That of the Amazons is one of our most ancient and powerfully ambiguous myths. The persistence of its influence on the Western psyche is such that, when the Spaniards, in 1542, navigated an immense river in South America they reported sightings of Amazons and the river eventually acquired their name.
Then, for about 500 years, nothing.
The Amazons slipped silently into the realm of mythology, where it seemed they should remain.
So it was until a group of archaeologists, during an excavation work in the Eurasian steppes, made an unexpected discovery.
Between 1992 and 1995, a group led by Jeannine Davis-Kimball, director of the Center for the Studies of Eurasian Nomadic Civilizations in Berkley, California, excavated a Neolithic site of kurgans (burial mounds) near Pokrovka, on the border of the Russia with Kazakhstan.
Last January, Davis-Kimball published in the journal Archeaology an account of the excavations in that area:an essay documented by maps and photographs describing his testimony of the passage in the the steppes of female warriors about 2,500 years ago.
Inside the kurgans, archaeologists found remains of both sexes, but it was a group of female skeletons that caught their attention:extraordinarily tall women for their time buried with daggers and swords.
Arranged next to a young female was a quiver containing forty bronze-tipped arrows; the same skeleton
presented the bones of the arched legs probably due to a whole life spent in the saddle.
Housed under the rib cage of another there was a bent arrowhead; testimony, perhaps, of a violent death in battle.
Another tracking system, the high-frequency radiogonio (“Huff-duff” after the initials H .F.D.F. of the device). It was also passive, operating solely on the transmission of their position by the U-boats. These used to surface every day to convey their report and position to the General Staff in Ger