Social and symbolic projections of funeral rite in protobactian cultural context

Just as there is no tree without roots, so there is no culture without symbolic and ritual manifestations. No culture can do without symbols and rituals. Ritual contains the most fundamental answers to the challenges of a changing world, especially when it comes to borderline situations – the meeting of life and death, which is most clearly reflected in the funeral rite. The social constants of ritual contain the unshakable values of culture, which make life and death, good and evil, order and chaos distinguishable. The power of ritual lies in its pronounced symbolic nature. Culture manages to tame conflicts and overcome the most dramatic transitions precisely due to the ability of ritual to carry out symbolic transformations and shifts. Ancient burials as an object of historical knowledge are of exceptional interest for cultural research. Their historical significance is determined by the preservation of a whole complex of archaeological objects in them, potentially endowed with a specific ritual meaning and therefore capable of reflecting to one degree or another various aspect of the material and spiritual culture of an ancient society. When studying burials, an archaeologist deals with the material remains of the past, represented by three main components – a burial structure, the remains of the buried, and burial inventory. As a rule, all these components are given to the researcher with a certain degree of devia-tion from their original structure (as a result of destruction, robbery, weathering, etc.). Reconstruction of the burial structure (type of burial structure, pose and position of the skeleton, orientation, location of the burial inventory, etc.) is the first and most important prerequisite for all further archaeological analysis. This article is an attempt to show the funeral rite as a cultural reality and a way of ritualizing social drama through some archaeological projections of the Proto-Bactrian civilization.