Burials of the Beginning of the Early Iron Age in the Mounds of Southern Eastern Europe (Metastructure of Sites)

The article explores the secondary burials of Bronze Age mounds in the steppe zone of southern Eastern Europe, dating back to the pre-Scythian period. It is established, based on summaries of funerary sites published by various researchers and collected by the author, that entrance burials of the pre-Scythian period are found discreetly in various burial mounds and also form small groups in some of them. The known burials are systematized by localization and number of burials in the burial mound group, as well as their topography in a single burial mound (group). This systematization revealed that burials of the pre-Scythian period can form stable groups of several burials connected by both vertical (tiers) and horizontal stratigraphy in a single mound. The analysis suggests a hypothesis about the non-random nature of these findings, the territorial localization of certain groups of the pre-Scythian population of the steppe, and the connection of this phenomenon with periods of relative stability in the life of nomadic communities during the pre-Scythian period of the early Iron Age.