Alexey A. Kazarnitskiy

St.-Petersburg State University, RussiaMuseum of Anthropology and Ethnography RAS, St.-Petersburg, Russia(kazarnitski@mail.ru)

Keywords: Catacomb culture, Eastern Manych, funerary rites, infragroup analysis, method of principal components.

This paper presents the potentialities of the use of the method of principal components (PCs) for the infragroup analysis of the changing of the burial traditions exemplified by M.V. Andreeva’s database of the record of the Eastern Manych catacomb culture (Аndreeva, 2014). In spite of the short duration and relative homogeneity of this culture, the applied multivariate statistical method enables us to divide it into three chronological groups reliably differing in a number of markers.