Wooden burial structures of the Sargat culture (according to the published evidence)

This article discusses the types of burial structures made of wood in Baraba and adjacent areas among the carriers ofthe Sargat culture ofthe Early Iron Age using information from the literature. Various interpretations of evidence on the Sargat period from the archaeological sites of the Transurals and reconstructions of gravestones and funerary structures made of wood among the Sargat population are summarized. Comparative photoanalytical and technical-technological analysis of field drawings and descriptions in monographic publications has shown that archaeologically intact funerary structures made of wood or their well-survived remains at the Sargat sites are practically unknown in the Transurals. Providing extensive and detailed description of house building among the carriers of the Sargat culture with almost complete absence of specific information about wood and wooden structures, and relying only on their traces, imprints, and decayed fragments, authors of the excavations concluded that these were the remains of the dwellings ofthe Sargat population at various points of its history. Painstakingly studying these remains, scholars reconstructed not only individual building elements, but entire tent-roofed burial structures and dwellings of the frame-and-post type. Detailed description ofthe reconstructed varieties and elements ofthe Sargat burial structures suggests that they belonged to some transitional type between the Arzhan and Pazyryk building traditions. The studies directly and indirectly indicate the signs of spreading building traditions of wood processing, such as burial structures of the tribes of the Uyuk culture in Tuva and their borrowing by the Sargat population of Western Siberia. Similarities in the planigraphic systems of setting the covers in grave pits, order of perpendicular arrangement of logs in radial circles around the circumference of the crepidoma, vertical orientation of the cover with tops of trunks from the edge of the crepidoma towards the center of the burial mound or to the central grave have been established.