EARLY BRONZE AGE "FUR COAT" FROM THE DOLMEN NEAR TSARSKAYA STANITSA (1898) IN NORTHWEST CAUCASUS: METHODS AND RESULTS OF AN INTEGRATED STUDY

The paper presents results of the morphological and isotopic analyses of fur remnants coming from a dolmen dating to the Early Bronze Age (the end of the 4rd millennium BC) discovered near Stanitsa Tsarskaya in the North-West Caucasus, 1898. It has been established that the fur garment of the buried individual was made of souslik (a short-tailed ground squirrel (S. citellus) skins, maybe, skins of Spermophilus pygmaeus. This part of the outer clothes was probably a fur coat which covered the buried individual who was dressed in a brown striped wool cloak decorated, possibly, with red tassels along the lower edge. Additional accessories such as silver fastenings shaped as curved (crook-shaped) pins may be regarded to be an indicator of the fashion trend adopted by locals from the Near East. For the first time a study of this type offers a possibility to reconstruct a cutout and decoration of woven and fur clothes worn by a North Caucasus inhabitant who lived in the Early Bronze Age period.