The Karasuk culture is a name given by archaeologists to a group of Bronze Age societies who lived in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan during the later second millennium BC.
They succeeded the Andronovo culture in this region and were farmers who primarily raised sheep and may have been the first trip on the steppes to master horse-riding. They also produced art with distinctively realistic animal depictions which may have developed into the later Scytho-Siberian artistic style.
Their settlements were of pit houses and they buried their dead in stone cists covered by barrows and surrounded by square stone enclosures. Industrially they were skiled metalworkers, the diagnostic artefacts of the culture being a bronze knife with a curving profiles and a decorated handle and horse bridles.
Last updated: 08-23-2005 07:41:04