Presented in the publication are the craniological data on a series of early nomads of the Sarmatian type from the Industrialnaya Zona (Poyma) cemetery in the territory of Terekti District of Western Kazakhstan Oblast. Age and sex determinations were given for 61 burials of the Early Iron Age and five of the Bronze Age. The craniological series is represented by 32 crania, of which 20 are male and 12 are female. They are characterized by similar morphological features characteristic of the population of the Ural River Basin. As of today, this series is one of the largest, and it dates to a rather narrow chronological period of the 4th–3rd cс. BC. The ‘Sauromato-Sarmatian’ population across the whole territory of its settlement demonstrates biological unity, which is also confirmed by the palaeogenetic data. It is likely that the Volga-Ural and Cisaral regions constituted the hearth of the racial genesis, which is associated with the origin of the early nomads of the arid zones from the Urals to Ancient Khwarazm and from the Turgay to the Lower Don regions and the formation of the specific craniological complex, with large latitudinal characteristics of the cranium and facial region. The angles of the horizontal profiling feature significant flattening at the upper level, while at the lower level it is at the borderline between the Caucasoid and Mongoloid types with the nasal bones protruding prominently in profile. Also presented in the publication is the graphic reconstruction of the face from the cranium from burial No. 3, mound No. 10. The features presented in the physical appearance of the reconstruction reflect what the ancient nomads of the Ural River Basin looked like. The comparison of the craniological characteristics of the Industrialnaya Zone cemetery against a broad background of the comparative materials, generalised from the cultures of the Early Iron Age, showed that the craniological features of the group do not differ from the surrounding population with similar cultural characteristics of the Volga-Ural region, Western Kazakhstan, and the Lower Don region at the end of the 6th — 3rd c. BC.

Keywords: Sarmatians, Early Iron Age, craniology, early nomads, anthropology, Western Kazakhstan, Volga-Ural region.

 

Acknowledgements. The author is grateful to D.V. Maryksin and Ya.A. Lukpanova for the opportunity to work with the collection.

Funding. The project was carried out with the financial support of the RSF Grant No. 22-18-00194 “The Epochal transformation of the cultural and physical appearance of the population of the south of the Middle Volga region and Cis-Urals region in the Neolithic and Early Iron Age according to archeological, anthropological and genetics sources”.

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Accepted: 08.06.2022

Article is published: 15.09.2023