On the crossing: russian mongolian archaeologist Vitaly Volkov (rememberence-cum-article)

Abstract

The research activity of Vitaly Volkov (1933–2000) was unusual in the sense that all of it took place outside the USSR, in Mongolia. His contributions to the Mongolian archaeology were also unique: a typology of the steles with stylized images of deer (most of them are located on the territory of Mongolia and more than 400 were discovered and described by Volkov); the excavations of the Scythian burial ground of the 5th – 3rd centuries BC near to Ulangom; the discovery of the first Aeneolithic burial sites in Mongolia; the primary fixation and interpretation of petroglyphs in the canyon of the river Chuluut dating back to the third – the end of the second millennium BC, with many previously unseen rock carvings. Volkov’s life experience is no less valuable than his scientific legacy. From the age of eight, he was brought up in the family of his stepfather Bazaryn Shirendyb, an outstanding Mongolian historian and public figure, the first president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and a man of remarkable personal qualities. Such a culturally syncretic school of personal formation taught Volkov not to measure the social environment of another culture with the usual standards, but to live in it. He was a rare type of person who, not caring about status distance, at the same time arouses deep respect. And knowing Mongolia as none of the foreigners who visited it, he never looked at Mongolian culture and the people who shared it from the position of an “elder brother”.