The Soviet-era excavations of the 1920s through 1950s, culminating in Rudenko’s major publications on the Pazyryk culture in the 1950s, established the scientific framework for understanding what the Altai kurgans contained.

The Ice Maiden’s discovery in 1993 marked the beginning of a new phase of Altai archaeology — one characterized by better preservation techniques, more sophisticated scientific analysis, and (eventually) more attention to the rights and interests of the indigenous communities whose ancestral landscape the kurgans occupy.

Subsequent excavations in the 1990s and 2000s have added to the corpus of preserved individuals and have expanded the understanding of Pazyryk society in ways that would not have been possible from the earlier male-focused excavations.

The Warrior found in 1995 added a male perspective on the same general social level as the Ice Maiden.