The argument the Ice Maiden makes about the past is simply this: the people who buried her were not simple, not primitive, not culturally limited.

They were the bearers of a sophisticated tradition that produced remarkable things, and she was one of their remarkable people.

The Long Conversation About Who The Pazyryk Were

The scholarly conversation about the Pazyryk identity — their ethnic and genetic relationship to modern populations, their cultural affinities with neighboring groups, their position in the broader history of Central Asia — has been ongoing since the first systematic excavations in the 1920s.

Early scholarship emphasized the Pazyryk’s relationship to the Scythian world to the west and treated them as essentially a eastern extension of the Scythian cultural sphere.