Karasor-2 Site in the Upper Tobol

Abstract

The present article introduces a collection of prehistoric material culture finds obtained at the Karasor-2 site during a stationary study of the Karasor archaeological site in 1998. A group of Karasor monuments is located near the town of Lisakovsk in the Upper Tobol river valley, which is in the northern Turgai depression. The territory of the Turgai depression connects the West Siberian and Turan plains. The Turgai depression borders on the Trans-Ural Plateau in the west and on the Kazakh hillocky area and the spur of the Ulutau mountains in the east. The local nature and geography destroy the cultural layer on the monuments. Thus, the finds represented by fragments of ceramics and stone products at the Karasor-2 site were collected from the surface, as the cultural layer had been destroyed. The article gives descriptive characteristics of the ceramics, while the stone tools were studied with the technical and typological method. Since the ceramic fragments are too small, the dating and cultural affiliation of the artifacts was based on the results of the technical and typological analysis of the stone tools. Most likely, the stone finds date back to the Mesolithic and Late Eneolithic periods. Most tools are similar to the stone industry of the Tersek culture and belong to the Eneolithic Age. The author believes that the time range of the stone tools and ceramics is from the Late Mesolithic to the Bronze Age.

Keywords

• eneolithic period
• turgai depression
• stone industry
• technical and typological analysis
• scrapers
• knives
• quartzite sandstone
• mesolithic
• bronze age