Late 3rd Millennium BC Ritual Behaviours in the Adji Kui Burial Ground

Waiting for the complete catalog of the Adji Kui graves will be published, this paper intends to preliminary highlight the great complexity and variability of the funerary rituals in Bronze Age Margiana (southern Turkmenistan). Numerous were the burial types as well as several the kind of use (primary and secondary; individual, multiple and collective) of the funerary structures. At Adji Kui, cenotaphs were also frequently attested, as well as complete and partial skeletons of goat, lamb, kid, and dogs were buried in several graves. Specific details and preliminary interpretation are here advanced in relation to grave 18.07, where rituals officiated by a child or children are presumably attested, and grave 390.07, where a scorpionshaped stamp seal has been found on the fractured skull of a female individual killed by a sword slash. The position of the seal above her head allows to advance a dramatic hypothesis on the death ritual the female individual had to undergo for reasons that we will never know