Children’s Burial of the Beginning of the Early Middle Ages from the Gorny- 10 Necropolis (South of Western Siberia)

Abstract

The article presents the results of studying of an extraordinary children’s burial excavated at the Gorny-10 necropolis. This complex, which today is the largest of the studied sites dated to the beginning of the early Middle Ages in the south of Western Siberia, is located in the Krasnogorsk region of the Altai Territory. The published object (grave 63) is an undisturbed burial of a 10—12-year-old child with representative accompanying grave goods, including horse equipment, costume elements, tools, jewelry and weapons. An analysis of the discovered items made it possible to establish the dating of the burial within the last quarter of the 6 th — the first half of the 7 th centuries AD. It has been established that the qualitative and quantitative composition of the finds indicates a high lifetime status of the buried person. There are grounds to assume that the originality of the grave goods was determined not only by the position of the child’s family, but also by his personal qualities, including participation in the traditional occupations of the early medieval population of the south of Western Siberia.