All of these explanations attribute to the Mal’ta community the kind of complex inner life — the social structures, the beliefs, the emotional responses — that fully human beings have.

Which is, of course, exactly what the Mal’ta people were.

The Museum Collections And What They Preserve

The objects from the Mal’ta site — the figurines, the burial goods, the tools and ornaments — are held today primarily in the collections of Russian museums, including the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk.

These collections are important not just for the individual objects they contain but for the contextual information that has been recorded alongside those objects — the documentation of where each object was found, in what relationship to other objects and to the burial context, and in what physical condition.

This documentation, gathered during the excavations of the 1920s and subsequent decades, is the record against which all later interpretation must be checked.