 Yeah, so I'm pretty far out in comparison to all the other talks I've been excavating together with colleagues from the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2017 in southern Siberia and I've just come back from a full month field campaign about a week ago And so everything I'm going to tell you is very preliminary I'm trying to give you like a rough overview of the history of the project and about the finds that we had this year And I'm really happy to take suggestions and new ideas in because we're really just trying to wrap our head around What we found and this ton of data that we have now So we started with a sort of initial question Trying to reinvestigate the earliest quote-unquote skitian period in the eastern Eurasian steppes and in the 1970s Gryaznopad excavated Artan I this is sort of this Really important site that kind of remained unique for a very long time Really defining the earliest skitian horizon on its own Of course, we have plenty of later burial mounds that have been excavated in the region all dating to Aldebel period and later but from this Eurasian horizon We really just had Eurasian one and then since 2013 Eurasian five Which was only partially excavated but seems to date to a similar time period For those who don't know this complex it has this really unique kind of radial structure of wood beams Underneath it, which we really didn't have any other examples for for a very long time So what we were trying To do is find another burial mound and essentially dates to this time period Well since the 70s we made some progress Methodology-wise and therefore I think it merits sort of a reinvestigation especially trying to figure out How the bronze age late bronze age leads over into the early iron age and the emergence of the the skitian phenomenon Um, there's been plenty of surveys done in The Uyuk valley the quote-unquote valley of the kings in Siberia um One of the earlier ones actually Matt by Gryazin of himself and it features this Dot number eight here on the map, which is completely lonely on the southern bank of the river, which Is strange because usually they know Existing in larger formations But really most of the burial mounds that we know of are on the northern side of the river and so Just already its position in the landscape Is somewhat strange So first we looked at it from satellite imagery And it appeared that there's something like radial features Already apparent from space We then went in we did a small-scale excavation try to find datable material We bumped into some really well preserved wood that we were able to date to the ninth century bc Which was really early it was surprisingly early and therefore published a small paper We also tried to check if there's anything else on the southern river terrace and At least in terms of size and composition we can say no there isn't We do have a few smaller monuments in the area. We have Later structures, of course, but in terms of really these large relatively flat burial mounds There's nothing similar in the vicinity Nicely enough in Elban radar, which is usually relatively useless for archaeology. I mean like yes, of course you can discover Palo river channels and investigate the Palo landscape, but for direct detection of Burial mounds, it's not particularly useful because of its Rather coarse resolution, but in our case it works really well Probably due to the long wavelength and the deeper penetration of the ground in this case So we published the first paper and then decided to start a larger project Because what we found in 2017 made us really curious Um This year we've done some geomagnetometry on the place in order to get a better overview over The general architecture and what we found was absolutely not visible from Just walking over the site was that it has this really nice circle Of stone circles around it and again Inside the burial mound walking over it With the geomagnetometer You do detect these radial structures um The surface of the mound is extremely bumpy It's very hard to conduct a geophysical survey on it So we had to kind of help ourselves building these bridges over all the so we could like have a reasonably Steady walk and nice lines going over it And Then this summer we finally got to break ground Inside the main burial mound and what we found was Actually what we expected You know deriving some sort of idea from Arjan one we wanted to find a sort of wood construction and this is clearly it um So we also have this radial wood construction that we have in Arjan one beautifully preserved wood the one here on the upper left is about 280 year old Large log, so that will be really nice for expanding on the dendro curves of For for to vinyan archaeology But what is very interesting and was very different from Arjan one is that this entire wood construction is covered in clay architecture And for that we really again we do not have any close parallels The main thing that we were able to come up with was Togiskin north Where you have burial mounds with actual clay architecture in them, but that's fairly far away And so currently we're trying to figure out how to draw our parallels and where to make comparisons because that Seems to tell us something where like Where these things are coming from where is this idea coming from and that's one of the big questions we have right now Um, of course, we have absolutely no problem dating this burial mound There's plenty of material for radiocarbon and actually, uh wiggle matching which We did with one of the of the smaller logs With five dates and landed with a nice date in the 9th century So, um, it still has a little bit of overlap with Arjan one, but it seems to be slightly older definitely dates to Uh, the right period here um in terms of finds it's Very poor so far, uh on the main burial mound We have a little bit of a broken worst gear We have some things that seem to date early skidding in the periphery Immediately associated with the mound, but uh once in a while you bump into something that you didn't really expect And so what we found here is actually in stratigraphic context um One of these Eurasian chariot depictions that to my knowledge, um, haven't been Directly stratigraphically dated up to this point. Of course, we know they date to the bronze age Through the perils that we have, but it's nice to Find something that you can actually directly date Here on the right side, you see, uh, so this, uh chariots petroglyph Was found broken face down Inside the filling of a pit and the pit was undisturbed as you can see there's a whole wooden log leading over the burial pit here um so, uh We started a slightly differently though 2018 because well, we didn't want to start right Going into the main burial mound as Established the things in the periphery are really important as well and When you look at this picture, then it's like, okay, there's a nice peripheral monument That is clearly indicated through the vegetation um So we were like, yep, that's the place to start to have like some preliminary understanding unfortunately, uh In that particular campaign we did not have the money for geophysics and that led to I can say a mistake now that I know because once we started opening up, um this part We had stones and we had stones and stones and stones and it did not stop By now we have over 50 individual stone monuments in the sun periphery um And we've excavated over three and a half thousand square meters. We're drawing close. So we were getting there most of it has been documented and removed now And uh, interestingly, we do have materials from the Bronze Age, uh, Okuneba pottery through, uh, early Scythian period late Scythian period into, uh Coquille time and all Turkey Kyrgyz and later. So this is entire periphery in the south of the mound that, um Yeah, it's really rich and it essentially covers About a 2,500 year long span in time Um, the main thing we have though most of the remains dates to the Coquille period Which is a very local culture. It doesn't seem to have a lot of direct cultural connections beyond the borders of Tuva um, but nonetheless a lot of interesting stuff coming up and I'm Very happy Marco made it. Um, he's our anthropologist and he was on site this summer And um, we have anthropology wise quite interesting, uh Findings, so we have for example this burial Well, we have a really nice preserved Uh, wood coffin where we have a compressed layer of wood bones and then again a compressed layer of wood We also have this really strange crouch positions where basically in the kneecaps or on shoulder height So it seems to have been wrapped. We're trying to Uh, possibly make some sense out of that get some fine cuts of the long bones and see if there have been Uh, people working with uh, with preserving these bones using the animal bones as a baseline Uh, another thing we have is massive, uh trauma and violence. We have, uh Really mean chops and arrow heads to the head We have collective burials where the adults have, um, arrowheads in the spine in the pelvis in the chest area And the two children have arrowheads, uh in the skulls So, um, that is something that is very apparent. It seems to run through the entire population No matter age or sex Um, and we have some really strange, uh, kind of composite skeletons that we've come across In, uh The laugh case, uh, the head doesn't really seem to fit the body In the right case, uh, we have the head being substituted by sheep vertebra So, um, there's some things going on and I think that there's some parallels to tashti culture where we Know that there have been some alterations with, uh, human bodies post mortem But this is very much part of ongoing research Um, you were quickly mentioning well barrel landscapes. It's definitely a topic that, uh, has kind of a wider significance and in terms of methodology Um and protection of these landscapes, uh It's definitely something we can do published recently two papers one trying to Um look into, uh, how damaged these things are trying to monitor ongoing damage seeing if it's even possible to get a good impression of, uh, the conditions of these burial mounds and then, um Just about what two weeks ago or so, um, we published a paper on convolutional neural networks trying to Really large-scale detect, uh burial mounds from open source satellite imagery And getting a better idea what's actually out there Yeah