Аннотация:MAYKOP CULTURE BURIALS OF KURGAN 1 IN MARYINSKAYA–5 CEMETERY
In the summer and fall season of 2009, the Stavropol expedition of the Chair of Archaeology, Department of History, Lomonosov Moscow State University, researched a standalone kurgan, No. 1 in Maryinskaya–5 cemetery, located on the right raised terrace of the Kura River, near the administrative boundary between Stavropol Krai and the Republic of Kabarda-Balkar. The embankment was 4.3 m tall, and about 50 m in diameter. The kurgan had 34 burial of different ages, and one ceremonial complex. The kurgan was surrounded with a wide shallow moat, filled in by the time of digging. The moat was spreading 13–15 m from the embankment foot of the current topsoil, and was not deeper than 1.5 m at any point. Apparently, the builders of the kurgan must have only removed the topsoil layers.
The research managed to trace the stratigraphy that represents stages of embankment
building and the sequence of interments: all in all, four overlapping embankments have been registered, with the slopes of the lower three ones covered with bulkheads of shingles. Those three embankments, as excavation later confirmed, were built by some Maykop culture tribes
during the early Bronze Age. To start, an above-ground crypt was built at the ancient horizon, spanned by the embankment and connecting to bulkhead I. At the structure’s center, there was a rectangular burial
chamber with upright walls, measuring 2.5 × 1.4 m. This structure most likely was roofed with a cover of wood and reeds. Burial 33 found inside, of the Early Maykop culture, was also at the level of the ancient horizon. Though destroyed during antiquity, it produced a bronze dagger.
The south-west corner of the tomb had been broken with two inventory-less burials No. 32 and No. 34, placed one on top of the other.
The burial is analoguous to Early Maykop above-ground tombs and monuments of the Leylatepi culture in Azerbaijan, where the Soyug Bulag cemetery had a number of kurgans with cromlechs that produced above-ground rectangular stonework of rock. Later on, burial 12 was organized on top of Kurgan I, attributed to the Dolinsky variant of the Maykop-Novosvobodnensky set. The builders of the burial leveled a site directly above burial 32. The bottom of the pit was covered with organic matter, with white river sand strewnatop of it. The interment was inside a frame of wood that produced a bronze dagger, two flint arrowheads, and an earthenware pot. Burial 12 is likely to have a connection to the child interred in burial 16, at almost the same depth, just 0.9 m south-east of it.
After the burials were finished, they were filled in with alternating layers of dark and yellow rock loams: embankment II had its slopes covered with a bulkhead of packed shingles. The south-west sector of the embankment had an embedded burial 25, cutting through both the shell and the ground base of embankment I. At the bottom of the pit that was level with the
buried soil, grooves were provided in which pillars were densely planted and faced with rocks on the outside. This formed the walls of a burial chamber that measured 2.6 × 2.55 m, and was roofed with two layers of rafters supported by the pillars. The backfill behind the southwest
wall of the burial chamber produced two oxen skulls, on one of which a loop-shapedharness element of bronze was registered in situ, with protruding rod-like tips. The rods had traces of thin leather straps. It is the first time that items of this kind are found as explicit tools of cattle driving control. It would be right to say that in this case we deal with a symbolic sacrifice of oxen harness. In the light of reliably established links and parallels between the culture of Maykop and the those of Mesopotamia, the context of this discovery offers an important argument in the ongoing debate on objects depicted in the hands of certain cattle-related deities
of Sumer and Akkad. Similarity to the Maykop spins suggests that these are symbols of the ox, but at the same time symbolic representation of supreme power. Although burial 25 had been raided, it still produced two bronze daggers, a temporal gold pendant, some fragments of a vessel, and a bone arrowhead.This high-status burial received an addition – embankment III, also faced around with a bulkhead of shingles laid in 1 or 2 rows. However, the upper additions to the embankment, on top of embankment III of the Maykop age, and its bulkheads, were obviously created by tribes of the North Caucasus culture who actively used the Maykop age kurgan for invasive burials.
Radiocarbon analysis of the Maykop burials in Maryinskaya-5 cemetery does not contradict the stratigraphic observations according to which all Early Bronze Age burials fall into two groups: Early Maykop (burials 33 and 34) from the second quarter to middle of the 4th millennium BC, and the Dolinsky variant of Maykop culture, Nos. 12, 25, and 32, dated around the third quarter of the 4th millennium BC.