My brother the archaeologist sent me these comments about his work:

Dog burials have come up in our work in Kazakhstan on Botai culture sites. The Botai lived in pit houses whose door opened to the southwest. Botai Dog BurialOutside the door, they would bury two sacrificed dogs, presumably as symbolic or supernatural guardians. If you look in the attached image showing a magnetic map of Botai houses, you will see pairs of small magnetic highs to the southwest of the larger (but weaker) square pit-houses. These have not been tested, but it is imagined that these pairs of anomalies may be dog sacrifices.

The Botai culture, by the way, are candidates for having been the earliest horse domesticators, and also (more speculatively) proto Indo-Europeans.

See also:

  • Ritual Dog Burials @ USA Today
  • Dog @ Wikipedia
  • Burial @ Wikipedia
  • Community Organisation Among Copper Age Sedentary Horse Pastoralists Of Kazakhstan — Sandra Olsen, Bruce Bradley, David Maki And Alan Outram — Pending