Early Bronze Age Cemeteries on Lake Baikal, Siberia: Their History and Patterns of Use

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Prehistoric hunter-gatherer cemeteries are usually analyzed as one chronologically flat block of data representing certain groups of people. While justified by small sample sizes or dating problems, such an approach is obviously ahistorical in that it denies these cemeteries and hunter-gatherer groups their own unique history. The aim of the Baikal Archaeological Project is to look at patterns of hunter-gatherer cemetery use from Late Mesolithic to Early Bronze Age (~8600–3500 cal BP) in the Baikal region, Eastern Siberia. Radiocarbon dating of all individuals from a given cemetery (currently, ca. 560 dates from 65 cemeteries representing five distinct mortuary traditions) allows for the examination of the overall tempo of burial events at each cemetery or a group of cemeteries and for comparison to one another. Combined with other categories of mortuary data, this radiocarbon evidence offers insights into the history of a given cemetery at an unprecedented level of detail. The most important discovery is that each cemetery seems to tell a different story about the people who used it and their contribution to the functioning of the broader microregional or regional population. This paper details the history of one Early Bronze Age cemetery with a particularly interesting pattern of use.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Northeast Asian Prehistoric Hunter-Gather Lifeways: Multidisciplinary, Individual Life History Approach   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35977.0