Museibli N.A.

Key words: Southern Caucasus, Late Eneolithic, Leilatepe culture, Soyug Bulag burial mounds, burial rite, migrations of population groups.
The excavations at Soyug Bulag cemetery have added to our knowledge of the Leilatepe Eneolithic archaeological culture in Azerbaijan, for which most of the hitherto available material came from settlements. The article presents the results of excavations at 18 settlements (2005). The specific features of the burial rite have analogies in the Maikop culture of the Caucasus. Some archaic tools made of obsidian and flint are typical of the Neolithic and indicate the genetic affinity between the Leilatepe and Maikop cultures, as well as Mesopotamian cultures (Ubaid, Uruk). Radiocarbon analysis has confirmed that the mounds at Soyug Bulag date to the first half of the 4th millennium BC. Investigations at the mounds revealed that the history of burial mounds in the Southern Caucasus is over a thousand years longer than previously assumed, and yielded important data for researching the migrations of certain population groups from Mesopotamia to the Caucasus in the 4th millennium BC.