This box is the most complete of the three ivory vessels recovered from Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site. It has a complicated surface decoration across the entire artifact, consisting of dotted lines arranged in wavy lines. A pair of drilled holes near the edge seem to represent an attempt at a repair.
Other tools collected from the site included several bone needles and awls, and pieces of three small decorated ivory containers were found at the site. See Pitulko et al. 2012 for additional information.
Sources
- See the main Yana RHS article
Basilyan AE, Anisimov MA, Nikolskiy PA, and Pitulko VV. 2011. Wooly mammoth mass accumulation next to the Paleolithic Yana RHS site, Arctic Siberia: its geology, age, and relation to past human activity. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(9):2461-2474.
Pitulko VV, and Nikolskiy PA. 2012. The extinction of the woolly mammoth and the archaeological record in Northeastern Asia. World Archaeology 44(1):21-42.
Pitulko VV, Nikolsky PA, Girya EY, Basilyan AE, Tumskoy VE, Koulakov SA, Astakhov SN, Pavlova EY, and Anisimov MA. 2004. The Yana RHS Site: Humans in the Arctic before the Last Glacial Maximum. Science 303(5654):52-56.
Pitulko VV, Pavlova EY, Nikolskiy PA, and Ivanova VV. 2012. The oldest art of the Eurasian Arctic: personal ornaments and symbolic objects from Yana RHS, Arctic Siberia. Antiquity 86(333):642-659.
Tamm E, Kivisild T, Reidla M, Metspalu M, Smith DG, Mulligan CJ, Bravi CM, Rickards O, Martinez-Labarga C, Khusnutdinova EK et al. 2007. Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders. PLoS ONE 2(9):e829.
