Research in eastern Kazakhstan

The expedition of the Ust-Kamenogorsk Pedagogical Institute, together with the East Kazakhstan Regional Museum, continued excavations at the Zevakino burial ground (Shemonaikha district) and the Kyzyltas burial ground (Ulan district).

Excavations of four fences of the Bronze Age at the Zevakino burial ground revealed six corpses and one funeral. In five cases, the dead were placed in earth pits, less often in stone cistes (two). The buried are often laid crouched on the left side, and only in one case - on the right. In five graves, the skeleton's position was fixed with the head to the west, in two - to the east.

The grave goods are represented by fragments of clay pots with a smooth profile line, ornamented zonally along the rim, shoulders, and body with a comb stamp. Their similarity to the vessels of the Fedorovo period found here earlier allows us to date these fragments within the same framework. Barrel-shaped glass beads and cowrie shells represent jewelry.

In a mound of the Early Iron Age, a paired burial was found in a log cabin of two crowns with a transverse overlap. The dead are laid out on their backs, their heads to the east. The funeral food, an iron knife, and a bone socketed rhombic arrowhead were buried in clay vessels. The complex of things dates back to the second half of the 1st millennium BC.

This season, the third mound "with a mustache" was excavated in the Zevakino burial ground, consisting of one stone mound (diameter 9 m) with stone ridges extending from it in an easterly direction. Horse bones (jaw and leg bones) and an earthenware vessel, similar in shape to Central Kazakhstan from similar burial structures, were found in the barrow. Burial not found. Approximately the mound "with a mustache" dates from the first half of the 1st millennium AD.

In previous years, medieval burials in two long barrows were similar to those studied at the Zevakino burial ground. The inventory of ten graves (weapons, harness, household items) dates them back to the 9th-11th centuries.

In the Kyzyltas burial ground, located 24 km south of Ust-Kamenogorsk, on the left bank of the Urunkhai stream, a Bronze Age fence containing a cyst was studied in which scattered human bones, fragments of an ornamented clay pot, and a cow's shoulder was found. A mound "with a mustache" was also excavated here (the second one at the Kyzyltas burial ground). An earthenware vessel was found in the eastern part of the mound, typical of dishes obtained from previously excavated kurgans "with a mustache." Burial not found. Inside the stone, ridges were located in three-stone mounds with a diameter of 5-8 m, up to 0.4 m high. As a result of their excavations, the material was obtained (end and middle linings of a bow made of bone, iron bits with bone cheek-pieces ending in the form of a "fishtail," spring buckles, whetstone, bone handle of an iron knife), dating from the 8th-9th centuries. One of these mounds had a stone stele on the east side, while the other had three steles dug into the corners of the grave.