The kurgans and the burials they contain are consistent with the early IE burial practices outlined above, and the late Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas proposed that the kurgan peoples were in fact early Indo-Europeans.

In 1897 N. I. Veselovskii excavated the very large, nearly 11 meter high Oshad kurgan or barrow in the town of Maikop in the Kuban region near the foothills of the northwestern Caucasus (the present-day capital of the Adygei Republic).[…]This discovery stimulated the excavation of other large kurgans located in the same general region, some of which seemed royal-like in their dimensions and, when not robbed in antiquity, in their materials.

Even in the middle Volga region some kurgans have central graves containing adult females, as at Krasnosamarskoe IV.[…]The appearance of adult females in one out of five kurgan graves, including central graves, suggests that gender was not the only factor that determined who was buried under a kurgan.

Kurgan

Meaning

Noun

Name

Origin