About the excavations at the ancient site of Koshtobe

A detachment of the Taraz expedition of the Institute of History, Archeology, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR began exploring the settlement of Koshtobe near Mikhailovka (Sverdlovsk district, Dzhambul region). The settlement is multi-layered has a three-part structure. Its shakhristan is a square with a side of 200 m. The citadel is located inside the shakhristan square, adjoining its western corner. The ruins of the buildings of the rabad are leveled almost everywhere. Randomly scattered hillocks, the ruins of burial structures, adjoin shahristan from the northeast.

Excavations were carried out in the citadel (excavation area 60 sq. m) and in the necropolis (67 sq. m). Two rooms of the end of the 12th-beginning of the 13th century were unearthed on the citadel. The area of ​​the former citadel at that time was turned into one of the city blocks. The uncovered premises were ordinary buildings (average size 10 sq. m). In the interior of one of them, there is a sufa with the remains of four hearths.

Burial chambers - nauses were attached to one another, forming compact groups. One naus was unearthed, oriented by the corners to the cardinal points. Its size is 1.28x2.72 m. The walls are preserved up to 1.1 m in height. Naus was robbed in antiquity, and scattered bones of three buried were found 0.5-0.7 m from the floor. Among them were found small things, fragments of pottery - a jug, a table pot, and a kitchen pot lid. Another human skeleton was located directly under the floor of the naus. The buried lay on his back, head to the east. Two arrowheads, a knife, a belt buckle, and a fragment of flint were found with him. An iron buckle with an oval frame and a semi-oval shield, combined with trihedral and three-pronged petiolate arrowheads, makes it possible to date the burial to the 7th-8th centuries and identify the unearthed area of ​​the necropolis as pre-Muslim.