Meat Parting Food in the Funeral Rite of the Dnipro-Prut Babyne Culture

Abstract

In the funeral rites of many archaeological cultures of the Bronze Age of Eastern Europe, it was practiced to accompany the deceased with the afterlife food, in particular meat, which is documented on the basis of animal bones in graves. This practice had taken place among pastoralists who left behind the sites of the Babyne Cultural circle. Among three Babyne’s cultures, only one — the Dnipro-Prut culture (DPBC) — lacks research on funerary meat food, which is not only an element of the burial ritual, but also serves as an important criterion for the cultural attribution of burials. The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate the informative potential of parting meat food of the DPBC. The operational arsenal of research includes methods of statistics, correlation, planigraphy and cartography. As a result of the study, it became clear that all three local variants of the DPBC (Dnipro-Dnister, Dnipro-Buh and Dnister-Prut) are characterised by a similar list of varieties of meat food (remains of ribs, vertebrae, tailbone, and legs of domestic animals, mostly sheep and bulls (fig. 1; 2). Along with this similarity, there were certain differences in the specific gravity and placement of the mentioned varieties of meat food in each local variant of the DPBC. Moreover, there were variations in the specific gravity and placement in the grave of the food in each local variant of the DPBC (tab. 1—4). The given facts, on the one hand, confirm the correctness of the selection of the DPBС itself in the structure of the Babyne cultural circle, as well as the selection of local variants in the structure of the DPBC, and on the other hand, demonstrate its difference from two other Babyne cultures — Dnipro-Don and Volga-Don — whose burial rite was characterised by completely different sets of bones of domestic animals (fig. 3). In addition, the meat food in the burials, in combination with other data, demonstrates the heredity between successive cultures of the Middle—Late Bronze Age, in our case Catacomb — Babyne — Zrubna cultures.