A Preliminary Survey of the Birds from Velikent (Bronze Age, Daghestan, Russia)

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary overview of the bird remains from the early/middle Bronze Age site of Velikent, a series of mounds situated on the Caspian coastal plain of the Russian republic of Daghestan. A total of 25 taxa, including 21 species, have been identified thus far. They represent species from both aquatic and terrestrial biotopes, although one species, the Great bustard, Otis tarda, constitutes the dominant element of all subsamples . Whether this was actually so or not and whether most of the secondary patterns reported below are trustworthy is an open question partly due to the small samples thus far available for study and partly to a manual retrieval of remains that will need to be improved in the future if patterns are to be coupled with those available for comparison from other faunal sets, domestic mammals in particular.