Anthropological and taphological characteristics of male burials at the Volna 1 cemetery

The paper analyzes the funerary rite and the anthropological collections from Volna 1, which is a ground cemetery of the 6th - 3rd centuries BC. Today it is the best studied cemetery in Asian Bosporus. Three groups of population were singled out based on the intra-group analysis of the attributes describing the shape of longitudinal bone diaphyses. The results of the analysis were verified with the use of archaeological methods. The research also focused on inter-group analysis of the three identified groups with other population groups living in the northwestern Fore-Caucasus in the Early Iron Age. The analysis managed to show significant similarity between the two identified groups and between these groups and the anthropological remains from a cemetery of Starokorsunskaya 2 hillfort. The third group turned out to be much different from both the first two groups of Volna 1 and from other series used in the inter-group analysis. Traditional methods of archaeology and methods of multivariate analysis, in particular, component analysis and cluster analysis, helped verify the data obtained through the anthropological study...