Trip to Astana.

“Hey, Polovtsian region,
You are glorious by the herds
There are black sheep roaming
In the showers of dry grass"

Olzhas Suleimenov. “Argamak”.

Archaeological excavation tours in vicinity of Astana.

No prehistoric sites or settlements directly on the territory of Tselinograd have yet been discovered, although the presence of an ancient person here and in the surrounding area is beyond doubt. In the spring of 1930, when planting trees in the courtyard of the second-level school, students dug up a clay pot with a typical ornament of Andronovo culture and two arrowheads - one of pink, the other of gray stone.
About a month later, at the bottom of the Chubarsky Log (Salt Beam), a resident of the city, L.I. Shcheglov, picked up the bronze tip of the spear.
Unfortunately, both finds were subsequently lost without a trace. In 1968 - 1972, in the course of work to deepen Ishim in the pulp thrown ashore by a dredger, small shards of Andronovo pottery, crushed bones, cores, sharp flakes-flakes obtained in the manufacture of stone tools came across.
In 1955 - 1957, the local historian Vasily Demyanovich Solochinsky discovered around twenty primitive sites around Tselinograd, mainly related to Andronovo culture. The richest in material turned out to be the Ishim site - approximately five kilometers southeast of the city, on the right steep bank of Ishim, and the Damsin site - sixty kilometers to the north-west, near the Damsa River.
The cultural layer of the Ishim site lies 70 - 100 centimeters from the surface of the earth, is clearly visible in the section of the coast. The parking lot is replete with fragments of ceramics, crushed animal bones, flakes, braces, flint blanks, pieces of charcoal.
It produced several stone arrowheads, a round bone piercing and other things characteristic of the Andronovo culture on the transition from the Stone to the Bronze Age. The Damsin site is younger than Ishim, and dates from the third to fourth millennia BC.
Over the past few years, Valery Stepanovich Voloshin, senior researcher at the Tselinograd Regional Museum of History and Local Lore, has been fruitfully working. The account of the sites and burials discovered and examined by him, attributed to the Paleolithic and Bronze Ages, is approaching seventy.
Among them, the Stone Age parking lot beyond the railway line near the city limits. With the assistance of the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR, Voloshin forms archaeological expeditions to the regions of the region every summer from among high school students, students and teachers.
Expedition materials replenish the funds of the Tselinograd Regional Museum of History and Local Lore. Bulldozer workers reported on a parking lot near a silicate brick factory in the summer of 1969. The attention of machine operators was attracted by the fact that in the building sand mined by them, there are a lot of old crushed bones, and sometimes green small bronze things come across.
It turned out: several thousand years ago people lived here. The parking lot was actually destroyed. The museum got only a small bronze knife, badly damaged by a bulldozer. July 1968 find on the bank of Ishim near the same silicate brick factory is interesting.
The driver of the road-repairing mechanical workshops of the Tselinograd branch of the railway Afanasy Zaferis and the excavator Nikolai Nikitin decided to equip the cellar in the country. On the afternoon of July 31, Nikitin began to dig the ground.
The pit was already quite deep when a rounded dent was noticed on one of its walls. Zaferis poked around with a crowbar - an oblong jug appeared. Next to him is the second. Treasure! An impatient summer resident wanted to quickly see the contents of the jugs - and he began to break them.
The jugs were empty. Probably, the shards would be thrown out, again covered with earth, if it were not for Alexei Ishutin, Alexander Kopnov and Viktor Efanov, who, having learned about the find, reported to the Tselinograd Museum of History and Local Lore.
A group of researchers went to the cottage to Zaferis. Fortunately, Zaferis did not break all the vessels. Choosing a solid, time-pressed cultural layer (excavation was done by the author of this publication), we managed to extract two more.
In total, there were ten of them with the broken. Each is about fifty centimeters high, gray in color, somewhat strange shape, wide necks and narrow cone-shaped bases with grooves converging downward. Of course, jugs could not stand on such bottoms - they had to be held in hands or inserted into some kind of nests.
They are made on a pottery wheel. Each one has some old defect - the edge of the neck is broken off or breaks in the sides. Damage is clearly received during firing or during use. It can be assumed that somewhere nearby was a kiln.
Master taking out of her finished products, laid aside the marriage. Then, perhaps, people left this place, and defective or broken objects remained, and over time they were covered with river silt, which reached almost a meter thick. According to archaeologists, the find refers to the period of the Mongol invasion.
Such jugs were tied to the wheels with chigirs, scooping water for irrigation of crops. Consequently, in the old days near present Tselinograd, irrigated farming was practiced. For centuries, many nomadic tribes wandered along the Priishimsky steppe with herds.
Their traces are also noted in the vicinity of Tselinograd. Mining engineer A. A. Kozyrev, who had compiled a “Hydrological Description of the Southern Part of Akmola Region” even before the revolution, reported that on business trips he was struck by the abundance of barrows scattered across the Akmola district, especially in the southern part, starting from the left bank of Ishim.
According to Kozyrev, he met lonely and group mounds, covered with stones or sod, occasionally with "stone women" (balbals) on the peaks. Similar information is contained in a number of other pre-revolutionary authors.
By the way, the Tselinograd region still does not have a detailed map on which all discovered sites of an ancient man, fortifications, fortifications, mounds, places of random archaeological finds would be plotted. Meanwhile, some unique monuments disappear - they are destroyed from time to time, overgrown with grass, destroyed during construction and household works, scented, flooded with water during the construction of dams.
In these places, even security signs are not installed.

Authority:
Dubitsky A. F. “City on Ishim” Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, 1986, 152 pp.