures is 2.5-8.0 m. In barrows 5 and 1-4 there are also additional enclosures attached. Under the mound of barrow 4 two burial complexes consisted of two and four fences. There were one or two graves in the enclosures. 33 burials were unearthed: 27 inboxes and eight in soil pits. All the graves had a transverse overlap of slabs. At the bottom of the pit in barrow 3, remains of a wooden frame were found. The burials were made in a crouched position on the left side, with the head to the southwest. There are paired burials of men (mound 4, enclosure 4), a man and a woman in a paired box (mound 6), a woman and a child (mound 14, grave 1), and a triple burial of children (mound 2, grave 2). Mound 2, 18 m in diameter and 0.7 m high, was surrounded by a moat 4 m wide and 0.6-0.8 m deep with a passage from the northeast. A fence 10 m in diameter was found under the embankment, in the center of which there was a stone box. On three sides of the box, a roller-shaped clay bedding was noted. On the north-eastern side of the grave there was a fire pit, and on the south-western side there were two skeletons of horses in anatomical order, laid on a clay platform measuring 2.25x2.00 m.

The buried, as a rule, were accompanied by one or two, occasionally three vessels. Several vessels were found in mounds. Vessels (52) of pot and jar shapes, ornamented with hatched triangles, zigzag, rocking chair, carved showers, grooves. A lamellar bronze knife represents the clothing material with an outlined crosshair, a bronze socketed double-pointed and five bone tetrahedral arrowheads, a limestone mace, a stone whetstone, a bone rattle from a convex-concave plate, grooved bracelets with closed and spiral ends, an oval bracelet in section rod, chased plaques, cruciform pendants, gilded pendants in one and a half turns, paste, bronze, bone and carnelian barrel-shaped beads. The ceramic and clothing complexes of the burial ground find analogies in the burial grounds of the developed Bronze of the Urals and Kazakhstan.