Post-Hunnic burial grounds in Karakabak Canyon (Mangystau): excavations of 2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52967/akz2024.1.23.180.203Keywords:
archaeology, Mangystau, Karakabak, burial ground, burial, settlement, post-Hunnic period, Shipovsky horizonAbstract
The article is dedicated to the results of new research conducted at post-Hunnic burial grounds No. 1, 3 and 7, located in the Karakabak Canyon. Next to the necropolis, on the top of the chink, there is an urban-type settlement of the same name, which was a port and craft center and at the same time a trading post, ensuring the functioning of the land-water trade route connecting the "West" and "East". The work of previous years showed that the population of the Karakabak settlement was not homogeneous in its ethnic composition. Apparently, a significant part of the urban residents adhered to Zoroastrian traditions and used the Altynkazgan ritual and burial complex, located 12 km deep into the steppe zone, to perform the funeral rite. Another part of the inhabitants of the settlement (as evidenced by recent studies) remained faithful to nomadic traditions, using an established burial rite (individual burial sites, northern orientation, burial pits of narrow rectangular shape and with a hollow niche under the eastern or western wall, deformation of the skull) formed in the late Sarmatian environment of the Southern Urals back in the second half of the 2nd century AD. The groups of objects studied by continuous excavation have a number of features: 1. the use of a ritual circular layout next to the funeral structure; 2. burials of only women and teenage children were found in the excavated stone mounds. The found accompanying inventory corresponds to the so-called "Shipovsky horizon" of metal products, complete analogies of which are also found at the Karakabak settlement and the Altynkazgan ritual and memorial complex. The studied burials are dated within the end of the 5th – middle 6th centuries.
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