Elite Female Burial from the Pre-Scythian Koban Necropolis Reveals Bronze Age Jewellery and Iranian Links

A richly furnished female burial from the famous Koban cemetery in North Ossetia has been brought back into scientific circulation more than 140 years after its finds arrived in Vienna. Researchers at the Natural History Museum Vienna have published a detailed analysis of burial 4, an assemblage of bronze jewellery, zoomorphic pendants, perforated wild boar tusks and a rare clay pyxis that was donated to the museum by the Vienna Anthropological Society in 1883. The study, part of an ongoing project to catalogue the museum’s previously unpublished Caucasian collection, dates the grave to the 8th century BCE and reveals both the local identity of the Koban community and its far-reaching contacts with Iran and the South Caucasus.

The Koban culture, which flourished in the Central Caucasus during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, is named after the eponymous necropolis on the northern slope of the main Caucasus ridge. The cemetery covered around two hectares and originally contained several hundred burials. Between 1881 and 1891, more than thirty burial complexes from Koban were acquired for the Natural History Museum in Vienna at the request of Franz Heger, yet these grave assemblages were never catalogued and presented in their entirety. The new publication series is now correcting this gap, following an earlier study devoted to burial 5 and male attire.

Burial 4 stands out because of the sheer quantity and character of its grave goods, which consist mainly of female jewellery. The inventory includes two multi-turn temporal pendants made of bronze wire with triangular cross-section and spiral ends, two long bronze pins nearly thirty centimetres in length with flattened rectangular heads, two bronze plate bracelets with three relief ribs and spiral terminals, a spiral-shaped finger ring, two massive arc-shaped fibulae decorated with carved bands and herringbone ornament, a ring-shaped pendant twisted from bronze wire, a large bronze belt buckle, a fragmented bronze belt, two bird-shaped zoomorphic pendants, a pendant in the form of a ram’s head, two perforated boar tusks and a small clay pyxis. Additional items recorded in the inventory book include cross-shaped plaques, a rhombic button, thirteen narrow bronze tubes, four round plaques and beads of carnelian and whitish calcareous material.

The temporal pendants with spiral ends are a hallmark of female adornment at the Koban cemetery and are rarely found outside the northern slope of the Central Caucasus. Their chronological range is wide: comparable pieces from burial 9 of the Koban necropolis have been radiocarbon dated to the 10th to 9th centuries BCE, while examples from the Seržhen-Yurt cemetery in the northeastern Caucasus belong to the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. Similar pendants from the Tli cemetery in South Ossetia were made not of bronze wire but mainly of wide electrum plate, and the authors question earlier claims that these rare electrum or silver pendants remained in use for as long as three centuries.

The long bronze pins with flattened, paddle-like heads are considered a specific ornament of the female costume of the Koban community. At least three varieties can be distinguished by the shape and proportions of the head, and items with a head-to-needle length ratio of 3:1 predominate. Pins with triangular heads, found together with cylindrical and spiral bronze armbands, appear to be relatively older, while younger modifications, some made of iron, continued into the Early Scythian period with smaller sizes and narrower rectangular heads. A hoard from the Dzhi-Dzhi tract near the Koban village, dated no later than the 8th century BCE, contained artefacts whose closest parallels lie in burial 4, including belt buckles inlaid with iron, a ram’s-head pendant and long pins with flattened heads.

Among the most spectacular objects are the belt fittings. The buckle from burial 4 is more than twenty centimetres long and belongs to a distinctive group of large bronze buckles decorated with iron inlay. Its surface bears three W-shaped figures set against an engraved background of zigzags, elongated triangles, hatched grids, dots and circles, all enclosed in a rectangular frame. The accompanying belt, made of a thin bronze plate attached to a leather base, is decorated with rows of dotted patterns and images of two writhing snakes whose bodies are filled with slanting rows of dots. The closest parallels to these snake images come from Tli burials 50 and 266, which are dated to the 8th century BCE. Iron inlay on bronze objects became widespread in the Central Caucasus no earlier than the 8th century BCE, making the buckle a valuable chronological marker.

The zoomorphic pendants shed light on the spiritual world of the Caucasian highlanders. The two bird-shaped pendants combine a triangular tail with a narrow elongated animal muzzle turning into a curved neck, and such figures come mainly from female burials. The authors suggest that figures combining bird and ram features may reflect Iranian ideas about the goddess farn, who could be personified as both a bird and a ram. The ram’s-head pendant from burial 4, with twisted horns spread wide apart and a suspension loop at the base of the horns, belongs to a type whose distribution centre lay in North Ossetia. The sheep was one of the most venerated animals in Ossetia, and in the Ossetian Nart epic sheep herds appear as indicators of wealth and the ram acts as a sacrificial animal. Notably, the joint occurrence of ram’s-head and bird-shaped pendants recorded in burial 4 has not yet been established in other areas of the Koban culture.

Perhaps the most telling find is the clay pyxis, a small lidded vessel with curved shoulders, two pierced lugs and incised decoration of hatched triangles forming zigzags, with traces of white inlay. Of all the numerous sites of the Koban culture, pyxides are known only from the eponymous necropolis, where at least six examples have been found, two of them now in Vienna. The vessels have no prototypes in the ceramic tradition of the Central Caucasian population and are undoubtedly borrowed pottery. Their origin lies in Iran and neighbouring countries: one of the main centres of pyxis manufacture in the Near East during the first half of the 1st millennium BCE was located in southwest Iran, in Elam, and ornate concave-sided pyxides with perforated side protrusions were produced mainly during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. The route by which such vessels reached the Central Caucasus probably ran through the territory of modern Azerbaijan, where a similar pyxis is known from the Zeyamchay cemetery. The authors reject earlier hypotheses that linked the Koban pyxides to the Aegean basin and dated them to the 10th century BCE.

Bringing together the typological and chronological evidence, the researchers date burial 4 to the 8th century BCE. The iron-inlaid buckle, the pyxis with its Iranian affinities and the finger rings with spiral shields, which first appeared in the Koban culture in the 8th century BCE, all point to this century, and a radiocarbon date obtained from one of the wild boar tusks places the burial within 786 to 541 calBC at 95.4 percent probability. Given the absence of any material from the 7th or 6th centuries BCE in the inventory, a date within the 8th century BCE seems the most realistic. The perforated boar tusks themselves probably served as amulets endowed with special magical powers, a practice shared by various peoples of the Caucasus and the Eurasian steppe.

The funerary inventory of burial 4 can be divided into groups that point to different Caucasian traditions and trade networks. The largest group reflects the activities of the North Ossetian bronzeworking centre and is practically unknown outside the local Koban community, comprising the large pins, the iron-inlaid buckles and the temporal pendants with spiral ends. A second group includes artefacts typical of the Central Caucasian mountain zone, such as the ram’s-head pendant, the herringbone-decorated fibulae, the snake belt and rhombic plaques, the latter two categories being most fully represented at Tli on the southern slope of the same ridge. A third group comprises objects common to both mountainous and foothill regions of the North Caucasus, including the ribbed bracelets, bird-shaped pendants, round plaques, cross-shaped buttons and cylindrical tubes. Because the Koban community had no local sources of tin, its highly artistic tin-bronzes depended on international exchange networks, and the authors suggest that Iran and its neighbouring countries may have been among the suppliers of tin to the Central Caucasian metal industry in the early 1st millennium BCE. The consistency of the burial 4 assemblage with other closed finds, such as Chantre’s burials 16 and 17 and the Dzhi-Dzhi hoard, confirms it as a reliable archaeological complex and demonstrates that the Viennese Caucasian collection remains a valuable source for the study of the entire Koban culture.

Subject of Research: Archaeological analysis of an elite female burial of the pre-Scythian Koban culture in the North Caucasus

Article Title: Elite female burial of the pre-Scythian period from the Koban Necropolis

Article References: Elite female burial of the pre-Scythian period from the Koban Necropolis. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.169550

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.169550

Keywords: Koban culture, Caucasus archaeology, North Ossetia, Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, female burial, Natural History Museum Vienna, clay pyxis, iron inlay, zoomorphic pendants, pre-Scythian period, ancient jewellery