A Rare Apotropaic Ornament from a Tagar Burial near Mount Uytag, Khakassia

This study continues a series of publications dealing with the findings of the 2021 excavation season at a cemetery near the Uytag mountain, Republic of Khakassia. Here, we describe an excellently preserved composite apotropaic ornament from vault 5 in Tagar mound 5 at Uytag-3. The funerary rite is typical of the Late Saragash stage. Only two female skeletons had been preserved (one of them partly) on the wooden floor of the log structure. Under one of the skeletons, a composite ornament was found, consisting of golden hemispheric plaques and biconical beads, glass polychrome conical and disc-shaped beads, steatite pendants and hemispheric plaques, a golden plaque with an embossed figure of a carnivore, a lynx claw wrapped in gold foil, a comb-hairpin, and a gilded bronze deer plaque. The analysis suggests that all these belonged to an apotropaic set, specially destined for the funerary rite. We propose its reconstruction and describe the techniques whereby separate details were manufactured. The results of a Raman spectroscopy analysis of the glass point to a region where the set, which has no exact Tagar matches, was made.

Bronze · Excavation · Polychrome · Rite · Stained glass · Vault (architecture) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis

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