Abstract
The paper is devoted to rock art of the Mt. Moiseikha, related to the Okunev culture of the Bronze Age in the Minusinsk basin. The mountain is situated on the right bank of the Yenisei River (now Krasnoyarsk Reservoir) at the very mouth of the Tuba River, along its left bank. More than 60 panels with imagery from various periods are known within this rock art site, and only two parts of one panel bear the images of the Okunev culture. At one of them two fi gures of “skinny” cows with specifi cally curved horns are depicted in the pecking technique. They were discovered in 1980–1981 by N. Leontiev; since then, they are well known to many researchers, while the author recorded them in 2003. In 2020, a new documentation of the entire site was undertaken, using modern techniques and technologies, which are particularly effective for revealing barely visible fi ne engravings, superfi cial scratching, abraded and painted images. The author describes those techniques and presents the results of their application for documenting the panel with Okunev images. In addition to the well-known fi gures of cows, the presence of images on six other small sections of the panel has been recorded there. Most of them are clearly visible: they are late schematic fi gures, made with the pecking technique; but numerous scratched and fi nely engraved lines were also revealed, which are almost invisible remains of some badly preserved images. Among them, at one of the sections we managed to see fi nely engraved bull’s horns, typical for Okunev imagery, exactly like those of the pecked fi gures. Furthermore, it has been established that one of the pecked fi gures has abraded horns with the red paint on a top of the abrading. Thus, all basic techniques of rock art were used to create the Okunev images at Moiseikha: pecking, engraving, polishing and painting. Their cultural and chronological attribution was not problematic, as fi gures of “skinny” cows and bulls, executed in a highly recognizable style, are abundantly presented on grave slabs, steles and statues of the Okunev culture as well as in rock art. Some of them had been found in the graves of the final stage of the culture, named the Razliv stage after the Razliv X kurgan. The fi gures of the Moiseikha cows perfectly fi t into the group of known images of the Razliv stage in terms of their style, technique and composition: so, therefore, they can be confi dently attributed to this fi nal stage of the Okunev culture and dated to the 19th and 18th centuries BC, just as radiocarbondated burials from this stage.
Keywords
Rock art, Okunev culture, Razliv style, Minusinsk Basin, Mt. Moiseikha.
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