Sacralization of the Landscape: Survey Campaign 2020 in the Ust’-Kalmanka district of the Altai region

Abstract

In the summer of 2020, the steppe detachment of the archaeological expedition of the Altai State Pedagogical University explored the territory between the Charysh and the Kalmanka rivers in the Altai Territory. The team monitored 25 mounds of previously identified individual monuments at the top of the watershed near the village of Ust’-Kalmanka. They interpreted the semantics of the burial site from the standpoint of religious and mythical ideas of the Siberian peoples about the so-called world mountain. The scientists compared the semantics of the mounds to the belt symbol. The linear structure of the barrow chain and ditches could be associated with an untied belt, which should have strengthened the mediator functions of the watershed as a sacral landscape that facilitates the rite of passage. The mound chain combined stone-mud and mud structures, probably associated with the cult practices and the multiculturalism of the people that built them. Judging by the external parameters, the mounds were built in the middle or the second half of the 1st millennium BC.