BURIAL GROUND OF CHERNIAKHIV CULTURE BOROMLIA (ACCORDING TO ETHNIC CRANIOSCOPICAL DATA)

Abstract

Anthropological material is generally considered a reliable historical source for the study of ethnogenesis and ethnic history of peoples. This article presents, for the first time, cranioscopical (non-metric) features of skulls from the Roman-period Boromlia burial ground (Chernyakhiv culture) in the Trostianets district of Sumy Oblast, Ukraine. The cranial material from the burial ground is preserved in the collections of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The author personally examined 23 skulls and their fragments from the burials. The aim of the article is to introduce new cranioscopical data into scientific circulation, provide a general characteristic of the sample from the village of Boromlya (Sumy Oblast), and determine the features of the studied group based on the results of ethnic cranioscopy. General scientific (analysis and synthesis), anthropological, and statistical methods were employed. To determine the features of the studied male and female skulls, a cranioscopical program is used, which includes five features first investigated by O. G. Kozintsev. The sixth feature, supraorbital openings, was independently proposed by Y. Dodo and T. V. Tomashevich. According to the presented program, the skulls are examined together, without dividing them into male and female series. Frequencies of cranioscopical features in the cranial series of the Boromlya Chernyakhiv culture are presented for the first time. Based on the data of ethnic cranioscopy, it is established that the skulls from the ground burials of the Boromlya burial ground in Northern Ukraine, which represent the population of the Chernyakhiv culture of the 4th–6th centuries AD, are characterized by a moderate frequency of supraorbital openings. Analogies are observed in the group of skulls from the 3rd–4th centuries AD in Western Ukraine at Chernelyv-Rusky. It is determined that, based on the feature of suborbital pattern type II, the studied sample belongs to southern Europids, similar to the Chernelyv-Rusky sample. The difference between these groups lies mainly in the occipital index, with the western series being more Europid.