Forgotten complexes and Chinese coins from the Timiryazevo-1 burial site

In the reconstruction of historical and cultural processes in the south of Western Siberia, one of the problems is that there are few nearly precisely dated and fully published early medieval complexes available. One of possible solutions to this problem is to introduce the academic community to the left-aside material kept in museum repositories. That can contribute to the preservation of collections and often has a significant information impact. The article represents a detailed publication and analysis of materials from the two 'forgotten' burial mounds of the Timiryazevo-1 burial site (excavations carried out by V.I. Matyushchen-ko in 1956) and a cultural and chronological interpretation of them. These two complexes from the most renowned V-X century archaeological burial site of Western Siberia have never been published before. The presence of a Chinese coin in one of them naturally raised one more issue - the need to introduce the academia to all of the numismatic finds from archaeological excavations of the Timiryazevo-1 burial site and to analyze these finds. The results produced during this research consist in the description, classification and dating of the two burial mounds. The presence of the coin in the non-looted burial mound 2 dating back to the second half of the VII-VIII centuries allowed include it in a currently small group of Siberia's chronological reference complexes of the early Middle Ages. In the form of a catalogue, the article lists all of the known Chinese coins from the Timiryazevo-1 burial site: one of the Sui state with the Wu-Shu legend and the other three of the Tang state with the Kai Yuan Tong Bao legend. The authors suggest that these coins had been brought to the Tom Ob region via Semirechye by Sogdian merchants.

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