Cauldrons and buried treasures of the Middle Yenisei region in the Early Iron Age

Purpose. The article dwells upon discoveries of cauldrons and buried treasures of the Early Iron Age on the territory of the Middle Yenisei region. The work contains a review of such main recent discoveries and an analysis of different variants of occurrence of cauldrons in the buried treasures of the Paleometal Epoch. They include self-containment of a cauldron hidden as part of the buried treasure; a cauldron as one of the containers for the buried treasure items; integral small-sized cauldrons as part of the buried treasure object set; pieces of cauldrons as part of the buried treasures. Results. The authors developed a map of 21 buried treasures on the territory of the Middle Yenisei region, whose object set included cauldrons. It allowed identifying a territorial uniqueness of location of cauldrons being part of ‘accidental’ discoveries as well as buried treasures. The archaeological microzoning approach enabled to define several compact areas that were characterized by multiple discoveries of buried treasures with cauldrons. One of them is the northeastern territories of the Middle Yenisei. This is the middle course of the Kan river valley in the vicinity of Terskoe village. Other areas of localization of finds of cauldrons are located in the northwest – from the Kosogolskie lakes to the middle course of the Iyus river. The same can be said about the presence of the distribution of such finds in the southern territory. It is localized mainly from the Askiz steppe and to the left bank of the Yenisei river in this area. The analysis of object sets focused on identification of repeated sets of items (mirrors, axes, belt fixtures, jewelry) in buried treasures that included cauldrons. Conclusion. The publication puts forward a hypothesis concerning the potential of using cauldrons as a buried treasure container in terms of its dating range. Based on the contents of buried treasures that included cauldrons, relative chronological lines of these object sets from the Scythian to the Xiongnu and Xianbei time for the Middle Yenisei region was proposed.