Tombs in the land of the Amazons

View of one of the Amazon burials unearthed in Russia, being excavated • INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY RAS / PRESS SERVICE.

Four female Scythian warriors, buried 2,500 years ago in an ancient cemetery in present-day Russia, lay in one tomb with all their weapons and equipment. Their remains have just been unearthed by archaeologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences near the village of Devitsa, in the Voronezh region, providing some information about these mysterious “Amazons”. The site, which includes 19 burial mounds, has been known since the 2000s, and the expedition led by Valerii Guliaev has been carrying out new excavations there for the past ten years. In one of the mounds, 1 m high, the researchers found the entrance to a tomb built with clay blocks and oak, where lay four women of three different generations:two aged 20 to 35 , a young girl aged 12 or 13 and a woman in her fifties, a rare age for the time, when life expectancy was more like 30 to 35 years old.

Jewelry and weapons

The northern and eastern parts of the burial had already been looted, but archaeologists still unearthed iron arrowheads and fragments of horse harness, proving that these women were warriors who benefited from the same rituals as the men. men. The youngest was accompanied by beautiful objects:a bracelet of glass beads, a bronze mirror and two spears. The oldest was buried with gold jewelry, an iron knife and an arrowhead. Above all, she wore a calathos on her head. , a ceremonial headdress surrounded by bands of gold. “A unique discovery”, according to Valerii Guliaev, who is on his eleventh discovery of burials of armed women on this site and considers that warrior women were numerous among the Scythians. This Indo-European people originating from Asia, often nomadic, occupied the steppes of the VII ^e century BC. AD to Late Antiquity.