Samara Valley Project Cemetery

David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The Krasnosamarskoe IV Kurgan Cemetery

The KS settlement was located near a cemetery of three kurgans that were already 1000 years old when the Srubnaya period began. Three other kurgan cemeteries, numbered KS I, II, and III, were discovered earlier in the same region, southeast of the KS marshes (Vasiliev and Kuznetsov 1988). Radiocarbon tests show that the kurgans at KS IV were built in a rapid sequence between 2900-2800 calBC--the earliest MBA. In each case, the kurgan was erected over a single principal grave. Each central grave was accompanied by at least one peripheral grave. Two adult women and an adult male were found in the three central MBA graves. The predominance of women in the central graves was unusual, but in other ways these kurgans were typical of MBA kurgans in the region. One kurgan was re-visted several centuries later and at least one adult grave was added to Kurgan 2 later in the MBA. The function of the kurgans changed dramatically at the start of the LBA. Instead of marking the grave of a single important individual, kurgans were used in the LBA to bury the whole population--infants, juveniles, women, and men. The population admitted to kurgan burial widened significantly at the start of the LBA. ADD FIGURES OF OTHER KURGANS AND PHOTOS OF MBA GRAVES

Kurgan 3, and only Kurgan 3, was used as a cemetery during the Srubnaya period, probably by the people residing at the KS settlement (Figure 14). The graves were uniformly poor--only pottery vessels and spindle whorls were included as gifts. Of the 22 Srubnaya graves in Kurgan 3, most (16, or 73%) were juveniles or infants. Only six were adults: 3 males, 2 females, and one indeterminate. This age distribution is not typical for other Srubnaya cemeteries in the Samara valley. Of 21 Srubnaya graves at Barinovka, the next Srubnaya settlement and cemetery upstream from KS, only 10 (48%) were of juveniles and infants. At Spiridonovka II, the next settlement and cemetery downstream from KS, only four of the 23 Srubnaya graves (17%) were of infants and juveniles (Khokhlov 1999; Murphy and Khokhlov 2004). The proportion of infants and juveniles at the KS cemetery is unusually high. There was no pathological evidence suggesting an unusual level of disease at KS; in fact the Srubnaya people here and elsewhere in the Oblast were generally healthy and robust. We do not know why the KS settlement produced such a high proportion of juvenile and infant deaths.

The dental health of the Srubnaya population bears directly on the problem of the Srubnaya diet (Figure 15). During the Samara Valley Project, Murphy and Khokhlov took the opportunity to examine pathologies in 192 Srubnaya individuals from 12 cemeteries in the Samara Oblast, including the 22 Srubnaya individuals from the KS IV cemetery. The prevalence of dental caries was very low, just 0.2% among 1732 teeth examined. Compared to other populations around the world (Lukacs 1989), this frequency groups the Srubnaya population of Samara Oblast with hunter-gatherers who had little or no starchy cultivated grains in their diet. Interestingly, an Iron Age cemetery at Aymyrlyg, South Siberia, where the economy was thought to include mixed herding and cultivation, had a caries frequency of 6.5% for the Scythian period population, and a prevalence of 5.5% among the succeeding Hunno-Sarmatian period group (Murphy and Khokhlov 2004).

Evidence from dental pathologies supports the evidence from phytoliths, pollen, and seed remains. The Srubnaya people at the KS settlement did not grow grain, and neither they nor the larger Srubnaya population of the Samara Oblast ate grain foods with any frequency.

ADD OTHER GRAPHS FROM MURPHY

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