Geoarchaeological study of short-term pedo-chrono-sequence in the kurgan cemetery of the late bronze age (the timber-grave culture) in the Orenburg Cis-Ural

The paper presents the study of pedo-chrono-sequence in the kurgan cemetery Bogolyubovka 1 in the Orenburg region. The kurgan cemetery included one paleosol buried under a kurgan and dated from the end of the Middle - beginning of the Late Bronze Age (20-18 th centuries BC according to the calibrated radiocarbon date), seven paleosols buried at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age (18-17 th centuries BC according to archaeological data), and two background soils. All studied kurgans had the Timber-grave cultural belonging with the influence of some other cultures (Alakul and mixed - Alakul-Fyodorovskaya) in the funeral rite and inventory which manifested themselves differently in one or another stage of the cemetery existence. It has been reconstructed that only the paleosol of the end of the Middle - beginning of the Late Bronze Age developed under the intensification of aridity, whereas the paleosols of the beginning of the Late Bronze Age - under humid climatic conditions with less degree of continentality of the climate than that in nowadays. Distribution of the studied paleosols in groups with identical morphological and physico-chemical properties within each group and arrangement of those groups in accordance with "humid" properties intensification allowed us to offer the relative chronological order of construction of all the kurgans in the cemetery.