On the cultural and chronological attribution of the Gremiachie cemetery in the Zhytomyr region
Abstract
The article publishes completely the materials from excavation of barrows of the Zhytomyr Survey Expedition of 1945 in the Gremiachie tract near Zhytomyr based on the archival materials and the collections stored in the Scientific Fund of the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Barrow were located at a distance of 15-25 m from one another. The height of the mounds was 0.15-0.25 m and their diameter was 5.8-7.5 m. The remains of cremations were recorded in the form of a handful of small burnt human bones under the mounds, at different depths, from 0.3 to 0.75 m, accompanied by small fragments of handmade vessels, separate stones without a definite shape, amorphous flakes and fragments of flint. A bronze pin, a handmade vessel, and a flint plate were discovered in the barrow No. 1. The cremations were done on the side. Their remains together with the inventory were laid at the level of the ancient horizon or in a small hollow, possibly on a specially prepared site. The studies of 1945 did not give any reason to assert that the remains of the cremations were put exactly in the vessels, as S.S. Hamchenko mentioned, and after that they were set at the level of the ancient horizon.
The time of the cemetery appearance was attributed to the final stage of the Kiev-Zhytomyr group of the Sosnitsa culture, immediately preceding the formation of the Milograd culture in Kiev-Zhytomyr Polesie, and can be dated to the turn of the 2nd – 1st millennia BC based on the peculiarities of the ceramic complex and the bronze pin found in barrow No. 1.
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