Tashtyk Culture

an archaeological culture of the Iron Age in southern Siberia. The Tashtyk culture existed from the first century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. in the middle Enisei River basin, including the Minusinsk Basin, the Krasnoiarsk area, and the eastern part of Kemerovo Oblast. The culture was named after a burial ground excavated on the Tashtyk River, near the village of Bateni on the Enisei. The culture is represented mainly by crypts and flat-grave burial grounds, primarily with cremations. The Tashtyk tribes were descended from the population of the Tagar culture period (the Ting-Ling), who intermingled with the Turkic-speaking Gian’gun’, who came from Central Asia in the second and first centuries B.C. Tashtyk burials have yielded portrait-type masks made of kaolin with painted decoration in two colors, vessels, and facsimiles of various objects. Burials of the nobility contained wooden animal figurines; statuettes depicting bondmen in a naive, realistic style have also been found. The Ting-Ling-Gian’gun’ economy was based on livestock raising and land cultivation. The society was in the final stage of disintegration of primitive communal relations.