ARCHÆOLOGY

PAUL SIEVEKING unearths the latest finds: lost cities, phallic carvings and a very old butterfly

SHIGIR IDOL GETS OLDER

A larchwood ‘totem pole’ found in a Siberian peat bog is even older than estimated in our earlier report [FT371:14]. It is by far the world’s oldest surviving work of ritual art. Scattered among the geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons, herringbones) carved into it are eight human faces, each with slashes for eyes. Svetlana Savchenko, the object’s curator, speculates that the eight faces may well contain encrypted information about ancestor spirits, the boundary between earth and sky, or a creation myth.

The Shigir Idol, named for the bog near Kirovgrad in which it was found by gold miners in 1890, is presumed to have rested on a rock base for perhaps two or three decades