Artsoundscapes in Siberia. An expedition about rock art, acoustics and human limits (Part I)

By Laura Coltofean-Arizancu, Postdoctoral Researcher

Our expedition began on 6 August 2019 and lasted three weeks. The members of our team were Margarita Díaz-Andreu (Artsoundscapes Project Principal Investigator), Tommaso Mattioli (senior postdoctoral researcher), Laura Coltofean-Arizancu (junior postdoctoral researcher), Adriano Farina (acoustical engineer) and Elliot Smith (student collaborator). Our aim was to perform acoustic measurements at several rock art sites in Siberia, more specifically in the Altai Republic. This is the least populated republic in Russia and what I find particularly captivating about it is that most of its territory is covered by mountains (the Altai Mountains). After a month of intensive preparations, we finally embarked on the long-awaited flight from Barcelona to Moscow. In the airport of the Russian capital we met Andrzej Rozwadowski, a Polish archaeologist specializing in rock art and one of the collaborators of the Artsoundscapes project. He has published widely on shamanism in Siberia and has often carried out fieldwork there, which is why we approached him months ago to be part of the team. With Andrzej on board, we landed at Gorno-Altaysk, the capital of the Altai Republic, on 7 August, after a long and delayed flight.

At Gorno-Altaysk airport we were welcomed by the three Russian members of the expedition, Elena Miklashevich, Leonid Bove and Vasiliy Blinov. Elena is one of the most knowledgeable archaeologists in Russia on rock art studies. She works at the Tomskaya Pisanitsa Museum and the Moscow Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was accompanied by two of her former archaeology students, Leonid, who works as an ambulance doctor, and Vasiliy, now a photographer. They were waiting for us with two off-road vehicles.

We were supposed to spend the first night in Gorno-Altaysk so that we could rest after the long flight and the time zone changes. We therefore went to the accommodation that had been booked for us by our university’s travel agency. To our amusement, it turned out to be a luxurious hotel outside the capital with a casino. It was certainly not what we expected. The reception staff were also amazed, as they were not used to guests like us:­ strange-looking archaeologists dressed for fieldwork and with a huge amount of suspicious luggage. The incompatibility was clear from both sides, so Vasiliy quickly found us simpler and less expensive accommodation in a tourist camp near the town. In the afternoon we visited the A.V. Anokhin National Museum in Gorno-Altaysk, the national museum of the Altai Republic. Besides its palaeontological, ethnological, mineral and fine art collections, the museum also hosts a large and very interesting archaeological collection with artefacts from the Palaeolithic to the Late Middle Ages. Here we also had the chance to see the coffin and burial reconstruction of the world-famous Siberian Ice Maiden or Princess of Ukok, known for her impressive tattoos depicting deer. Later in the evening we were introduced to Russian cuisine and the next morning we were already driving deep into the mountains, heading south to our first destination.

During our expedition we had three major stops in Beliy Bom, Kurota and Chemal, villages that had been chosen in advance by Leonid and Elena to be our accommodation and base camps. It was from those places that we explored the nearby rock art sites. In Beliy Bom we were accommodated in a tourist camp located at the foot of mountains on the bank of the fast-flowing Katun River. The camp included several ails (the traditional Altai house, a hexagonal wooden building with one room and a high, pointed roof). In our case, the ails contained five beds, an oven and a large, low, round table in the middle surrounded by small chairs. Altaic families that still live in them gather and eat sitting around those tables. This is also where we enjoyed our dinners on the coldest evenings and they were perhaps some of our nicest meals. I felt that sitting next to each other in circle and being able to see each other closely really had a positive effect on us. Socializing was easier and we felt more like a team.

The very simple living conditions in Beliy Bom came as a shock at first, but we slowly got used to them. There was no bathroom of course and we only had two outdoor latrines. We washed in the antechamber of the sauna (which had to be requested and heated in advance). Our personal hygiene was a ritual-like process that involved preparing our own water by mixing the different pots of hot and cold water until we obtained a suitable temperature for washing our bodies. Sometimes before “showering” we spent time in the dry sauna and then went outside and jumped into an inflatable pool full of ice-cold water. I mentioned several times during the expedition that Beliy Bom was my favourite accommodation during our stay in the Altai. I have the same opinion now, three weeks after our return. After Beliy Bom, the accommodation got better and better in terms of comfort (although the toilets were still outside). In the next village, Kurota, we slept in small wooden houses with one room and twin beds in the courtyard of our dear host Irina. Later on, in Chemal, we were accommodated in the beautiful wooden houses of a spotlessly clean tourist camp, which was kept alive by a tireless woman who worked 24/7.

Whenever we moved to a new place, Elena, Leonid and Vasiliy first took us to explore the rock art sites of the area so that we could plan and decide where to take the next acoustic measurements. During our stay we took measurements at well-known rock art sites that we grouped into four working areas. These sites were Kalbak-Tash I, Kalbak-Tash II and Adyrgan in the first area; Urkosh and Grand Yaloman in the second area; Kara-Tuu, Bichiktu-Bom, Talda and Torgun in the Karakol Valley, our third area; and finally the fourth area, Kuyus, which is along the sacred Katun River. The rock art in the regions where we worked in the Altai Republic is superb and simply everywhere! From cliffs and horizontal rock surfaces to stone slabs and random stones, often, but not necessarily, near rivers; there seemed to be rock art wherever we looked! It is so widespread that it was sometimes difficult to find a place without depictions for our comparative measurements.

At the sites we chose to examine, the rock art can mainly be dated from the Neolithic (in this area between the second half of the fourth millennium and the beginning of the third millennium BC) to the Early Modern Period and even the present day (graffiti). Depictions from different periods can quite often be found at the same site; for example at Kalbak Tash I, which comprises more than 5000 rock art representations with the earliest being from the Neolithic and the latest from the Late Middle Ages. The figures depicted in the Altai Mountains consist mainly of animals (deer, goats, boar, horses, bears, snakes, etc.), anthropomorphs (sometimes with mushroom-shaped hats), cup marks, abstract motifs and sometimes small compositions representing hunting or perhaps ritual scenes.