COSSACK'S DUGOUTS IN THE BURIAL MOUND ON THE KUBAN RIVER RIGHT BANK (BASED ON SECURITY EXCAVATIONS IN 2013)
The article is devoted to the publication of the late Middle Ages - Modern Times monuments of the burial mound, located on the Kuban river right bank. There is a description of the six similar dugouts with the stoves and a few pits located around hypothetical center. Small dugouts were designed for two people and were used for a short time, and the minor concentration of mass archaeological material (bones and pottery) evidences to it. Each dugout had a stove located in the entrance's opposite side of rectangular trench over its floor. All stoves had a domical vault without chimney, a narrow furnace opening, calcined furnace walls and a flat smeared with clay bottom. There also was a narrow slot below the stove mouth and further to the entrance. The ditch in the center of the dugout's floor was filled with coal and ashes. Despite the dominance of “Crimean” group of glazed and non-glazed pottery, the pieces of the fish and pig bones give us the idea about no Muslim worship of the local residents. A flint stone and the lead spherical bullet are often interpreted as common findings in the Russian colonist's settlements dated by the 17th-18th centuries. Than the dugouts were often used as the seasonal Cossack's dwellings for fishing, one of their main avocations. The construction features of the dugouts have the ethnographical analogies in the Don region. A small settlement with the circular layout was named “kuren”. The analysis of the excavations' results let us identify the peculiarities of the Cossacks' adaptation on the colonizing territories of the Kuban region and trace the traditional house-building features in the end of the 17th and at the beginning of the 18th centuries.