Seasonality of Sintashta funerary rites (based on the Kamennyi Ambar-5 Bronze Age cemetery)

Based on archaeological materials from the Kamennyi Ambar-5 cemetery, we test the hypothesis about the connection between the seasonality of pastoral practices and funerary rites during the Late Bronze Age (early 2nd millennium BC). We studied growth layers in the teeth of 24 cows, 19 sheep/goats, 14 horses, a dog, and ten humans from 17 graves. We combined samples from various species from the same contexts into eight assemblages. With regard to animals, differences in seasons of death were revealed only once. 70% of graves were arranged in spring and 30% in autumn. Therefore, the hypothesis about the seasonal use of the cemetery can be supported at least partially. The contemporaneous settlement of Kamennyi Ambar demonstrates a similar tendency in the seasonality of animal slaughtering. However, the reasons for slaughtering at the settlement differed from those in the cemetery. At the settlement site, it was motivated by practical needs, and in themortuary site, only by the seasonality of human deaths, specifically by a higher frequency of deaths in late winter and spring. Also, postmortem selection is possible, whereby kurgan burials were arranged only for some individuals. In practice, several of the above factors overlapped, resulting in an anomalous composition of the buried cohort (disproportion of sexes and a higher proportion of individuals who died at the peak of vital activity).