Pazyryk

Pazyryk is a local name for a valley in the Altai Mountains lying in Siberian Russia south of the modern city of Novosibirsk, near the borders with China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia. It is part of the Ukok Plateau, where many ancient Bronze Age barrow-like tomb mounds of larch logs covered over by large cairns of boulders and stones have been found. In Russian, such "barrows" are called kurgans—a word of Turkic origin— and the spectacular Scythian burials at Pazyryk introduced "kurgan" into general usage to describe such log-barrow burials.