Okunev culture

Okunev culture (Окуневская культура ), sometimes also Okunevo culture, was a south Siberian archaeological culture of pastoralists of the early Bronze Age dated from the end of the 3rd millennium BC to the early of the 2nd millennium BC in the Minusinsk Basin on the middle and upper Yenisei. It was formed from the local Neolithic Paleo-Siberian forest cultures, and later received some admixture from a predominantly male Late Yamnaya - Early Catacomb population from the North-Western Caspian region, which expanded eastwards to the territory of Southern Siberia. The Okunev culture was discovered by Sergei Teploukhov in 1928. It was named after the nearby Okunev settlement in the south of modern Khakassia. Initially, the burials from Okunev were attributed by Teploukhov to the Andronovo culture. Then, on the basis of vessel finds, Teploukhov considered the population to be a transitional variant between the Afanasievo and Andronovo cultures. In 1947, M. N. Komarova singled out the sites in the early Okunev stage of the Andronovo culture. In 1955-1957 A.N. Lipsky found Okunev stone slabs with images as part of stone boxes used for burials. Lipsky, who was an ethnographer, not an archaeologist, assumed that the Okunev sites were pre-Afanasiev and attributed them to the Paleolithic era, since he considered the Okunev people to be the ancestors of the American Paleo-Indians, based on parallels in art and anthropology. In the early 1960s G. A. Maksimenkov identified an Okunev culture based on the excavations of the Chernovaya VIII burial ground, whose burials had not been disturbed by later invasions and did not contain Afanasevo ceramics. The early Uibat stage, later Chernov stage, and the final Razliv stage of Okunev culture need to be differentiated. Typical sites include Tas-Khaaz, Beltyry, Uibat III, Uibat V (in the Uybat river basin), Chernovaya VIII, Chernovaya XI, Razliv X, and Strelka. The typological horizon between the development of the Afanas’ev and Okunev steppe cultures in the Minusinsk Basin and the development of the later Andronovo type is very thin.