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Detailed analysis of all archaeological material from the Semyonovka barrows allowed the authors to distinguish the following cultural-chronological horizons.
The earliest is the horizon of the Usatovo culture of the Early Bronze Age, which includes five burials from three barrows. The most interesting is burial 11/10 with beads from sea shells.
Fifty-two funerary complexes of eight barrows belong to the Pit Graves cultural-historical community. The most informative are burials 8/16 and 14/24 with stone axes-hammers, 8/13 with flint an axe-adze, 8/8 with a stretcher in the form of a “boat”, 14/24 with a flint arrowhead, 2/3 with four skeletons, 14/2 with three anthropomorphic stele, 2/2, 8/15, 11/5 and 19/9 with metal adornments, 8/9 and 14/12 with ornamented mats. The set of the data allows us to classify the main and, probably, the secondary (with additional mounds) burials of the Pit Graves cultural and historical community to the first half of the 3rd millennium BC, and the greater part of the secondary burials — to the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. Such dating is also confirmed by separate items of grave goods from secondary burials: flint axe-adze from complex 8/13 (which finds analogies among the materials of Corded Ware cultures), drilled axe-hammer and bowl with ornaments from complex 8/16, half of an axe-hammer from complex 14/12 (which finds analogies among the materials of Catacomb Graves cultures). According to all features, the overwhelming majority of the Pit Graves cultural-historical community graves from Semyonovka barrows are related to the Budjak type of sites.
Four of the six complexes of the Catacomb Graves cultural-historical community belong to the Ingul culture. The most interesting is burial 14/16, where the production set of the “arrow maker” (or, more likely, its imitation) and also, apparently, a wooden bow were found.
Two more burials of the Catacomb Graves cultural-historical community (9/1 and 8/21) are connected with the late-catacomb cultural groups of the Ciscaucasia and the Don basin. Existing 14C dates for the sites of these groups fit within 26th — 21st cc. BC, and, thus, as a whole, they are synchronous to the bulk of the sites of the Ingul Catacomb Graves culture. The complex Semyonovka 8/21, obviously, taking into account the features of the funerary rite, should be attributed to the later Catacomb Craves sites of the North-Western Black Sea region.
The appearance of burials 8/21 and 8/1 (with the cruciform in the plan diorite mace, previously attributed to the Babino cultural-historical community) may be associated with the process of formation (with the participation of the newcomer population) of the local variant of the Dnieper-Prut Babino culture.
Fourteen funerary complexes sunk into the mounds of five barrows were attributed to the finale of the Middle — to the Late Bronze Age (first — third quarter of the 2nd millennium BC). Judging by the funerary rite and the inventory, a significant part of these burials can be referred to the Babino cultural-historical community (the Babino cultural circle, the Dnieper-Prut Babino culture). Complex 8/20 with a gray-clayed ladle belongs to the Sabatinovka culture and dates by the second — third quarter of the 2nd millennium BC.
There are twenty Scythian complexes, nineteen of which are burials in pits and catacombs, and the last one is a cenotaph.
Funerary structures and the rite of the Scythian burials, investigated at Semyonovka village, find many analogies in the Northern Black Sea region. There is no difference in the composition of the accompanying inventory either. The analysis of chronological indicators showed that the Scythian burials from the Semyonovka barrows are divided into three groups that are not equal in number: the second half of the 5th — 4th c. BC (19 burials) and 3rd c. BC (two complexes).
Ten burials were Sarmatian. Eight of them were sunk in the Bronze Age mounds and were made in the second half of the 1st — first half of the 2nd c. AD. The other two burials were the main and the only graves over which the mounds were built. These barrows were built in the second half of the 2nd — first half of the 3rd c. AD.
In addition, ethno-cultural attribution for other two burials due to their strong destruction by plowing cannot be determined.
So, this complete publication of the materials of the barrows, investigated near Semyonovka on the right bank of the Dniester firth, and their detailed analysis for each of the periods, make it possible to clarify many issues related to the study of cultures from the Early Bronze Age to the Sarmatian time in the Dniester region, and to draw more credible conclusions on the difficult problems of the region’s ethnocultural development in antiquity.
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