Sokolova pustyn -a new burial site of the Late Dyakovo period

The first materials from the excavations of the settlement and burial-groundat Sokolova Pustyn on the Oka River near the town of Stupino dating from the MigrationPeriod are published in this article. The settlement occupies the first terrace of the OkaRiver. The burial-ground is adjacent to the settlement, partly overlapping it, and it is lo-cated at the edge of the second terrace. The settlement and the burial-ground date fromthe same era, but it has not yet been possible to establish whether they existed in parallelor not. At present three burials have been discovered and investigated. In each burial re-mains from cremation (carried out outside the grave) had been scattered on the surface ofthe grave and today these present as thin lenses of calcified bones under turf at a very shal-low depth. Each of the burials has been found to contain the bones of at least two individu-als and also animal bones. In one case it is thought that partial excarnation of the corpsestook place prior to cremation. Finds from the burials and burnished pottery serve to datethe burial ground to the 5 th-7 th centuries. This burial-ground is the first site of this typediscovered in the southern part of the Moscow region, where the period of the middle andthe second half of the 1 st millennium AD has not been widely studied.