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This article is about Bronze Age burial mounds. See Kurgan, Kurgan Oblast for a Russian city of that name.
Kurgan (кургáн) is the Russian word (from Turkic) for a type of burial mound or barrow, heaped over a burial chamber, often of wood.
In 1956 Marija Gimbutas introduced her Kurgan hypothesis combining kurgan archaeology with linguistics to locate the origins of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speaking peoples. She tentatively named the culture "Kurgan" after their distinctive burial mounds and traced its diffusion into Europe. This hypothesis has had a significant impact on Indo-European research. Those scholars who follow Gimbutas identify a Kurgan culture as reflecting an early Indo-European ethnicity which existed in the steppes and southeastern Europe from the fifth to third millennia BC.
Several towns in Russia are called Kurgan, as well as one oblast (Курганская
область), named after its capital.
1 Archaeology
Kurgan type barrows were characteristic of Bronze Age nomadic peoples of the steppeIn physical geography, steppe (from Russian , step is a plain without trees (apart from those near rivers and lakes); it is similar to a prairie, although a prairie is generally reckoned as being dominated by tall grasses, while short grasses are said tos, from the AltaiFor the republic in Russia, see Altai Republic. Altai (in Mongolian Altain-ula the "Mountains of Gold"), a term used in Asiatic geography with various significations. The Altai region in West Siberia and Mongolia, is similar in character to Switzerland, b to the CaucasusThe Caucasus is a region in eastern Europe and western Asia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea which includes the Caucasus mountains and surrounding lowlands. It is occasionally considered part of Central Asia. The highest peak is Elbrus (5642m), w and RomaniaRomania (formerly spelled Rumania or Roumania is a country in southeastern Europe. Romania is bordered by Ukraine and Moldova in the northeast, Hungary and Serbia in the west and Bulgaria to the south. Romania also has a small sea coast on the Black Sea.. Sometimes, burial mounds are quite complex structures with internal chambers. Within the burial chamber at the heart of the kurgan, members of the elite were buried with grave goods and sacrificial offerings, sometimes including horses and chariots.
