Viktor A. Trifonov*, Natalia I. Shishlina**, Olga F. Chernova***, Viacheslav S. Sevastyanov****, Jan van der Plicht*****, Feodor N. Golenishchev******

*Institute for the History of Material Culture, RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia (viktor_trifonov@mail.ru)
**State Historical Myseum, Moscow, Russia (nshishlina@mail.ru)
***A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, RAS, Moscow, Russia (olga.chernova.moscow@gmail.com)
****Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, RAS, Moscow, Russia (vsev@geokhi.ru)
*****University of Groningen, Leiden University, Netherlands (j.van.der.plicht@rug.nl)
******Zoological Institute, RAS, St. Petersburg,, Russia (Fedor.Golenishchev@zin.ru)

Keywords: dolmens, Bronze Age, the Caucasus, animal fur, clothes, morphological analysis, isotopic analysis.

The paper presents results of the morphological and isotopic analyses of fur remnants coming from a dolmen dating to the Early Bronze Age (the end of the 4rd millennium BC) discovered near Stanitsa Tsarskaya in the North-West Caucasus, 1898. It has been established that the fur garment of the buried individual was made of souslik (a short-tailed ground squirrel (S. citellus) skins, maybe, skins of Spermophilus pygmaeus. This part of the outer clothes was probably a fur coat which covered the buried individual who was dressed in a brown striped wool cloak decorated, possibly, with red tassels along the lower edge. Additional accessories such as silver fastenings shaped as curved (crook-shaped) pins may be regarded to be an indicator of the fashion trend adopted by locals from the Near East. For the first time a study of this type offers a possibility to reconstruct a cutout and decoration of woven and fur clothes worn by a North Caucasus inhabitant who lived in the Early Bronze Age period.