Ukrainian nationalists battle archaeologists over burial mound excavations
Controversy over excavations has intensified since the Russian invasion
As the earth is brushed away from the ancient grave, the shape of its occupant gradually emerges: first his skull, followed by his clavicle, then his arms and ribs.
“He was a teenager,” Dmytro Teslenko, the chief archaeologist for Dnipro, says as he tenderly coaxes the bones from the clay earth, “but someone important, because of the effort that went in to burying him, the size of the stone that marks his grave.”
The vast hill of earth that Teslenko’s team have dug through to find him is one of Ukraine’s storeyed kurgans, burial mounds dating back to the Early Bronze Age, housing the dead of at least six different archaeological eras, including ancient Indo-Iranian pastoralists and Scythians, the horse-mounted, marijuana-smoking warrior tribes whose
