Kurgan culture
This article is about Bronze Age burial mounds. See Kurgan Oblast for the russian district of that name.
Kurgan (кургáн) is the russian word (from turkic) for a type of burial mound or barrow, heaped over a burial chamber, often of wood. Such barrows were characteristic of Bronze Age nomadic peoples of the steppes, from the Altai to the Caucasus and Romania. Within the burial chamber at the heart of the kurgan, members of the elite were buried with grave goods and sacrificial offerings, sometimes including horse-sacrifices.
Sometimes, burial mounds are quite complex structures with internal chambers. The bodies of important or wealthy people, together with grave goods were placed in such graves out of respect or for religious reasons.
In 1956 Marija Gimbutas introduced her "Kurgan hypothesis" combining kurgan archaeology with linguistics to locate the origins of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking peoples. She tentatively named the culture "Kurgan" after their distinctive burial mounds and traced its diffusion into Europe. This hypothesis has had a significant impact on Indo-European research.
Those scholars who follow Gimbutas identify a Kurgan culture as reflecting an early Indo-European ethnicity which existed in the steppes and southeastern Europe from the fifth to third millennia BCE.
Several towns in Russia are called Kurgan, including the capital of the Kurgan Oblast (Курганская область).
