Barry Cunlife - The Scythians

further reading
‘Tuva during the Scythian Period’, 265–81; ‘Scythian Culture in the Altai Mountains’,
285–95; and ‘The Tagar Culture in the Minusinsk Basin’, 296–314. The same author
provides an updated view of the Tagar culture in his paper ‘The Emergence of the
Tagar Culture’, Antiquity, 80 (2006), 860–79.
By far the best account of the wonders of the Pazyryk cemetery is that written
by the excavator, S. I. Rudenko, and carefully translated from the Russian by the
archaeologist M. W. Thompson as Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron
Age Horsemen (London, 1970). It provides a meticulous account of the finds, written
for the general reader but also of great value to the specialist. The first exhibition of
material from Pazyryk and other tombs in the region held in Britain generated a useful
catalogue with good introductory essays, Frozen Tombs: The Culture and Art of the
Ancient Tribes of Siberia (London, 1978). A far more elaborate and brilliantly illustrated
catalogue, prepared for a new exhibition nearly 40 years later, St J. Simpson and S.
Pankova (eds.), Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia (London, 2017) is essential reading.
The date of the Pazyryk cemetery has been clarified by radiocarbon dating and
the evidence is discussed in J. P. Mallory et al., ‘The Date of Pazyryk’, in K. Boyle, C.
Renfrew, and M. Levine (eds.), Ancient Interactions: East and West in Eurasia (Cambridge,
2002), 199–213.
Other tombs, where the burial contents are preserved by the permafrost conditions,
include the cemetery of Berel in Kazakhstan, details of which are provided in
A. P. Gorbunov, Z. S. Samashev, and E. V. Severskii, The Treasures of Frozen Burial Mounds
of the Kazakh Altai: Materials of the Berel Burial Site (in Russian and English) (Almaty,
2005) and Z. S. Samashev, ‘The Berel Kurgans: Some Results of Investigations’, in
Stark et al. (eds.), Nomads and Networks (cited above), 31–49. The frozen tomb at Ak-
Alakha on the Ukok plateau is reported in three papers by N. Polosmak: ‘A Mummy
Unearthed from the Pastures of Heaven’, National Geographic, 186/4 (October, 1994),
80–103; ‘The Burial of a Noble Pazyryk Woman’, Ancient Civilization from Scythia to Siberia,
5 (1999), 125–65; and ‘Ak-Alakh-3’, in Simpson and Pankova (eds.), Scythians (cited
above), 100–1.
The discovery and excavation of the frozen tombs have generated a range of specialist
studies, some of which are of considerable general interest. Among them we
may list: G. Argent, ‘Do the Clothes make the Horse? Relationality, Roles and Statuses
in Iron Age Inner Asia’, World Archaeology, 42 (2010), 157–74; G. Azarpay, ‘Some
Classical and Near Eastern Motifs in the Art of Pazyryk’, Artibus Asiae, 22 (1959), 313–
39; J. Lerner; ‘Some So-Called Achaemenid Objects from Pazyryk’, Source: Notes in the
History of Art, 10 (1991), 8–15; and K. S. Rubinson, ‘The Textiles from Pazyryk: A Study
in the Transfer and Transformation of Artistic Motifs’, Expedition, 32 (1990), 49–60.
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