ИСТИНА

Central Asia is one of the main migration routes for Paleolithic societies moving into North and East Asia. The Eastern coast of the Caspian Sea represented a key area for human migration and many forms of contacts and exchanges occurred with neighboring regions. The pioneer investigations conducted by Soviet archaeologists during the mid-20th century in the Eastern Caspian region allowed A.P. Okladnikov the discovering of the burial site named Kailyu, located in western Turkmenistan. Kailyu rockshelter is one of the few sites of the region (with Jebel and Dam Dam Cheshme 1 and 2) with stratified deposits encompassing the transition from the Epipalaeolithic to the Neolithic. Despite his primary importance, the site is remained almost undescribed and unpublished to this day. The re-evaluation of the burial, including chrono-cultural reattribution, anthropological study and analysis of the material associated to the human remains, offers an opportunity to explore new aspects of the regional Epipalaeolithic. This presentation focuses on the hundreds of shell beads discovered in the burial. The method includes the sourcing of the material and morphometric and microscopic analyses in order to explore the strategies developed by the group of Kailyu to acquire, transform, and use the beads. We will provide new insights on the relation developed by the Late Caspian Epipaleolithic communities with their physical and social environments. We will also discuss the methodological and interpretative limits we face for inferring cultural and social behaviors from this particular category of data within a poorly documented region. The analysis of the human remains is supported by the Russian Foundation of the Basic Research (RFBR). project grant number #16-06-00420 ‘Hunter-gatherers during the final Paleolithic and Mesolithic’. Shell beads analysis is supported by the project ‘Multidisciplinary Research in Archaeology and Ethnography of the Northern and Central Asia’ grant number #14-50-00036.