Research in Pavlodar region
The archaeological reconnaissance detachment of the North Kazakhstan Expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR conducted searches and secondary examination of monuments in the Irtysh and Zhelezinsk districts of the Pavlodar region, on the banks of the Irtysh, Silety rivers. 50 burial mounds, which were recorded in 1955, are now practically destroyed. Nine cemeteries were surveyed for the second time, 13 cemeteries and six separate burial mounds were discovered for the first time. All of them date from the early Iron Age and the Middle Ages. Two Stone Age sites and a Bronze Age settlement have been discovered near the Silety River. The Silety I site is located on the right root bank of the river, in a hollow with the remains of a relic pine forest. Judging by the microrelief, there was a small spring lake here. The material was collected from an area of about 16 ha. The cultural layer is not fixed. The tools are made of light quartzite, rarely siliceous and jasper-like rocks; 24% of the collection are plates and products made from them. Medial sections predominate, scrapers are few. Arrowheads were made on plates and flakes. An interesting narrow wedge-shaped tool on a flake. The site can be preliminarily dated to the Neolithic period. A similar inventory was recorded 1 km to the south, around a small lake on the first floodplain terrace (Silety II site).
The Silety settlement is located on the edge of the first floodplain terrace on the right bank of the Silety River. The settlement area is about 23,000 sq.m, the thickness of the cultural layer is 0.15-0.20 m.
The recovered material contains a few flint tools of chopping fragments of a detachable mold for casting a knife or dagger. The found ceramics are well-fired, thick-steppe. Fragments of jar-shaped vessels with fine carved ornaments and pot-shaped vessels with a strongly swollen body and a rim near the rim stand out. Vessels are ornamented with horizontal lines, simple and comb stamp impressions, and pit impressions. Traces of smoothing are fixed on the inside. Ceramics from the layer is different. It is decorated with oblique flat stamp impressions and continuous random comb impressions smoothed over the pattern. A significant number of small cattle bones also come from the layer.
The settlement has two chronological horizons - the initial and final stages of the Bronze Age.