Posthumous Trepanation from the Burial of the Middle Bronze Age on the Upper Don

The paper publishes the results of a study by the method of tracology of postmortem trepanation found on the skull of a man from the burial of the Middle Don catacomb culture of the Bronze Age. The burial itself is an atypical reburial of bone remains, which is part of a large ancestral funeral and ritual complex built by the bearers of the tradition of roller ornamentation of ceramics and can be tentatively dated to the XXIII—XXII centuries BC. It was found that the holes were made in the occipital part with a tool with a grooved working blade, presumably to extract the brain. After that, the skull was probably dried, while retaining the shape of the head.