Kurgan

A kurgan (Russian: курга́н) is a tumulus, a type of burial mound or barrow, heaped over a burial chamber, often of wood. The Russian noun, which is already attested in Old East Slavic, is borrowed from an unidentified Turkic language, compare Modern Turkish kurğan, which means "fortress". These are mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Associated with its use in Soviet archaeology, the word is now widely used for tumuli in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology.

The earliest kurgans date to the 4th millennium BC in the Caucasus, and are associated with the Indo-Europeans. Kurgans were built in the Eneolithic, Bronze, Iron, Antiquity and Middle Ages, with ancient traditions still active in Southern Siberia and Central Asia. Kurgan cultures are divided archeologically into different sub-cultures, such as Timber Grave, Pit Grave, Scythian, Sarmatian, Hunnish and Kuman-Kipchak.

A plethora of placenames that include the word "kurgan" are located from Lake Baikal to the Black Sea.

Kurgan (disambiguation)

Kurgan is a tumulus or burial mound in Eurasia, but especially in Russia and Ukraine.

Kurgan may also refer to:

Kurgan hypothesis

The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory or Kurgan model) is the most widely accepted proposal of several solutions to explain the origins and spread of the Indo-European languages. It postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language. The term is derived from kurgan (курган), a Turkic loanword in Russian for a tumulus or burial mound.

The Kurgan hypothesis was first formulated in the 1950s by Marija Gimbutas, who used the term to group various cultures, including the Yamna, or Pit Grave, culture and its predecessors. David Anthony instead uses the core Yamna Culture and its relationship with other cultures as a point of reference.

Marija Gimbutas defined the "Kurgan culture" as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper/Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BC). The people of these cultures were nomadic pastoralists, who, according to the model, by the early 3rd millennium BC had expanded throughout the Pontic-Caspian steppe and into Eastern Europe.