(CNN) -- Archaeologists in Russia
have discovered an "extraordinary" group of Stone Age artworks which appear to
have been carefully buried in pits and covered with mammoth bones, the
researchers announced this week in a newly published paper.
Archaeologists uncovered
these Stone Age figures buried in pits southeast of Moscow.
At least some of the 21,000-22,000-year-old objects appear
to have been regarded as magical, the scientists surmise.
The collection includes the only example of engravings of
images found to date at the site -- what appear to be three overlapping mammoths
only a few centimeters long and carved onto the rib of a mammoth.
"The main lines of the image are clear, not ragged; they
were made by confident, unbroken movements," Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev
write.
The carving may have been part of a hunting ritual, Lev told
CNN.
The objects they describe in their new paper "show an
extraordinary repertoire of incised carving on mammoth ivory plaques and carving
in the round, including representations of women and large mammals, and
geometric decoration on bone utensils," they write.
They also uncovered two female figures, including one 16.6
centimeters tall with a head they call particularly accurate in shape. The
figures, which Lev called Venus statuettes, had been carefully placed in pits
and surrounded with colored sand, Lev said.
The archaeologists uncovered the objects in 2005 at a site
called Zaraysk, which was discovered in 1980. The site is about 100 miles
southeast of Moscow.
Researchers have been excavating the site since 1995, and
have found a necklace made of teeth of the arctic fox and a carving of a bison
made from mammoth ivory.
Zaraysk is the northernmost known location for a style of
Stone Age artwork called Kostenski-Avdeevo after two other Russian locations where art of that type has been
found.
Lev said the Zaraysk site was on a par with Kostenski and
Avdeevo "in terms of the splendor and variety of its art."
The site dates from the Upper Paleolithic period, which
began about 40,000 years ago and lasted until roughly 10,000 years ago.
Amirkhanov and Lev's article, "New Finds of Art Objects from
the Upper Palaeolithic Site of Zaraysk, Russia," is to be published in the
December issue of the magazine Antiquities, a York, England-based journal that
describes itself as a quarterly review of world archaeology. A version of their
article appeared on the journal's website on Monday; the print version is due
out soon, reviews editor Madeleine Hummler said.
The researchers are associated with the
Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.