Early Nomads in the Southern Foothills of the Urals Based on Materials from the Pokrovka Burial-Ground1 Vladimir Yu. Malashev, L

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EARLY NOMADS IN THE SOUTHERN FOOTHILLS OF THE URALS BASED ON MATERIALS FROM THE POKROVKA BURIAL-GROUND1

VLADIMIR YU. MALASHEV, LEONID T. YABLONSKY

The burial-grounds made up of burial-mounds or kurgans situated within the territory of Russia’s Orenburg Region have attracted the attention of scholars since the end of the 18th century.2 In the 20th century the work on the Sarma- tians in the foothills of the Urals which had started under Rostovtsev3 was continued by Grakov,4 Smirnov5 and Moshkova.6 Their work covered almost the whole of the territory of the Orenburg Region with the exception of a small area on the south bank of the Ilek River, where the River Khobda ﬂows into it south of the village of Pokrovka in the Sol-Iletsk District (Fig. 1). In the early 20th century two burial-mounds were excavated here, but only incomplete information of a very general nature has survived from this undertaking.7 In the course of archaeological reconnaissance carried out by members of staff from the Archaeological Laboratory of the Orenburg Education Institute (S.Y. Kravtsov) and the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (L.T. Yablonsky) a large number of burial-mounds was recorded (Fig. 2).8 What became evident in the course of this work was the striking geographical character of the area in question stemming ﬁrst and foremost from the fact that as regards to its climate and vegetation it is a dry-steppe zone, making it unique in the Orenburg Region: at the same time it is an inte- gral part of the enormous steppe zone to south of Orenburg.

1 This work was carried out with the support of the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, Project No. 02-01-00016a. 2 Ignat’ev 1871; Kastan’e 1910; Palas 1786, 1809; Rÿchkov 1762. 3 Rostovtsev 1918. 4 Grakov 1927. 5 Smirnov 1964; Smirnov 1975; Smirnov, Petrenko 1963. 6 Moshkova 1961; Moshkova 1962. 7 Kastan’e 1913; Rostovtsev 1918. 8 Yablonsky 1993, 1-14; Davis-Kimball, Yablonsky 1995, 1-174.

260 VLADIMIR YU. MALASHEV, LEONID T. YABLONSKY

Fig. 1. Map of the southern part of the Orenburg Region.