Bezvodnensky Burial Ground

Bezvodnensky Burial Ground — a flat-grave cemetery of the 5th–8th centuries near the selo of Bezvodnoe in Kstovsky District, excavated in its entirety: 169 graves containing jewelry, weapons, and clay vessels, with some warriors buried alongside horses in full harness.^[1] The site was discovered in 1970 by Gorky archaeologist Vitaly Chernikov; over the following two seasons it was excavated by an expedition from the Institute of Archaeology led by Yury Krasnov, and the findings were published as a standalone book.^[1][2][3] Krasnov identified the population that left the burial ground as a distinct group of Volga Finno-Ugric peoples — related to the Muroma, and in part to the Merya, and to the northern groups of the Mordva, ancestors of the later Erzya.^[1]

How it was found

In 1970, Gorky archaeologist Vitaly Chernikov noticed a flat-grave burial ground near the selo of Bezvodnoe — a cemetery with no burial mound, the kind that in the Volga Region is found only through chance discoveries or plowing.^[1] Over the following two seasons, an expedition from the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow, led by Yury Krasnov, worked the site and excavated it completely: 169 graves.^[1]

Krasnov published the excavation results twice. An initial account of the 1971 fieldwork appeared in the Kratkie Soobshcheniya Instituta Arkheologii (Brief Communications of the Institute of Archaeology) in 1974, and the full description — the cemetery's layout, stratigraphy, burial rite, analysis of artifacts, and the question of ethnic attribution — was published in 1980 as a standalone book, Bezvodnensky Burial Ground (On the History of the Gorky Volga Region in the Early Medieval Period).^[2][3] Nizhny Novgorod archaeologists continue to cite this book whenever the question arises of where to look for medieval Finno-Ugric cemeteries in the Volga-Oka lowlands.^[4]

Fully excavated sites of that period are rare in the Nizhny Novgorod Volga Region: the 169 burials at Bezvodnoe provide a count of objects, rites, and ages that no assemblage of isolated finds can match.^[1][2]

What lay in the graves

Women and girls were buried in full adornment: brow-bands, hair plaits ornaments, neck torques, beads, pectoral plaques, finger rings, bracelets, and sulygama clasps — used before buttons to fasten garments.^[1] Men's graves contained iron spearheads and arrowheads, richly decorated belts, and horse equipment; warrior burials with weapons were set apart from the rest.^[1]

The finds proved to be of mixed tribal origin, and therein lies the chief difficulty this site presents. Temporal rings — ornaments attached to a brow-band, a headdress, or braided into the hair — were found at Bezvodnoye in fewer than ten examples: such rings were common among the Merya, Muroma, and Mari, but far rarer among the ancient Mordva. The sulygama clasps, on the other hand, are a distinctively Mordva feature, and thin wire bracelets with ends hammered flat into lobes are typical of Mordva burials of the 7th–8th centuries.^[1]

Taken together, the burial ground aligns more closely with Mordva antiquities than with those of the Mari or Merya: direct parallels were found among Mordva brow-bands, hair ornaments, torques, many bead types, pectoral plaques, finger rings, and items of horse equipment.^[1]

The deceased came to the cemetery twice

Burials here were made in an extended position, consistently with the head to the north; secondary interments also occur. Examining these, Krasnov noticed incomplete skeletons with disturbed bone arrangement and explained this as follows: the dead were initially left in the open air and transferred to a ground grave much later, once the soft tissue had decomposed; traces of wood rot preserved in the fill came from the boards on which the partially decayed bodies were brought.^[5]

The burial ground also presents an anomaly with respect to age: among the approximately one hundred and fifty interred individuals, there are no infants under two years of age. Krasnov interpreted this as evidence of a special funerary rite for children that was performed outside the cemetery.^[5]

Mordva folklore preserves a direct memory of above-ground burial: in the tale "Dubolgo Pichay," a coffin with the deceased is placed on supports in a forest at a three-way crossroads, with baskets of wheat laid beside it.^[5] In the villages of Sabayevo and Davydovo in Kochkurovsky District, ethnologists as late as the 19th century encountered a living custom: in winter and early spring, coffins were hung in trees and buried in the ground only after the thaw, when the crossing of the Sura became passable again.^[5]

Bury me, dear mother, by the side of the main road… beneath the old oak

Whose people were they

Krasnov resolved the question of who left the burial ground not from a single find but from the full assemblage. The cemetery is small: it could not have belonged to a large tribe or even a large clan — it was more likely a shared necropolis for several neighboring families.^[1]

Krasnov's final formula is cautious, and for that reason has endured: the population of Bezvodnoye does not coincide with the Muroma, the Merya, or the Mordva, yet is connected to all three.^[1]

Later, another interpretation emerged for the same group of people. The Bezvodninskiy burial ground was included in a cluster of sites named after it and after the Younger Akhmylovo burial ground in Mari El, and Mari archaeologists linked the population that left it to the formation of the early Mari ethnos in the Vetluga–Volga–Oka interfluve, on a common substrate with the Volga Finnic peoples.^[1] Thus one cemetery acquired two readings: in some works its people are the ancestors of the Erzya, in others — the ancestors of the Mari.

A distinct group of Volga Finno-Ugric population, close in ethnographic terms on one side to the Muroma and partly to the Merya, and on the other to the northern groups of the Mordva, the ancestors of the later Mordva-Erzya

What came next in these places

Half a millennium separates the Bezvodninskiy burial ground from the earliest written records of the Teryukhans, yet archaeology does not lose the thread: in the basin of the Ozyorki River, south of Bezvodnoye, lie Mordva cemeteries from the 11th to the 14th centuries. At the Staroselskiy burial ground in 2016, excavators uncovered the grave of a young high-status warrior of the 11th–12th centuries, standing up to 180 centimeters tall, buried with two battle axes, a bow, a quiver, a pike, and a shield, with a birch-bark vessel containing chopped human bones placed above the grave.^[6]

Paired burials of a man and a woman, characteristic of Erzya funerary rites in the Tesha River basin, have been found here as well: five such burials at the Sarleyskiy burial ground near the selo of Sarley, and another, dating to the 11th–12th centuries, at the Teryukhan burial ground near the selo of Pomra.^[6] The Bezvodninskiy burial ground is the earliest link in this chain and the only one to have been fully excavated.^[1][2]

Sources

1. komanda-k.ru — Mari Forest Walkers — Bezvodnensky burial ground, February 5, 2020 (archive)
2. Yu. A. Krasnov — Bezvodnensky Burial Ground (On the History of the Gorky Volga Region in the Early Middle Ages). Moscow: Nauka, 1980. 224 pp.
3. Yu. A. Krasnov — Bezvodnensky Burial Ground (based on the 1971 excavations) // Brief Reports of the Institute of Archaeology. 1974. Issue 140. Pp. 84–95
4. opentextnn.ru — Open Text — G. P. Golovchansky et al. Materials for the Historical and Archaeological Assessment of a Land Parcel within the Boundaries of Moskovsky District of Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
5. MK — Nizhny Novgorod — MK in Nizhny Novgorod — Dmitry Karabelnikov. "Bury Me in the Old Oak," January 31, 2014 (archive)
6. MK — Nizhny Novgorod — MK in Nizhny Novgorod — Nizhny Novgorod archaeologists investigated a burial ground destroyed by vandals, December 22, 2016 (archive)