The skeleton of a woman equipped for the burial, incl. with a golden pectoral and bronze mirror was discovered by a Polish-Russian team of archaeologists inside a large burial mound from about 2.5 thousand years ago. The research was conducted in Siberia, in a place known as the “Siberian Valley of the Kings”.
The Chinge-Tey archaeological site is located in the Turano-Ujukska Valley in northern Tuva, an autonomous republic in the Asian part of the Russian Federation. It is referred to as the “Siberian Valley of the Kings” due to the numerous, huge mound tombs with rich furnishings dating back over 2.5 thousand years. For this reason, some of them are described as princely.
Last year, Polish archaeologists from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow came across two intriguing graves. The first of them was located in the central part of the destroyed burial mound with a diameter of approx. 25 m.
Two people rested in a wooden burial chamber, built on a framework made of solid beams. The chamber itself was covered with three layers of beams. The floor of the tomb, in turn, was made of boards. According to the researchers, there were a woman aged around 50 and a child around 2 or 3 years old. They found, among others, next to the woman golden ornaments.
“A particularly interesting monument was the golden pectoral, a sickle- or moon-shaped ornament hanging at the neck,” noted in an interview with PAP (Polish Press Agency) the head of the Polish part of the expedition, Dr. Łukasz Oleszczak from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.