У статті описані морфологічні, палеопатологічні та тафономічні ознаки, виявлені на скелеті підлітка 13—15 р. Посмертні зміни кісток
пов’язуються зі специфічним поховальним обрядом.
The funeral rite is a complex ritual process. It combines
traditional worldview norms and rituals, includes
various stages — the preparatory, process of
burial and post-funeral actions as the funeral fest etc.
From the archaeological point of view, the funeral rite
is considered as the system of interrelated features
which includes the funeral method, type of burial, form
of the burial structure, grave goods and the remains of
the buried people or animals.
Mostly the reconstruction of the funeral rite is quite
simple. However, there are the burials, practically
having no analogies in archaeological culture and literature.
Unusual postmortem transformations on the
bones that appear during the preparation process or
at the time of burial are sometimes hard to be seen,
even more difficult to interpret. Recently, thanks to
the spread of research methods, gaining the experience
and opportunities to international consultations
as well as fruitful cooperation with archaeologists
we began (albeit very slowly) to collect the database
of «unusual» cases of rites. The vast majority of such
cases can be traced at the populations of Scythian Age.
The examples are decapitated accompanying persons;
skull fragments with signs of scalping and deliberate
destruction; possibly boiled human bones found on the
ash hills of the Bielsk hill-fort etc.
From this point of view the Early Scythian grave in
the barrow 524 near Zhabotin village in the basin of
the Tyasmin River is undoubtedly interesting. The primary
burial (N 1) was completely destroyed and has no
traces of any skeleton. Our paper is focused on the anthropological
study of human remains from the other
grave.
This is the burial of teenager aged 13—15 with the
body of very gracile structure. Features on the skeleton
indicate poor health from early childhood. The
teenager suffered from frequent prolonged illnesses or
starvation.
The process of preparing the body for burial in this
case is very complicated. The body and a wooden platform
located near grave were exposed to low-temperature
fire (100—200 °C). One can assume that the body
was placed on the platform. There are no reasons yet
to determine the motive of such rite — the ritual cleaning
the wooden structure or body by fire or the purposeful
process of mummification by low-temperature
drying of the body on a smoldering fire. Spectrometric
analysis of the black plaque on the skull fragments
confirms the presence of mummified organic tissues of
the human body. Cases of this type of mummification
are known from ethnographic sources. The incision in
the skull may have been caused by a procedure to clean
the bones of soft tissue or by cutting certain tendons
before burial.
Until other similar cases would be found in similar
cultural milieu the purpose and exact nature of the
manipulation with the child’s body in the barrow near
Zhabotin remain unknown.
