Investigations of a medieval cemetery at the fortified settlement of Selitrennoye in 2013

This article is a publication of materials obtained from investigations of the Golden Horde capital - the city of Sarai - which were carried out in 2013. In the course of that work the city’s cemetery was discovered and partly studied. It contained burials of the Muslim representatives of the capital’s population. The way in which the structures over the graves were built indicates that this particular group of the population belonged to the middle stratum of society. The excavations have also established that the territory concerned had been on the north-western edge of the city before the cemetery appeared there, so that it shows limited traces of population’s activity. The graves contained building rubbish from destroyed mausolea that had been located in the southern part of the city and at the top of Zmeiny Bugor (or Snake Hill). This fact makes it possible to determine the chronology of the cemetery It emerged no earlier than the end of the 14 th century.