Burial Rite of the Ancient Population of the Russian Lapland Arctic Coast (according to the excavations of the Kola Oleneostrovsky burial ground)

Abstract

The Kola Oleneostrovsky burial ground is located on the Bolshoy Oleny Island in the Murmansk region. It was discovered in 1925 and investigated by excavations three times (A.V. Shmidt, N.N. Gurina, V.Ya. Shumkin, respectively). In 1935, during the construction of military facilities, a quarry was built on the site of the burial ground. A significant inventory accompanying about 25 buried, as well as the anthropological materials themselves, collected by the builders during earthworks, considered as lost. During all the years of excavations 32 burials with 40 skeletons have been studied. Many of the buried were placed in a kind of "sarcophagus" in the form of boats, made of boards according to all the rules of shipbuilding technology and covered with a "lid" of the same design. The archaeological material has numerous analogies among the tools and artifacts of a non-utilitarian nature of the Arctic Lapland coastal settlements of the Bronze Age, and some of them in the Ymyyakhtakh culture of Siberia. Anthropological and paleogenetic data indicate that the Oleny Island ancient population, buried in the Kola Oleneostrovsky burial ground, do not show similarities neither with the previous residents, nor with the Saami, who replaced them, but find certain correspondences among the inhabitants of the south of West and Northeast Siberia.

Keywords

• archaeology
• anthropology
• inhumation
• cremation
• individual and family burials
• tools and non-utilitarian items
• differences in grave goods in male and female burials