Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

discovering the scythians
its English edition, The Frozen Tombs of Siberia, published in 1970. Pazyryk had gained
its place in the history of archaeology, bringing the rich culture of the Altai nomads,
with its striking animal art and complex rituals, to the attention of the whole world.
Having finished his excavations at Pazyryk Rudenko moved to the Central Altai.
In 1950 he excavated two frozen tombs at Bashadar and two more at Tuekta in 1954.
Since then work has continued in the region. In 1993 the well-preserved body of an
elite female was found buried in a kurgan at Ak-Alakha on the Ukok plateau close
to the border with China. She was partially tattooed and was finely dressed for
burial wearing an elaborate headdress nearly a metre high. Dendrochronological
analysis of timbers from the tomb chamber show that the burial took place in the
fifth century bc. In 1998 a new programme of work was initiated at the cemetery of
Berel in the Kazakh Altai where Radlov had first dug more than 130 years before. Here
some twenty-four kurgans have now been excavated dating mainly from the fourth
and third century bc. They vary in their elaboration from quite simple constructions
to rich, well-furnished tombs such as kurgan 10, with its ten sacrificed horses decked
out with elaborate saddles and harness buried beside the timber burial chamber.
The value of the more recent work is that excavation techniques have improved
and excavators are now far more aware of the need to have dedicated conservation
facilities on hand to prevent the rapid deterioration which sets in immediately the
bodies and artefacts are removed from the frozen ground.
It is no exaggeration to say that the frozen tombs of Siberia have revolutionized our
understanding of the first millennium bc nomads of the Altai region. The occupants
of the graves physically confront us as real people whose lives we can visualize from
seeing the totality of their organic belongings and whose beliefs come alive through
the evidence of their complex burial rituals. The ability to study the tattooed skin of
a nomad princess or the stomach contents of her horse can add so much more to our
understanding of the past than having to rely only on metal artefacts and dry bones.
The evidence from the Altai kurgans will feature large in discussions throughout this
book.
But perhaps the greatest surprise arising from the excavations in the Altai was
that a vibrant animal art existed in the region so similar to the Scythian animal art of
the Pontic steppe that the two must have been part of the same cultural continuum.
Russian archaeologists refer to this as Scythian–Siberian animal art and some see
it as representing a distinct culture. But the very use of the term raises a myriad of
questions. Where and when did the art originate? Does its use over a large area imply
a degree of ethnic identity? Can the name Scythian be used to embrace the whole
region or has it to be restricted to the people of the Pontic steppe? These are some of
the questions to which we shall return.
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