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The Fellowship of the Ring # Burial Mounds of the Katanda Valley

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Archaeological expeditions are always unpredictable, and it goes beyond their results. After traveling with her husband, an archaeologist, Agatha Christie wrote: “All digging is a gamble <…>. Luck is the predominant factor.” Not only the outcome is unpredictable but life itself: What will it be like? What will the camp and the team be like? In the summer of 2020, we, the South Altai Team of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS, managed to escape the world of COVID-19 masks into the wilderness of the Altai Mountains to conduct excavations near the Katanda Kurgan, a well-known burial site of the Pazyryk culture. The mound we excavated turned out to be more than 2000 years older...

To the Arctic in a Balloon # A Discovery in the Archive Collection of the Polar Commission

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0300

To the Arctic in a balloon… This idea possessed the minds of many European researchers in the late 19th century. Even today, when we know a lot about the Arctic and tourists can travel to the North Pole by icebreaker, a balloon flight over the vast Arctic Ocean seems a bold adventure. In the past, only the bravest ones could even dream of such a mission. Although the amazing flight to the North Pole made by Swedish polar explorer Salomon Andrée in the summer of 1897 ended in a tragedy, daring scientists and explorers continued to make plans for conquering the Arctic

Books of the Old House # A Portrait of Russia’s Most Important Library

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Today, in our Bookshelf section, we focus on the inner workings of our country’s most important library, i. e., the Russian State Library (RSL), known from 1925 to 1992 as the USSR Lenin State Library, or simply Leninka. Among dozens of millions of printed and handwritten publications, the RSL, one of the world’s largest libraries, keeps a lot of children’s books. This publication was inspired by the interactive exhibition “Books of the Old House: Childhood World in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” which ran from October 23, 2018, to March 3, 2019, in the library’s Ivanovsky Hall