Morphological traits of the female skull from the Nechunaevo-3 burial ground of the Andronovo culture in the Alei Steppe (statistical aspect)

The article presents an analysis of the morphological features of the female skull from the Andronovo culture burial ground Nechunaevo-3. The burial ground is located in the lower reaches of the Alei River in the Shipunovsky District of the Altai region. The skull was examined using the standard craniometric methods, created by V.P. Alekseev and G.F. Debets. A detailed morphological characteristic of the analyzed female skull pointed to its similarity with the Andronovo (Fedorovo) populations of the Baraba forest-steppe and the Upper Ob region, but in order to get a more objective data of the origins of the observed specific features, the derived craniometric data were analyzed against a broad comparative background of individuals from the populations of the Middle Bronze Age of Western Siberia and Kazakhstan using two independent methods of multivariate statistics -through the discriminant analysis and the principal component method. Discriminant analysis requires subdividing the involved individual data into groups, and thus, the method makes it possible to attribute the studied object to one of the established groups. But a noticeable drawback of the method for individual data analysis is its focus on intragroup dispersion elimination. Therefore, an analysis of individual data was also conducted using the principal component method, which retains maximum intragroup variability. The results of the discriminant analysis showed the similarity of the analyzed individual from Nechunaevo-3 with the Andronovo population of the Upper Ob region, as well as with the Fedorovo group of the Baraba forest-steppe. The analysis of the principal components showed the connections with the Andronovo population of the Kuznetsk Basin, on the one hand, and with the populations of the Aley and Baraba forest-steppe, on the other. Also, based on the results of both statistical analyses, it can be concluded that the morphological features of the female skull from Nechunaevo-3 have no parallels among the Andronovo and Petrovo populations of Kazakhstan.