An international team of restorers studied the Golden Horde period burial

In the Scientific restoration laboratory “Island of Crimea” (Almaty, Kazakhstan), an international team of specialists from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Korea, the USA and Russia carried out the cleaning of the burial of Mongol noble woman of the Golden Horde period, as well as restoration activities. Lyudmila Maklasova, a research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology of the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences worked as part of an international team of restorers. She cleaned a female headdress with a birch bark frame, which is commonly called a boqtaq.

The burial was found in 2021 by a joint international archaeological expedition (Society for Eurasian Studies, Switzerland; International Institute for Central Asian Studies, Uzbekistan; Archaeological Expertise LLP, Kazakhstan; Lanier Center for Archaeology, Lipscomb University, USA; Margulan Institute of Archaeology, Kazakhstan) during the excavation of the “Usharal-Ilibalyk” site in the south-east of Kazakhstan. During implementation of a long-term project, a large city, standing on the trade route, and a burial ground with preliminary estimates of about 500 burials, were discovered. Archaeological works at the cemetery revealed the existence of a large Christian community of the 13th to 14th centuries: a small funerary chapel of the early 14th century and stone tombstones with crosses were found.

The burial of a married Mongol noble woman was found in a Christian burial ground. Due to the late excavation season, lack of time and the difficulty of extracting organic materials, it was decided to take the burial as a monolith and bring it to the laboratory for strong analysis and cleaning in order to preserve the organic materials.

The importance of this site in the study of the Golden Horde period of Central Asia lies not only in the finding of a Christian medieval society in one of the uluses, but also, possibly, in the first burial of a noble nomadic woman found in a Christian cemetery.