Abstract
The interest of scientists in trepanation originated in the XIX century. One of the first found mention of Hungarian scientists. Since this time, a large number of domestic and foreign scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and doctors conducted research on this topic. The article describes in detail the history of the study of trepanation, which originated in ancient times, and also defines its stages of development.In world practice, there are cases of both intravital and postmortem trepanning. The author reviewed the various opinions on the causes of trepanation for both a living person and a corpse.A comparative analysis of the works of domestic archaeologists was also carried out based on the results of a study of the cases of drilling human bones of the skull and tubular bones that have recently been encountered in «royal» kurgans in Kazakhstan.