Гуманитарный вектор (Dec 2019)
A Short-story about the Burial Mounds in the Territory of the Eastern Province of Baikal Asia
Abstract
In the article the issue of the functional definition of the burial mounds is represented. It is discussed nowadays. The fact of the absence of the interments in more than 50 per cents of the burial mounds makes the character of the structures doubtful itself. The interments fixed in the burial mounds are the antipode of the burial tradition of the culture of the tile graves. The work is based on the material of the archeological investigations of the burial mounds sacral complexes which lasted for a half of the century in Western and Eastern Transbaikalia. The author gives an original interpretation to the notion of the burial mounds and he defines the time when they were dated based on the results of the excavations in Podlopatinskoye, Bilchirskoye, Albituyskoye barrows complexes. The main position of the investigations is in that the megalithic structure traditionally marked as Transbaikal burial mounds firstly they are the objects of the solar cult. At the same time the interments, the oblations and other findings are rarely found in the burial mounds dated from the early Iron Age to the ethnographical contemporaneity historically and culturally are not connected with the burial traditions and the architecture. The inventory lack of bones in burials fundamentally falls out of the context of funeral rites in the massive burial mounds of the Scythian-Sarmatian world. It is suggested that the presence of bones in the burials may be interpreted as “funerary objects of the burial culture”. It is logical to assume that these are either “intake burials” or traces of some lustration involving human sacrifice performed by the population of the plate graves culture. The authors suggest that the existing definition of “Karacharov culture” on the territory of Central Asia is a contentious issue.
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