Pazyryk Culture in the 21st Century: Discoveries and Hypotheses

The 21st century heralds the qualitatively new level of the Pazyryk culture research. Along with more in-depth insights into the material culture and the reconstruction of the worldview possessed by the Pazyryk people, the core focus now is on the study of a human being, with all physical features, pathologies and diseases; cultural marks (tattoos and mummification); hairstyle; clothing, etc. We explored individual traits of the people buried in the River Ak-Alakha valley on Ukok Plateau in the southwestern Altai Mountains. It has been confirmed that the morphology of those buried people refers to several anthropological types. This is a core fact for the understanding of nature and peculiarity of the Pazyryk culture: this culture was the result of integ­ration among people with different genetic roots, mostly migrants. 
The obtained insights let consider the Pazyryk culture of the Altai Mountains as a new population formed as a result of close contacts between newcomers (migrants from today’s Central and Western Asia as well as Mongoloid individuals of Eastern Siberia) and the indigenous people. It is proven that migrants from remote lands with different nature and climate contributed much to the Pazyryk culture formation, which was decisive for the pathological status of the Pazyryk people of Ukok as extremely negative. The anthropological reconstruction of four men’s appearance from the River Ak-Alakha valley mounds using M.M. Gerasimov’s method has helped to trace similarities in the types of the modern popu­lation and identify exact regions from where the people later buried in the mounds could have arrived in Altai.