The significance of late anthropological collections

Abstract

Late medieval anthropological materials are rarely subjected to scientific research. The authors of this work attempt to demonsrate the importance of such investigations. Despite a rather large number of writen sources, late anthropological materials can significantly extend the collection of sources related to the specified period. In order to illustrate this concept the authors conducted an analysis of paleoanthropological materials from the island town of Sviyazhsk dating back to 16th-17th centuries. The materials have been discovered at excavations of parish Orthodox burial grounds. All the burial grounds date back to the same period, which allowed the reearchers to incorporate the materials into a single series. The investigation was conducted in accordance with a standard program adopted in the Russian Federation: determination of gender and age; subdivision of the collection into two series on the basis of gender; intragroup and intergroup aalysis of the series. This article features a analysis of the male portion of the collection, as investigations of male collections is more widely used in palaeoanthropology, and much more reference material is available for their execution. The analyzed material was subdivided into the following two series: the first one comprised materials from a monastery burial ground, and the second – parish necropoleis of the town. An intergroup comparison was conducted with the application of canonical analysis. A dendrogram was plotted in order to visualize the acquired data. As a result of conducted invesigation the authors established that both monastery and parish series from the island town of Sviyazsk subjected to intragroup analysis demonstrate their correspondence to the Eu Caucasian group with a Mongoloid component of local Ural origin in the morphology of sculls from the parish series. An intergroup aalysis revealed a morphological similarity of the parish series with the Russian series from Moscow governorate illustrating the local colonization routes. Thus, as a result of investigation the authors acquired new information on the history of the Middle Volga region providing an insight into the origination of the anthropological appearance of local peoples.