The Heterogenous Nature of the Early Nomadic Archaeological Culture in the Southern Urals in the Middle of the I Millennium BC

An increased number of source materials on nomadic antiquities in the steppe belt of the southern Urals in the middle of the I millennium BC (the so called ‘Sauromatian period’) have shown that the concept of the single archaeological culture is not able to explain a whole variety of funerary rites and territorial specific features related to site location. The ritual-based groups of the early nomadic sites singled out previously (Mugodzhary, Eastern Aral and Blumenfeld groups) have been renamed into ‘cultural complexes’. Based on the planigraphical data and the funerary rite analysis conducted for 14 kurgan burial grounds of the Steppe Urals region and the Southern Trans-Urals region, it has been shown that such complexes coexisted in the region in the period approximately from the turn of the 5th century BC to the turn of the 3rd century BC and that they became a basis for appearance of a multicomponent archaeological culture of the early nomads in the southern Urals. The conditions of the ethnocultural conglomerate which is described as a ‘territorial tribe’ based on ethnographical data have been recorded, among other things, in the Filippovka 1 elite cemetery. These data help add such characteristics as ‘homogeneous’ and ‘heterogeneous’ to the existing definition of the ‘archaeological culture’ (that would, possibly, apply only to nomadic antiquities).