Shipovo Kurgans

Shipovo Kurgans 

several groups of barrows dating from the first to fourth centuries in the Derkul River basin, west of the city of Ural’sk (Zapadnyi Kazakhstan Oblast), near the station of Shipovo. The Shipovo Kurgans were investigated by P. S. Rykov in 1925. Most of the burials belonged to the Sarmatians, nomads of the first centuries A.D. Buried in one rich barrow was a man in silk clothing, with gold plaques, weapons, and a horse harness. Another rich barrow yielded the burial of a woman, with a glass-encrusted bronze diadem, a pendant edged in gold, earrings, and a mirror. The objects are characteristic of the age of the Great Migration of Peoples in Eastern Europe in the late fourth and fifth centuries and belonged, judging from the funerary ritual, to representatives of the tribal aristocracy of the Alani, descendants of the Sarmatians.

REFERENCES

Rykov, P. S. “Arkheologicheskie raskopki i razvedki v Nizhnem Povolzh’e i Ural’skom krae letom 1925 g.” In Izv. kraevedcheskogo instituta izucheniia Iuzhno-Volzhskoi oblasti pri Saratovskom universitete, vol. 1. Saratov, 1926.
Zasetskaia, I. P. “O khronologii pogrebenii ’epokhi pereseleniia narodov’ Nizhnego Povolzh’ia.” Sovetskaia arkheologiia, 1968, no. 2.