Research in the Aktobe region

The Aktobe detachment of the Central Kazakhstan Expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR and the Aktobe Regional Museum and the Aktobe Palace of Pioneers, worked in the Aktobe Region.

The excavations of the Sauromatian kurgan group near Nagornoye, Martuk district, have been completed. Three burial mounds were unearthed, containing burials at the level of the day surface (collective) and in oval pits (individual). Around the burial site with a collective burial, the remains of a destroyed log structure were cleared. The graves were robbed, but clay vessels, stone altars on two and three legs, swords with a bar-like and antenna pommel, bronze socketed arrowheads, gold and silver earrings, a silver chain, gold and glass beads, a gold badge-patch depicting a predator, bronze mirrors, a bracelet, plaques depicting horse heads and a clip from a horse harness.

In one of the mounds, in addition, inlet passages of the burial were found. The structure of the graves is different: a soil pit, a pit with a lining, a catacomb (with a diagonal burial). A woman was buried in the catacomb in clothes and shoes embroidered with glass beads and beads. There was a glass hair ornament under the back of the head, in the folds of clothing at the left elbow - part of a bronze mirror and a bone pommel of a comb, similar to that from the Kalinov burial ground. The burial of a child is also interesting, in which three bronze amulets were found in the form of a cauldron on a conical base and with two handles, bow gorytos, and some third object (its image is unclear).

Four Bronze Age burials were excavated 15-16 km south of the Aktyubinsk: three on the right bank of the Ilek River in the Zhereksai burial ground and one on the left bank near the “Rossovkhoz” farm. Their inventory included clay pots, bronze bracelets, temporal rings, stripe plaques, a knife with notches at the base, a stone mace typical for alakul graves. However, the burial rite in both cemeteries has some features that are not characteristic of monuments of this type: all the graves are unpaved, the buried are laid with their heads to the east, on the right side (in a double burial, a man lay on the right side, on the left - a woman).

In the Lenin district, on the left bank of the Ebeta River (the left tributary of the Urals), two Andronovo burial grounds, Ebeta I and II, were investigated. Two stone fences were unearthed in burial ground I, and one in burial ground II. Ring - fences were built from slate slabs dug on edge or quartz blocks. Burials were made in earth rectangular graves up to 0.8 m deep, covered with stone slabs, accompanied by clay vessels of the Alakul type, bronze bracelets, beads, temporal rings, rhombic pendants.