Disturbed late-bronze-age burials of the Irmen culture in Western Siberia

This article analyses materials from the Preobrazhenka-3 and Zhuravlevo-4 kurgan burial cemeteries of the Irmen culture. Against a background of standard funerary practice the author singles out and examines burials with traces of post-deposition intervention in antiquity. The concept suggested by a number of scholars regarding the existence of territorial differences in the funerary rite of the Irmen culture is supplemented with conclusions concerning the existence of local features of post-deposition disturbance of graves. special attention is paid to the way of how bodies were treated after death, planigraphic position of paired burials in the Zhuravlevo-4 cemetery and their subsequent disturbance. As a variant for the interpretation of the archaeological data the author emphasizes the importance of ethnographic data. The main conclusion is possibility of semantically equal status for the burials with disturbed anatomy of the skeleton (cremation, secondary and partial burials, intervention in graves) and burials containing complete bodies which have been laid out in positions different from the general standard