К вопросу об учете человеческих останков в коллективных захоронениях санитарного характера на этапе полевых работ

Abstract

Materials and methods. Based on the analysis of the descriptions of collective burials of the victims of the Mongol invasion in archaeological reports, taking into account the experience of foreign researchers of mass burials of the 20th century, an original method of fixing human remains of various completeness is proposed. Approbation of the methodology is described on the example of a study (2008, 2020) of a col-lective burial in 1238 in the archaeological object "construction No. 60" on the territory of the Yaroslavl Kremlin. Results. To resolve the issue of the method of registration of remains of different completeness, we turned to the archaeological practice of separating individual and mass material. As well as for individual archaeo-logical finds, it is proposed to introduce a field logbook of “individual anthropological finds”, in which they will be numbered and described with an indication of their completeness (“type” of deposition), localization and in situ position. The use of continuous numbering implies the general name of the numbered object, which, in our opinion, can be a name similar to that adopted for an individual material in archeology – “indi-vidual anthropological find”. Conclusion. The application of the proposed method will make it possible to more accurately describe the position and completeness of anthropological materials in mass graves of a sanitary nature or collective burials destroyed due to anthropogenic or other factors and containing redeposited remains. A careful de-scription and maximum "personification" with this approach will contribute to the realization of a paleoan-thropological material as a source for bioarchaeological and historical reconstructions. This corresponds to the modern contextual approach in archeology, aimed at a comprehensive study of the communities of the past based on a detailed analysis of all types of sources discovered during excavations.