New polychrome style find in Altai territory

The purpose of the article is to introduce into scientific use an extremely rare category of archaeological finding - a polichrome style object. It is only the ninth monument with a polichrome style object in the Western Siberia. It is a ring-shaped torus earring made of 18 carat-fine gold which was encrusted with stone or glass insertion and decorated with gold balls and numerous granulation, including pyramids made of grains. The object is a random find from a multi-layered, gradually destroyed by wind erosion monument of Urlapovo located near Urlapovo village in Shipunovskii District of the Altai Region. The find is stored in the funds of the Altai local lore museum. The article gives a detailed description of the ring-shaped torus earring, heart-shaped and hollow, welded of two halves, drawn from a thinly-rolled gold leaf, with seven hollow 5 mm balls at the bottom and two hemispheres on each side. At the ends of the earring are corrugated tubes. A pyramid of four grains is soldered on each ball and hemisphere, three of those are at the basis and one is on top. The diameter of the grains is from 1 to 1.2 mm. The grain is decorated with a red-brown insert, made of transparent solid material, under which a thin sheet of gold foil is laid. The insert is of crescent shape with dimensions 11 mm by 4.5 mm, held in the nest made of a thin gold stripe soldered on the basis. The size of the object at the extreme points: 28 mm high, 25 mm wide, 12 mm thick. With the help of detailed photography, the ancient masters' technological methods used in the manufacture of the earring and a sequential technological chain of manufacture were reconstructed. On the basis of a fairly fractional technological chain, it is suggested that a society producing such objects had a complex social organization. On the basis of analogies a primary cultural-chronological attribution was made, which allowed to date the ring-shaped torus earring the second half of the 4th to the first half of the 5th century and to identify it as an antiquity of the Great Migration Period. A hypothesis was made about the place of origin of the earrings of such type - areas of Central Asia (regions of the Dzhetyasarskaya and Kenkolskaya archaeological cultures (south-western Kazakhstan, north-western Kyrgyzstan and south-eastern Uzbekistan). The fact that it was found in the territory of the forest Altai testifies to the existence of cultural contacts of the people of the southern Ob-Irtysh interfluve with the south-west regions in the 4th-5th century A.D. The article is illustrated by a detailed picture and photographs showing technological features of the published earring.

Keywords

Authors

References