Affiliation:
1. Institute for Humanitarian Studies and Problems of the Indigenous Peoples of the North SB RAS
2. Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography Siberian Branch RAS
3. Arctic Research Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)
4. Institute of Geology of Diamond and Noble Metals SB RAS
Abstract
The article presents the results of a comprehensive study of the Ogonyok burial, discovered and investigated in 2016 in the city of Yakutsk, Central Yakutia, in the middle reaches of the Lena River. The purpose of the study was to determine its cultural and chronological characteristics, to identify the features of the funeral rite and spe-cifics of the accompanying grave goods. In addition to historical and archaeological methods, the methods of tra-sological analysis of stone tools, radiocarbon dating and date calibration, isotope analysis of human and animal bone collagen, and determination of the species composition of the fauna that was part of the burial equipment were used. The burial place was destroyed during land works, as such, only part of the accompanying equipment and osteological material was preserved for the analyses. Excavations of the remains of the burial were carried out, which made it possible to determine approximately its orientation, the position of the deceased and the depth from the day surface. Similarities to the accompanying goods, which included a flint core and three blades, an arrowhead, polished adze, bone composite arrowhead with a blade in the groove, anthropomorphic figurine from a mammoth tusk, fragments of a bone polisher and a needle, as well as faunal remains, were found in the com-plexes of the Bel'kachi Neolithic Culture of Northeast Asia of the end of the 5th–3rd mil. BC. Further analogies were identified in the synchronous Neolithic cultures of the Baikal, Transbaikalia, Lower Amur region, Primorsky Krai and Chukotka. The funeral ritual of filling the grave with ocher also brings the Ogonyok burial closer to other Bel'kachi cemeteries. Paleozoological analysis has shown that bones of lynx, wild reindeer and geese were pre-sent in the burial. Four AMS radiocarbon dates were obtained from human and animal bones, which attribute the burial in the first quarter of the 4th mil. BC. An interesting fact was the identification of an offset in the age of hu-man bones relatively to the age of animal bones, the former being approximately 200 years older, which is appa-rently associated with freshwater reservoir effect. Analysis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes demonstrated that the human diet was based on meat food, as well as, apparently, fish products, with a minor inclusion of wild plants. The burial of Ogonyok is one of the few “pure” sites of the Bel'kachi Neolithic Culture in Yakutia.
Publisher
Tyumen Scientific Center of the SB RAS
Subject
Archeology,Anthropology,Archeology
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