"Fragile and Priceless" is an exhibition project of the Kostenki State Museum-Reserve about the earliest treasures of the Voronezh region!
The exhibition presents remarkable bone objects found at the Kostenki sites, and demonstrates the full cycle of their study — from their discovery in the cultural layer to scientific interpretation.
Senior researcher of the museum Darya Sergeyevna Tolstykh spoke about these ancient artifacts and the process of their study.
What can the "fragile and priceless" objects tell us about the lives of our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic?
Generally, in our everyday understanding the Stone Age is associated with the stone tools of our ancestors. Paleolithic archaeologists have made huge advances in studying stone tools and the waste from their production. But in reality, ancient people more often made tools from materials that were easier to work with, such as wood or bone, which preserve much worse in the ground. In the Kostenki deposits wood does not preserve at all, and bone finds occur, but much less frequently than stone ones. However, it is precisely these that provide archaeologists with information about the technologies and techniques available to prehistoric people, as well as about their spiritual world and aesthetic needs. It was from bone and tusk that ornaments and works of art were made.
The exhibits presented at the exhibition are truly priceless. Was it difficult to preserve them?
Preserving bone and tusk objects is a very difficult task. We face this problem both as archaeologists during excavations and later as museum staff responsible for their conservation in the collections of our museum-reserve and in exhibitions. The thing is these are organic materials — they were part of a living organism. But over the millennia that the objects have been in the ground, many factors affect them, changing their chemical composition and, what is more noticeable to us, their appearance. But the worst happens when archaeologists unearth them: changes in temperature and humidity are simply devastating to bone. We carefully clean the finds and impregnate them with a special conservation compound that allows them to be preserved.
Which bone-processing technologies of ancient people astonish scientists today?
There are many such technologies: we really don't always understand by which techniques and technologies some items were made. Probably the simplest example is the straightening and bending of mammoth tusk. This material is still highly valued in the art of bone carving, but it never occurred to anyone that a tusk could be straightened and used to make an absolutely straight spear. Thanks to studying the physical properties of tusk, our colleagues Evgeny Yuryevich Girya and Gennady Adolfovich Khlopachev reconstructed long-forgotten techniques and solved this mystery. But I won't reveal all the secrets in advance!
