Pazyryk burials
More actions
The Pazyryk burials are a group of five large burial mounds (barrows or kurgans) of the Iron Age in the Pazyryk valley of the eastern Altai Mountains, in the Altai Republic of Russia.[1][2] Frozen ground beneath the stone mounds preserved wood, felt, leather and tattooed bodies.[2] Barrow 2 held a set for burning hemp seed on hot stones, which the excavator Sergei Rudenko compared with the rite Herodotus described among the Scythians.[3] Radiocarbon dating of its timbers places its construction at about 300 BCE.[1]
Discovery and excavation
An expedition of the ethnographic department of the State Russian Museum under Sergei Rudenko found the group of large mounds of piled stone in the Pazyryk valley in 1924, two kilometres north of the Yan-Ulagan river. Test pits showed frozen ground beneath the stone. In 1929 a team under Mikhail Gryaznov excavated the first barrow, where the frost had kept wooden objects, the remains of a felt carpet, leather goods, tattooed bodies and the burials of horses. Rudenko planned to continue the work in 1930 but was arrested.[2] He later excavated the other barrows of the group. His account of them appeared in English in 1970.[3]
The hemp finds
Rudenko found that every barrow had held a set for smoking hemp. The sticks of the stands survived in each of them, but robbers had taken the vessels and the cloth covers from all except barrow 2.[3] Barrow 2 held two copper vessels, a small footed cauldron with two handles and a rectangular dish on four legs. N. V. Polosmak and V. A. Trunova counted them in 2006 as the only copper vessels known from sites of the Pazyryk culture. Both held stones cracked by fire and charred hemp seed. The handles of the cauldron were wrapped in birch bark, which Rudenko took as protection against the heat of the stones.[4] Rudenko identified the seed in the vessels as Cannabis sativa "of the variety C. ruderalis Janisch". A leather flask of hemp seed was tied to one leg of a six-legged frame of rods. In the barrows he found plant fibre only of hemp and kendyr.[3]
Meng Ren and colleagues describe the Pazyryk seed as carbonised and wild in form. They also report from Rudenko's publication a leather pouch from the same barrow holding cannabis seed together with coriander and yellow sweet clover.[5]
The charred seed from the copper vessels is held in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Analysed by Polosmak and Trunova, it held more than a thousand times as much copper as fresh hemp seed. They concluded that the fumes breathed over the heated copper carried copper compounds. They suggested that copper poisoning was frequent among the Pazyryk people.[4]
Dating
Art-historical comparison of the objects from the barrows had placed them in the 5th century BCE. The tree rings of their timbers show that barrows 1 and 2 were built about 48 to 50 years before barrow 5.[1] A log from barrow 2, split into six pieces of 20 rings each and dated by radiocarbon, matched the calibration curve best at a construction date of about 300 BCE, with an error of 25 to 35 years.[1] Dates on the same tree-ring series from laboratories in Saint Petersburg, Zürich and Belfast gave a best match at about 300 to 290 BCE. Yaroslav Kuzmin and colleagues placed the Pazyryk-culture burials of the Altai in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE.[6] Ren and colleagues, writing in 2019, date the Pazyryk tombs to about 500 BCE.[5]
Interpretations
Rudenko saw in barrow 2 "the full set of articles" for the cleansing rite that Herodotus described among the Scythians of the Black Sea, who would "creep under the felt and scatter the seeds over the hot stones". He held that both men and women smoked hemp, in daily life and in the rite after a burial.[3]
Ren and colleagues argued that the burning at Pazyryk, as at the Jirzankal Cemetery in the Pamirs, took place during the burial rather than after it. In their view it may belong to a different rite from the one Herodotus described. Comparing the two sites, they suggested that ritual smoking spread from an elite to common people.[5] Hongen Jiang and colleagues grouped the Altai finds with the cannabis from the Yanghai Tombs and from Jiayi near Turpan as evidence of ritual or medicinal use across Central Eurasia in that millennium.[7]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Dergachev, V.A.; Vasiliev, S.S.; Sementsov, A.A.; Zaitseva, G.I.; Chugunov, K.A.; Sljusarenko, I.Ju. (2001). "Dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating methods in archaeological studies of Scythian sites". Radiocarbon. 43 (2A): 417–424. doi:10.1017/S0033822200038273.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Novozhilova, E.N. (2022). "Начальные этапы изучения на Алтае археологических памятников пазырыкской культуры" [The initial stages of studying the archaeological monuments of the Pazyryk culture in Altai]. Известия Алтайского государственного университета (in русский) (2 (124)): 66–71. doi:10.14258/izvasu(2022)2-10.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Rudenko, S.I. (1970). Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen. Translated by M. W. Thompson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Polosmak, N.V.; Trunova, V.A. (2006). "Смертельное наслаждение. СИ обнаруживает убийцу". Наука из первых рук (in русский) (1 (7)).
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Ren, Meng; Tang, Zihua; Wu, Xinhua; Spengler, Robert; Jiang, Hongen; Yang, Yimin; Boivin, Nicole (2019). "The origins of cannabis smoking: chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs". Science Advances. 5 (6) eaaw1391. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391.
- ↑ Kuzmin, Yaroslav V.; Slusarenko, Igor Y.; Hajdas, Irka; Bonani, Georges; Christen, J. Andres (2004). "The comparison of 14C wiggle-matching results for the 'floating' tree-ring chronology of the Ulandryk-4 burial ground (Altai Mountains, Siberia)". Radiocarbon. 46 (2): 943–948. doi:10.1017/S0033822200035992.
- ↑ Jiang, Hongen; Wang, Long; Merlin, Mark D.; Clarke, Robert C.; Pan, Yan; Zhang, Yong; Xiao, Guoqiang; Ding, Xiaolian (2016). "Ancient Cannabis burial shroud in a Central Eurasian cemetery". Economic Botany. 70 (3): 213–221. doi:10.1007/s12231-016-9351-1.