At the Serteya II site, in a stratum from the 5th–4th millennia BC, an anthropomorphic hand carved from wood has been found. Nothing comparable exists in this country’s Stone Age archaeology.
The hand was very skilfully made. The palm has been carefully smoothed, while a seven-lobed rosette has been carved on the back. The artefact did not, however, emerge intact from ancient times: some fingers were broken, while the edge of the palm, which was decorated with deep incisions, was partially damaged. The hand originally formed part of some larger object, as is indicated by the break at the wrist.
The find has been provisionally dated to the 5th–4th millennia BC. That is implied by the archaeological context – the cultural layer in which it was found formed in the 4th millennium BC.
Interestingly, shards of a vessel bearing a depiction of a man were found in the same layer and in immediate proximity. Neolithic vessels with anthropomorphic images are rarely unearthed in the forest zone of Eastern Europe.
Scientific investigation of the materials obtained is being supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation – Project No 22-18-00086-П “Between East and West: hunter-gatherers of the lake district in Western Russia in the 7th–3rd millennia BC (economic strategies, cultural traditions, links between regions and palaeoecological conditions)”.
An active part in the excavations of the North-Western Expedition was played by the students of the 10th field school “Lake Settlements of Stone Age North-Western Russia: exploration of the turf-bogs”. That project is supported by the Istoriya Otechestva [History of Our Country] foundation, which recruited young people from Tomsk, Saint Petersburg and Barnaul to join in the work.
The expedition is headed by Andrei Nikolayevich Mazurkevich, Chief Curator of the State Hermitage’s Department of the Archaeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia.