The results and perspectives of investigation of cremation burials in the North-Western Caucasus (8th - 13th cc. a. d.)

The paper discusses some debatable problems related to the cremation burials. The rich material accumulated by now needs historical interpretation. Among the urgent problems there are those of chronological distribution of the burials of the 8 th - 13 th cc., and ethnic attribution of the cremation associations. Not a single hypothesis (including the Abkhazian-Adyg, Turkic, or Ugrian origin of the sites) has been sufficiently proved, the provenance of cremation rite in the Middle Age Caucasus also remains unclear. The author stresses the necessity of modern methods of working out chronology and searching ethnic markers, first of all, compiling a unified database of cremation burials, which will enable their multivariate statistical analysis. This method is promising, as far as the problems of ethnic and political history of East European population in the late 1 st - early 2 nd millennia are concerned.