The Department of the Archaeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia in the Staraya Derevnia Resoration and Storage Centre

The Hermitage "trophy collections" are gradually being transferred to specially equipped rooms in the Staraya Derevnia Repositiory. These are collections of organic materials (wooden items from the Pazyryk burial mounds, the Minusinsk Depression and Russian Turkistan) and also the Neolithic collections of North-Western Russia from excavations carried out by the State Hermitage's North-Western Archaeological Expedition and collections from new acquisitions (the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for the History of Material Culture, graves of Scythian and Hunno-Sarmatian times excavated by Anatoly. Mandelstam and Elvira Stambulnik). The existence of convenient, specially adapted premises at the Restoration and Storage Centre has made it possible to organize the cleaning, conservation and scientific processing of incoming collections.

The first item to be moved to the Repository was a stone graven image of a man (second half of the 1st millennium, Altai Mountains) that is on display on the excursion route of the open storage tour.

This full-height depiction of a warrior combining features of sculpture in the round and relief belongs to the group of ritual artefacts known as "ancient Turkic". The first carvings from this period were studied in the 18th century by expeditions working in Siberia. At present such works have been found in Mongolia, Sinkiang (China), Kazakhstan, Tuva and the Altai Mountains.

A tradition of setting up such monuments was common to all the peoples making up nomadic groupings in Central Asia in the second half of the 1st millennium). The stone graven images symbolized a dead man and his participation in the cycle of burial and remembrance rites. The ancient stone-carvers may have sought to give their work a certain portrait resemblance, albeit of a schematic sort. In the present instance the image from the region of the River Jumala in the Altai that came into the State Hermitage in the 1960s shows a broad-faced man with a long straight nose and a moustache with turned-up ends. Earrings can be seen in his ears. He is wearing a caftan. His right hand holds a small jug, while his left rests on the hilt of a sword (or dagger) suspended from a belt. The belt, weapons and earrings make it possible to date the carving to no earlier than the 8th century.

A stone image with a relief anthropomorphic depiction belonging to the Bronze Age Okunev Culture (2nd millennium BC) comes from the Minusinsk Basin (the lower reaches of the River Abakan, a tributary of the Yenisei) and entered the State Hermitage in 1937. A series of stone images was specially brought for a new display of the Department of the History of Primitive Culture in the Hermitage.

The study of the Bronze Age anthropomorphic stone images of the Minusinsk Depression was started by Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt, who was sent to Siberia on Peter I's orders in 1718. In the 19th century these artefacts were dated to the Bronze Age. Archaeological researches proved that the stone images were objects of worship and not grave monuments. The solar symbols cut into the stone prompt the supposition that they were connected with the cult of the sun. But it is not impossible that the stone stelae were carved with ancient mythological subjects, the images of totemic ancestors and tribal deities (some of them definitely feminine) on which the ancient inhabitants of the Minusinsk Depression believed their prosperity depended. Remarkably the custom of feeding stone images from the Bronze Age still survives in present-day Khakassia.

Anthropomorphic stone graven images on display in the Staraya Derevnia Restoration and Storage Centre
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