D. T. BEREZOVETS AND NETAILIVKA BURIAL GROUND OF SALTIV CULTURE: DISCOVERY, MODERN RESEARCHES, RESULTS

Peculiarity of the Netailivka burial ground, noted by its discoverer D. T. Berezovets, is the total predominance of burials where the bones of the buried people are completely absent. At the same time the burials often contain grave goods located in the places when the bodies of the deceased should have been lied. This fact allowed D. T. Berezovets to suppose that initially the burial was performed on the surface of the earth where the body was exposed to natural factors and only after that it was re-buried into a pit. However, the researches of recent years show that burials were made in full accordance with the funeral rite of the Proto-Bulgarian population of the Saltiv culture. The absence of human remains in most of the burial pits should be associated with the specific hydrological conditions prevailing at the site of the necropolis in the post-Saltiv period. In a number of burials of the burial ground the later activity in the burial pits, associated with ritual actions performed in ancient times, were recorded. These actions testify the existence of the so-called «final ceremony» among the Netailivka people, the holding of which meant the end of mourning for the deceased person and made the death of a relative complete and final for the living. The study of the chronological markers of the site made it possible to attribute the time of the burial ground to the stage of the formation of the Saltiv culture in the region and to date the earliest burials of the necropolis to the 740—790 AD. The set of decorations and brooches from early burials shows that the original area of the migration of this population was the North-Eastern Caucasus (the territory of modern Chechnya and Dagestan). The location of the horse remains in the burials of the horsemen indicates the mixed Turkic-Ugric character of the population, which was part of the tribal union of the «Bulgars». The date of the burial ground and the probable area of residence of the population which made it, allows us to identify the «Netailivka» people with the representatives of the nomadic Bulgar union known from literary sources as «Sabirs / Savirs»