Excavations of Kul-tobe settlement

The paleo ethnographic detachment of the South Kazakhstan Complex Archaeological Expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR carried out excavations of the settlement Kul-tobe (“Ash Hill”), located on the northern slopes of the Karatau ridge in the Karakuruy gorge, 4 km south of the Engels state farm in the Suzak district.

Kul-tobe can presumably be identified with the city of Yllan-Karaul (Zhylan-Karaul), known from written sources, which in 1582 was entirely destroyed by the son of Sheiban Khan Ibadulla Sultan. However, part of its life continued until the 18th century, which is proved by archaeological data.

Kul-tobe (180 X 135 m) is an oval hill with a citadel located closer to the northern part. Its height reaches 6 m. Along the edges of the hill, some sections of the fortress stone wall up to 1 m wide can be traced. Around the hill, the remains of a heavily swollen moat are recorded.

An excavation (2000 sq. m.) was laid in the northwestern part of the settlement. Fifty premises were unearthed, and the remains of two streets were revealed. One of them, 2 m wide, stretches along the fortress wall. The street in the center of the settlement has a width of 2.5 m. The houses were located between the streets and around the citadel. They consisted of two to four rooms measuring 5.2 X 4.5, 4.7 X 3.2 and 2X1.9 m. Each complex had a kitchen room, half of which a sufa. In the center of its tandoor is a hearth with a diameter of 0.30 to 0.55 m and a depth of up to 0.45 m. In front of the hearth is a tashnau covered with flat stones. Chimneys are held in the sufa; their narrow channels were blocked by stones laid flat and ended with a vertical channel laid in the wall. In some rooms (24, 33, 28), there were paired hearths, the chimneys of which were also connected by a vertical channel in the wall. In addition to the tashnau (diameter 0.5–0.6 m, depth up to 0.9–1.2 m).

The building material for all types of structures, in most cases, was stone. Raw bricks were used only to construct the upper part of the walls.

To clarify the nature of the fortifications of the graying, a trench (20 X 1 m) was laid. It turned out that the ditch had a width of 5 m and a depth of 3 m. Remains of three fortress pakhsa walls, probably the lower cultural layer, were also found. Stone walls were built on the third pakhsa wall, which belongs to the last period, and the lower two walls date back to the 13th-15th centuries. Ceramics from the rooms of the upper layer dates back to the 16th-18th centuries.

Thus, it can be assumed that the settlement dates back to the 13th-18th centuries.