A post of pride in our archaeologists!

A post of pride in our archaeologists! Scholars of the Centre for Palaeoart at the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have launched the long-awaited project “Petroglyphs of the Lower Amur and Ussuri”, which has been in preparation since 2015 jointly with the Remote Sensing and Spatial Data Analysis Laboratory and the Khabarovsk Regional Centre for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, and which has brought together all the rock art sites of the Amur-Ussuri province available for study.

Anyone who has taken even a passing interest in petroglyphs in Russia has heard of the Khabarovsk Territory's sites, astonishing in their beauty and the richness of their material, in particular Sikachi-Alyan, Sheremetyevo and Kiya. Now the objects at these sites are fully available for study online: the special website offers not only the history of their investigation and a database, the “Catalogue of Stones and Surfaces with Petroglyphs”, but also three-dimensional models of the identified sites and three-dimensional maps of their locations.

And that means that anyone can go to the site and, descending from the level of the region, visit any monument, open literally the very rock or stone required, bring a petroglyph closer at the desired angle, examine it in the desired lighting and in the desired textures, and “read” images that cannot be examined from ordinary photographs.

An excellent example of how, in spite of various circumstances, our researchers create relevant, useful projects that meet modern requirements and technical innovations, and push science forward.

Not without the direct contribution of the Institute of Archaeology's staff, the Sikachi-Alyan site is already on the UNESCO Tentative List, and since 2019 has been recognised as a particularly valuable monument of the cultural heritage of the peoples of Russia.

The idea for the project belongs to the remarkable Ekaterina Devlet, Professor, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Academic Secretary of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and head of the Centre for Palaeoart, who died in 2018, but whose work lives on and yields such impressive results.