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A Bear-Depicted Bronze Plaque from Early Medieval Altai Reveals a Forgotten Cultural Frontier
For more than thirteen centuries, it lay unnoticed in the soil along a quiet Siberian river. When it resurfaced, the object was small—a bronze plaque no wider than a hand—but its implications reach far beyond its size. Unearthed at the Chumysh-Perekat burial ground in southern Siberia’s Altai region, the plaque depicts three bears arranged in…