An elite burial of the Chinge-Tey I kurgan: preliminary analysis of anthropological data

Abstract

The article presents preliminary results of the analysis of the skeletal remains of an individual buried in the elite grave 9 of the Chinge-Tey I kurgan. According to osteological data the skeleton belongs to a male of 20–25 years old. The hip and lower extremity bones display the periosteal lesions. Despite postmortem destruction and deformation, the skull was reconstructed and measured using rather wide battery of traits. The data on thirteen cranial metric traits were analyzed by means of discriminate canonical analysis using averaged intra-group correlation matrix. To compare the male from grave 9 with other Scythian populations of Tuva, the obtained vector scores were used to calculate the squared Mahalanobis distances (D2).The results of statistical analysis reveal high level of similarity between the morphology of the male skull from the elite grave with other samples of the Aldy-Bel culture. The characteristic morphologic complex includes the largest width of the skull and the least protruding nasal bones comparing to all other samples from Tuva. Among the closest analogies to the Chinge-Tey I skull is the sample from another elite burials of the Aldy-Bel culture, the Arzhan-2 kurgan.