MOSCOW, March 12. The age of a child's burial found in the Arctic Circle was determined by researchers from Tyumen State University (TSU) as part of a scientific group using dendrochronological analysis. The results were published in the journal “Archaeology of the Eurasian Steppes,” the press service of the university reported.
In 2016-2018, Siberian archaeologists discovered the settlement of Num-hiba-sikheri VI on the territory of the Mameevsky archaeological microdistrict in the Tazovsky district of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. They discovered there a late medieval above-ground structure and nine burial structures, separated into a separate archaeological site — the Num-hiba-sikheri VIa burial ground.
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Having analyzed the funeral tradition and the artifacts of the grave structures, scientists have suggested that the monument is a cemetery of the northern (Tazov-Turukhan) Selkups, who periodically sailed at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries to the lower reaches of the Taz River for fishing.
Almost all the remains found in the burials belong to infants aged five to eight months, there is also a burial of a girl six to eight years old, noted Alexander Tkachev, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of Tyumen State University.
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"Apparently, this is a children's cemetery. How they got there — there is no exact answer to this question. There are no settlement complexes nearby, they definitely didn’t live there, the group sailed from another place. Apparently, men and women swam together, the whole family or the whole clan, and infants simply could not endure the journey. High infant mortality is a characteristic feature of traditional societies,” he said.
Scientists have not yet been able to find out whether the burial was one-time or created in several stages. However, they noted an interesting nuance: during excavations, coals were found in the soil, which means that it was heated during the preparation of the graves and this was probably done in the spring or autumn.
“The population in these places appeared several thousand years ago, so we can talk specifically about a specific group of Selkups who left a children’s necropolis. The Selkups are characterized by beliefs in various gods and spirits, as well as elements of shamanism. They were familiar with the Orthodox tradition, but full-fledged Christians «were not, they only used elements of the Orthodox cult and symbols (crosses, icons). In burials, they are usually located next to the buried person in the area of the waist and hips; for children, they were wrapped in rags, that is, most likely they were used as amulets,» he said Alexander Tkachev.
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He noted that the burial site used the type of burial characteristic of the Selkups — very deep, up to 1.5 meters, complex graves in the form of multi-tiered wooden structures.
“Burials were made in wooden boxes, logs or coffins. A box was knocked together over them, small cuts of tree trunks were placed on it, and another covering made of thick larch boards was made on top. In one of the burials, a painted Russian-made coffin with factory nails was found. Thus, The Selkups adhered, on the one hand, to traditional burial methods, while adopting everyday elements from the Russian population, for example, the use of nails, as well as Christian religious attributes,” the scientist explained.
To establish the calendar dating of the burial ground, scientists carried out a tree-ring survey analysis of archaeological wood samples is the most accurate existing absolute method for dating archaeological sites.
They established that the dates of operation of the Num-hiba-sikheri VIa monument fall within the time interval from the second quarter of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. This corresponds to previously discovered evidence of the emergence of Selkup fishing farms in the lower reaches of the Taz.
September 27, 2023, 03:00