The largest number of Tashtyk masks are collected in stone structures, conventionally called crypts of the V-VI centuries. In the graves located in the crypts, as well as in the graves of mounds of the Hunno-Sarmatian period, dozens of dead people were buried simultaneously, and with the same funeral rituals, reflecting a single worldview about the transition of the deceased to the afterlife. In practice, it was like this: first they made a temporary burial, then they "revived" the deceased - they created a dummy and after a while there was a recognition of the final death - a mask was molded on the dummy's face with closed eyes and closed lips, like a dead person. However, if earlier corpses were temporarily buried, and mannequins were made on the skeleton (after exhumation), now the corpse was burned, and the ashes of a person in the form of burnt bones with an average size of 1.5 - 3 cm became the basis of mannequins or their heads. From an adult cremated person, 1 kg (or slightly more)remained seeds, but only a part of it (250-800 g) was placed in a birch bark curtain or leather bag, which was tightly wrapped with grass and wrapped with leather. On the front side of a thick leather blank, the hollows of the eyes and mouth were marked, and the nose was sewn on. These heads of funeral dolls symbolized the "living or revived deceased" until a mask was made on them (Vadetskaya, 2005, p. 141, 146, Tables 2, 4). Differences in the size of the leather-grass heads and the shape of the noses determined some individuality of the masks, even if the rest of the facial features were sketchy. Nevertheless, it was difficult to identify a specific deceased by the mask without painting it (Figure 1). Unfortunately, the painting on the masks is extremely rare by the time the crypts were excavated, since the cameras burned along with imitations of the dead, and during their burning, the masks were usually soaked with organic products - leather, fabric, birch bark-and other materia ... Читать далее