Researchers of the Scientific Center for Arctic Studies investigate elements of ancient horn armor found at the Ust-Poluy archaeological site, which is located within the city of Salekhard of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. This was reported by the press service of the institution.

"The unique and most ancient details of the military armor of the early Iron Age were discovered in different years on the archaeological complex of Ust-Poluy. The archaeologist of the center Andrei Gusev is trying to put together horn plates of a shell, the remains of a horn helmet and, other parts to find possible reconstruction options of protective weapons. The work is complicated due to incompleteness of sources - all the finds are only details of separate shells, since no no cases of finding complete armor are known yet, the press service specified.

According to Mr. Gusev, there are 30 horn plates in the collection of Ust-Poluy artifacts. "They vary in the degree of safety as well as the size, location of the fastening holes, and the presence or absence of ornamentation. The appearance of the parts says, rather, in favor of the fact that the local tradition of their implementation was indigenous and developed independently of others", - he emphasized.

"In the collection there stand out the plates that served as elements of the horn helmet. They are distinguishable thanks to a special curved shape that repeats the head profile. In the taiga zone of Western Siberia, finds of real iron helmets are extremely rare, but from the middle of the 1st millennium AD there were lots of bronze images of people wearing headgears that reminded of helmets. A probable explanation may be the previous long tradition of making horned helmets", - the researchers specified.

Ust-Poluy is the only archaeological site in the north of Western Siberia, where the biggest number of horn weapons' items of the end of the 1st millennium BC have been found. The Scientific Center for Arctic Studies was founded in 2010. It includes departments of regional studies, archeology and ethnology, environmental monitoring and biomedical technologies.