Ritual and Burial in the Iron Age Eurasian Steppe Zone: This dissertation discusses the archaeology of status, ritual and gender, and the application of ethnographic information to the reconstruction of past societies. It presents a model of Scythic society in the seventh to third centuries BC derived from ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence. It uses presence-absence analysis to evaluate grave inclusions from three Iron Age Scythic cemeteries in the Eurasian steppe zone in order to discover whether ritualist interments can be identified. The cemeteries studied were Pokrovka 2 and Pokrovka 8 (excavated by Davis-Kimball 1990-92) in the Southern Ural arid steppes, and Pazyryk (excavated by Rudenko 1979) in the Altai mountains. Grave inclusions which have been chosen for study included those which have been linked by previous studies to ritual graves, and those which appear to be linked to ritualism in the ethnographic literature. Phi coefficients have been used to assess the correlation between grave inclusions, and between grave inclusions and the age and sex of associated skeletal material. The significance of these conclusions has been measured using Fisher's Exact Test. Cluster analysis has been performed to highlight these findings. The results of these analyses are interpreted with reference to the ethnographic and ethnohistorical data. The conclusions reached were that there were several identifiable status assemblages including warrior, high status, and lower status, however there was no conclusive evidence for ritualism in these cemeteries. A possible ritual assemblage was associated with high status at Pazyryk suggesting that ritual powers had been subsumed by the temporal leader. Further data and a larger sample size would be required to truly answer the research questions.
Further results from the 1995 excavation season at Pokrovka, when published, may help to address the problem of the small sample sizes in this study. Visit the CSEN website (Centre for the Study of Eurasian Nomads) and the Kazakh/American Research Project Pokrovka update (Fall 1995) for an interim report and more details on the Pokrovka site.