The Chinese silk in the Ice Maiden’s burial is worth lingering on for a moment, because it is evidence of something that is easy to underestimate: the reach of Bronze and Iron Age trade.

The silk had been produced somewhere in China — possibly in the Yangtze River valley, possibly in the Wei River valley of the north, possibly in another of the regions where silk production was concentrated in the pre-Han period.

It had been woven on Chinese looms by Chinese weavers according to Chinese techniques.

And then it had traveled, by some route or series of routes, across the mountains and steppes between China and the Altai.

How it traveled — whether it moved through direct trade between steppe nomads and Chinese border populations, through a chain of intermediate exchanges, through gift exchange between elite groups, or through some combination of these mechanisms — is not established by the silk alone.