The range of Medieval burial structures on the territory of Belarus includes barrows with stone lining. Commonly, one layer of stones encircled a barrow, but two layers’ lining could also be met. Funeral rite can be described as inhumation at the horizon level or in a pit with western orientation of the dead. Individual burials are most characteristic though double burials were practiced too. Not every burial mound contains grave goods. The items are represented by ornaments, amulets and pots of mostly Slavic type. The finds date back to the 11th – early 12th or 12th – 13th century. The same burial ground could also contain barrows composed entirely of earth, ones including stones interspersed or in the form of thin pavement at the horizon. Barrows of this kind are spread both in central Belarus and farther to the north, covering partly the Dzvina Basin, or more often to the south-west – in the Middle Buh Basin including Polish and Belarusian parts.
In Ukraine barrows with stone construction were studied in Zhytomyr Polissya Region where almost 20 burial grounds of this type are known. Such barrows can be found in some other places too: in the Ros’ Basin, in Bukovyna (two barrows with stone lining dated back to the 12th – mid 13th century have been excavated there), in Podilia (burial sites in Zhnyborody I, Sokilets’, Hlybochok).
In archaeological studies, there’s a tendency to assign all the barrows with stone constructions to the range of so called stone barrows which are considered to be burial sites of the Jaćviahi. Though in the eastern part of Mazur Lake region and in the basin of the Chornaya Hancha river where the Jatvingians have been located according to the evidence from chronicles there’s no barrows dated back to the 10th – 13th centuries at all. At the same time, in the first millennium AD barrows with stone lining were spread in the range of the Eastern Balts tribes: on the territory of Latvia (tribal areas of Latgaly, Siely, Ziemgaly) and Lithuania (the area of the Eastern Lithuanian Barrows Culture) where they dominated between the 4th and 7th centuries and still could be met in the 7th – 10th centuries. However, we know Eastern Balts’ barrows with stone lining of the eleventh century in the south of Lithuania and bordering part of Belarus, which are chronologically close to the barrows with stone constructions in the rest part of Belarus and in the Middle Dnipro region. The emergence of these kind sites in Bukovyna and Podillia became possible in the result of the union of Volhynian and Galician principalities, i.e. after 1199.
Key words: barrows with stone lining, grave goods, Middle Buh region, Zhytomyr Polissya region, Bukovyna, Podillia, Jatvingians, the Eastern Lithuanian Barrows Culture.
Early Bronze Age barrow in Jawczyce, site 1, Wieliczka Foothills, Lesser Poland
