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Abstract

Accidental fi nds of small-form toreutics of the late 1st – early 2nd millennium, being a characteristic element of the material culture of the Sayan-Altai population, present one of the sources of their research. Most of these fi nds come from the Minusinsk Basin. Many objects were collected in the 19th– early 20th century as separate objects or as part of collections they ended up in various museums in Russia and abroad. The paper gives a brief overview of museum sources. They provide material from collections of accidental fi nds for studying the décor of small-form toreutics from the Sayan-Altai region and, primarily, the Minusinsk Basin. Museums and collections (with corresponding numbers) are listed in the Appendix. Against this background, the study considers and systematizes décor of objects from one of these collections, previously known only from a partial publication. All known analogies are given, most of them also come from the Minusinsk Basin, but there are analogies from other regions of a vast territorial range. The analysis of several dozens of objects showed that this random sample as a whole reflects practically the entire spectrum of the corpus of small-form toreutics from Sayan-Altai (over 2000 objects). The collection contains both single items that have no analogies and those that have identical analogies, as well as samples included in the “series” common throughout the Sayan-Altai territory. In addition, it includes specimens allowing the author to cautiously assume their “local” production. It is safe to say that, with a certain approach to a comprehensive study of the entire array of items in the collection, the collections of accidental fi nds can yield promising and important results.

Keywords

Minusinsk Basin, Sayan-Altai, accidental fi nds collections, small-form toreutics, décor, early Middle Ages.

Galina G. Korol

Institute of Archaeology Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

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