Scythian Archaeology in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives

Abstract

Scythian Studies, or Scythology has a complex and discontinuous history as a branch of archaeology. In its modern form, it is a relatively young discipline. Rather than showing steady development, the field is marked by major interruptions, particularly under the Soviet regime. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Iron Curtain, Scythology entered Western academia more fully, enabling mutual access to literature, collections, and excavations across Eastern and Western Europe. However, by the 1980s, new conceptual challenges grew stronger than ever, particularly the division between narrow and broad definitions of “Scythian culture”. This article argues that the increasingly popular, broad usage of the term, especially in genetic, isotope-based, and popular-science contexts, is rooted in political frameworks. It further examines how colonial and neocolonial narratives have influenced and continue to shape scholarly interpretations, museum representations, and political discourse surrounding Scythian heritage.

1. Introduction

Modern Scythology1, as we see it now, is a relatively young field that bears little resemblance to research conducted in the early 19th century. Moreover, we cannot speak of a gradual development (from the 19th century to the present) or of advances in the study and interpretation of this prehistoric period. On the contrary, repressions and social experiments carried out by the Soviet government in the early USSR had a dramatic impact on the humanities; as a result, the 1920s, 1930s, and most of the 1940s present a significant gap in the study of Scythian antiquities in the USSR (Shelekhan 2020, p. 18). Thus, new specialists had to start almost from scratch in the 1950s. At the same time, west of the Soviet border, new studies of Scythian art and culture were undertaken, based largely on previously acquired materials, though a few scholars traveled to the Soviet Union to examine new finds in museum and institute collections. From the mid-1950s onward, the relative easing of pressure from the totalitarian regime brought a new wave of interest, attracting new researchers to Scythology and contributing to a clearer understanding of Scythian history and culture.

With the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the gradual removal of language barriers, Scythology has entered Western academia more broadly than before. The Eastern European Scythologists gained access to Western and Central European literature, and Western and Central European specialists acquired entry to the archeological collections and excavations in Eastern Europe. However, in the 1980s, new challenges emerged: two views of Scythian culture formed more clearly than ever, in the narrow (situated on the North of Black sea, between Danube and Don Rivers) and broad (as continuum from Danube till Altai Mountains) senses of the term.

In this article, we examine why the broad use of the term “Scythian culture,” now common in DNA and isotope studies2, in many Russian-language publications and in popular scholarship reflects not scientific precision but political agendas. A related aim is to analyze the colonial and neocolonial narratives that have shaped and continue to shape scholarly works, museum exhibitions and political statements.

2. Methodology

This article employs a postcolonial approach combined with critical discourse analysis to examine how Russian historiography and museum narratives have constructed Scythian archaeological cultures as part of an exclusively Russian historical continuum and how these constructions have influenced Scythian Studies in Eastern and Western Europe. Our analysis, in most cases, focuses not on the archaeological evidence itself but on the mechanisms by which archaeological interpretations acquire political and ideological functions. To avoid treating related concepts as synonymous, the study distinguishes four analytical categories.

Imperial narratives are understood as interpretations that integrate the archaeological heritage of the Northern Black Sea region into a continuous historical narrative, linking the region’s ancient populations to the history of the Russian state and thereby legitimizing claims of territorial and historical continuity between the Russian Empire and earlier populations of the region.

Colonial narratives are interpretative frameworks that marginalize or erase Ukraine’s historical agency by presenting archaeological discoveries from its territory as part of a broader Russian historical space.

Appropriative narratives constitute a more specific category. They refer to discursive strategies through which archaeological sites, museum collections, excavations, and cultural achievements originating in present-day Ukraine are reclassified as Russian heritage. In this study, appropriation refers to the transfer or discursive reassignment of cultural ownership, rather than merely the reinterpretation of historical evidence, drawing on Lowenthal’s (1998) discussion of the appropriation and political uses of the past.

Neocolonial narratives describe the continuation and adaptation of imperial and colonial interpretative models under contemporary conditions, particularly where formal colonial structures have changed, but hierarchical claims to historical authority, cultural ownership, and interpretive control persist. In this study, the term refers to their reproduction in contemporary Russian scholarship, museum practice, public history, and state memory politics (Beisswenger 2007; Krysachenko 2020; Lukianov 2025). Rather than creating fundamentally new interpretations, these narratives reproduce earlier claims under contemporary political conditions, particularly through continued assertions of authority over Ukraine’s historical past, archaeological heritage, and cultural identity.

These categories are treated as analytical dimensions rather than mutually exclusive types of discourse. Individual publications or museum projects may simultaneously demonstrate imperial, colonial, and appropriative characteristics. Postcolonial scholarship has extensively examined colonialism and imperialism, including the production of knowledge, representations of the colonized, and the enduring effects of colonial power (e.g., E. W. Said 1978; E. Said 1993; Bhabha 1994; Hamilakis 2007, 2013; Dietler 2010).

Studies of Russian imperialism and colonialism have likewise examined these processes, particularly in the fields of art and literature, while some have also pursued a more explicitly decolonial orientation by seeking to deconstruct and challenge the persistence of colonial epistemologies and power relations (Thompson 2000; Shkandrij 2001; Sunderland 2004; Tlostanova 2012, 2025). However, these approaches have been applied only to a limited extent to Russian and Soviet archaeological scholarship, and particularly to the ways in which Scythian archaeology was constructed and subsequently transmitted into Eastern and Western European scholarship.

3. Scythian Archaeology in the Romanov Period

Studying Iron Age prehistory in Eastern Europe began with the translation of the works of Ancient Greek and Roman authors. Thus, Scythology itself flows from Classical Studies, and even today, these two branches remain closely tied.3 Herodotus’s Histories was the most prominent source for early studies, describing the Greco-Persian Wars and the numerous people involved, including the Scythians. However, scholars also discussed numerous lesser-known sources, such as the Periplus by Hecataeus or Pseudo-Scylax, who placed the Scythians on the northern shores of the Black Sea. Notably, the first Russian translation of Herodotus by Andrej Nartov, based on a German translation (Nartov 1763; Neikhardt 1982, p. 6; Meyer 2020, p. 206), was published the same year that Lyta Mohyla kurgan was first excavated (Pridik 1911).

The first Russian “History of the Scythians” manuscript was written in 1692 by Moscow historian, courtier and participant in the Moscow Tsardom’s Chyhyryn and Crimean campaigns, Andrej Lyzlov (Lyzlov 1776; Neikhardt 1982, pp. 7–9; Meyer 2020, p. 204). Around the same time, at the end of the 1690s, during a trip to the Netherlands, Tsar Peter I developed an interest in collecting Siberian antiquities and ordered that the State collect such items (Trigger 2006, p. 91). Initially, he kept such valuable archaeological artifacts—most of which had been found by treasure hunters—as personal possessions, and neither the exact location nor the circumstances of discovery were recorded. After his death, his personal collection was transferred to the Art Cabinet, or Kunstkammer, which he himself had established in 1714. From there, in 1859, these items were transferred to the State Hermitage Museum, where they are held under the name ‘Peter the Great’s Siberian Collection’. Even though it comprises only a handful of decontextualized items attributable to ‘Scythian culture’ (Meyer 2026, p. 40), it is precisely from this collection that Russian literature of the past three decades (and, as a result, Western academia, e.g., Meyer 2013, 2026; Simpson and Pankova 2017; Cunliffe 2019; Cuenca 2019) has traced the origins of Scythian Studies, positioning Russia as its primary source and center. Thus, we can agree on the fact that the time of Peter I can be considered the start of Russian “homeland” archaeology (Medvedeva et al. 2009, p. 24); however, we strongly argue that it was proclaimed as the beginning of Scythian Studies without a firm factual background.

The start of the actual field investigation can be pinned to 1763, even earlier than the first excavation of Classical Greek monuments in the North Pontic region. In that year, the Russian officer Isakov mined a kurgan known locally as Lyta Mohyla or Lytyi Kurgan, where he found a set of 7th-century BCE gold artifacts of Assyrian appearance. Shortly thereafter, the Russian official Melgunov presented these finds to the empress in a bid to secure his promotion. As a result, they became known as the Melgunov treasure (Pridik 1911; Lebedev 1992, p. 58; Tunkina 2007; Babenko 2012; Klejn 2014, p. 39), and the barrow itself is commonly referred to as the Melgunov kurgan in Russian-language literature.

Eighteenth-century Russian aristocratic textbooks stated, as an indisputable fact, that Russia (the new name for the former Moscowia) was formerly known as Scythia (Dilthey 1763, pp. 314–15). It is therefore hardly surprising that such ideas helped Empress Catherine II construct a concept of the ‘Russian national character’ modeled on that of their ancestors, the celebrated Scythians. It was particularly reflected in her Notes on Russian History (Ekaterina II 1801).

Nevertheless, only in the 19th century did archaeological excavations, rather than the chance recovery of striking objects, begin to shape the narrative. At that time, as the theatre of the ongoing Russo-Turkish wars moved from present-day Ukraine to the Balkans and the Caucasus, antiquarian enthusiasts gained the opportunity to study local monuments firsthand. However, almost all the pioneering archaeological enthusiasts were private collectors and dilettanti from the colonial administration or the army, who primarily focused on searching for precious items with little concern for their context or proper storage in museums. Only after the establishment of centers of study, such as the Kerch Museum of Antiquities in 1826 and the Odesa Society of History and Antiquities in 1839, can we speak of more or less systematic work on the North Pontic sites (Tunkina 2003; Trigger 2006, p. 64; Meyer 2017, pp. 501–2).

At first, all the attention was on the remains of Greek poleis on the northern shores of the Black Sea, although many kurgans were excavated there at the same time. Only after decades of exploration did it become evident that these sites—replete with both Greek imports and local products—could be associated with the Scythians familiar from the written sources. Although the Lyta Mohyla mentioned above had been excavated much earlier, the 1830 excavation of the Kul-Oba kurgan near Kerch (Tunkina 2010, pp. 167–222; Medvedeva et al. 2009, pp. 26–27; Meyer 2017, p. 500) marked a turning point by sparking sustained interest in Scythian antiquities.

However, in the principal synthetic works of the period, such as Antiquites du Bosphore Cimmerien conservées au musée imperial de l’Ermitage (Antiquites 1854), historians paid minimal attention to the Scythians, describing them mainly from an artistic perspective as romanticized barbarian neighbors of the Greeks.

Already under Tsar Nicholas I, as a result of the overwhelming number of antiquities arriving at the Russian imperial palace, which very quickly outgrew its space, a New Hermitage was built (Meyer 2017, p. 500). The Imperial Archaeological Commission was established quite late, in 1859, and since 1882, it has been located in the Hermitage (Medvedeva et al. 2009, p. 93). Its creation made possible more systematic and better-organized excavations across Eastern Europe and helped regulate the principles governing the storage of materials in state museums (Trigger 2006, pp. 230–31). Interestingly, in its early years, this Commission primarily financed excavations of the Scythian kurgans North of the Black Sea (Klejn 2014, p. 48). At the same time, the Commission initiated the systematic export of antiquities from colonial lands to the Russian metropolises of St. Petersburg and Moscow. These practices would thrive for more than a century and were later adopted by Soviet Russia. According to a recent OSINT investigation, more than 110,000 archaeological items exported from Ukraine to Russia are held by only two Russian museums, the Hermitage and the State Historical Museum; however, these figures reflect only items that were entered into open catalogs (Gadzynska and Romanenko 2023). The real number of exported artifacts remains unknown to this day.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, many works published by Russian scholars presented the Scythians as the ancestors of the Slavs and Russians. For example, in his study on the history of Russian dress, Prohorov (1881) began with a description of Scythian attire and used the specific term “Scythians-Slavs” to refer to the Scythians. In contrast, in not-so-numerous because of Russian state oppression, Ukrainian-language literature, the understanding of the complicated ethical picture of Scythia was understood almost from the beginning. One of the first attempts to analyze information about the Scythians, as provided by Herodotus and other ancient authors, in Ukrainian was made by Mykhailo Hrushevskyi during his tenure at Lviv University, resulting in a published work in 1895. The scholar disputed the notion of a possible Ural-Altaic origin of the Scythians and concluded that they were ethnically heterogeneous (Hrushevskyi 1895, p. 5, footnote 4).

Caspar Meyer recently proposed the idea that “the court’s antiquarians discovered in the nineteenth century an alternative ancestry for the cosmopolitan empire in the Scythian monarchies of South Russia” as a “response to Slavocentric nationalism” (Meyer 2017, p. 493; partly repeated in: Meyer 2026, p. 189). However, at this time, the idea of Slavic origins from Eastern European forest-steppe peoples of Scythia or Scythians themselves was already popular among the dominant historians; thus, we cannot agree with such an idea. The bright example of celebrating Slavic (and not cosmopolitan) roots was the 1862 celebration of the Millennium of Russian Statehood (Banaszkiewicz 2016). It served both political and ideological purposes: it reinforced the legitimacy of the Romanov monarchy, promoted imperial unity in the aftermath of the Crimean War, and popularized the official doctrine of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” through a carefully constructed narrative of uninterrupted state continuity from the so-called invitation of Rurik in 862 (Karamzin 1818, pp. 112–22).

At the beginning of the 20th century, the corpus of excavated kurgans and settlements enabled scholars to conduct the first extensive analysis of Scythian culture. As a result, scholarly reconstructions of Scythian life became clearer and much less romanticized than in the previous century. Despite nearly a century of excavation, the first systematic attempt to summarize the knowledge gained about Scythian culture was made not by a Russian scholar but by the British classical archaeologist Ellis Minns, a professor at the University of Cambridge. He visited Russia and Ukraine in 1898—1901 and completed further study in St. Petersburg and Moscow. His book “Scythians and Greeks” (Minns 1913) remained, for a long time, the primary reference work for Western academia studying the Scythians (see Klejn 2014, p. 626; Meyer 2013, p. 6, footnote 13). Notably, in describing the Scythian animal style, he wrote that the prototypes for the Scythian images lay in Western Siberia (Minns 1913, p. 226; Meyer 2013, p. 110).

Soon after, the St. Petersburg University lecturer Aleksandr Spitsyn turned his attention to Scythian culture and eventually became the first to distinguish forest-steppe farmers’ sites from nomadic steppe monuments (Spitsyn 1918). He highlighted the close connections of the farmer communities with Central Europe, while tracing eastern influences among the steppe population. Another important conclusion of his work is the division of Scythian culture into three chronological periods. Spitsyn adapted to the new Bolshevik regime and remained active in Russian academia until his death in 1931 (Klejn 2014, pp. 581–84).

A different fate, emigration, was chosen by Michael Rostovtzeff, a St. Petersburg University professor who was Ukrainian by origin with a Russian identity. He wrote his main works on the Scythians as an émigré scholar (Rostovtzeff 1922, 1929, 2001), two of which were printed in Russia (Rostovtzeff 1918, 1925). He described Scythian culture as the archaeological expression of the ruling stratum of the region’s earliest known state. According to his interpretation, the boundaries of this state extended from Prussia to the Lower Urals, while its principal centers of Scythian antiquities were located in the Kuban, Taman, and Dnieper basins (Rostovtzeff 1925, p. 302). Such an expansive geographical framework was shaped by his reliance on widely dispersed hoards of nomadic character, such as that from Witaszkowo. At the same time, he emphasized the heterogeneous nature of this culture, identifying several key components: local indigenous traditions alongside Greek imports, as well as Near Eastern, Caucasian, and West Siberian influences (Rostovtzeff 1925, pp. 302–6). However, these features were interpreted primarily through the lens of classical art-historical analysis. Stressing what he regarded as the Iranian—thus Near Eastern—core of Scythian culture, Rostovtzeff nevertheless refrained from making definitive claims about the origin of the Scythians.

At this stage of research, archaeological material still did not play a central role in the study of the past. It was used mostly as an illustration for historical conclusions. Views on the social development of the Scythian tribes are also characteristic of this period. Notably, Rostovtzeff considered archaeological remnants to be undeniable evidence of a state structure similar to that of medieval states such as the Golden Horde, which he designated the Scythian Tsardom (Rostovtzeff 1918, p. 38). In his opinion, this was the first state in “Southern Russia” to wage war against its neighbors, establish a protectorate over Greek poleis, and conduct trade with the Mediterranean world through Greek ports.

However, due to extensive experience in kurgan excavation, a new, more progressive methodology was developed during that time. It became clear that a mound had to be excavated in its entirety, including all the area beneath it, rather than approached through mining shafts, as in earlier fieldwork undertaken, for example, by Nikolaj Veselovskij or Ivan Zabelin (Klejn 2014, pp. 54, 444). Such “exemplary” work was, in Rostovtzeff’s view, the excavations of Luhova Mohyla (Oleksandropol) by Oleksandr Liutsenko (Rostovtzeff 1925, p. 428, footnote 2), who also served as Kerch Museum director. Another methodological high point was the excavation of the First Mordvinivskyi kurgan, conducted by yet another Ukrainian researcher Mykola Makarenko in 1914, at the very beginning of World War I (Klejn 2014, p. 528; Gulyaev 2018, p. 80, footnote). Ukrainian industrialists and members of the bourgeoisie, such as the Tereshenko and Khanenko families, funded the excavations of Ukrainian scholars, including Oleksandr Liutsenko, Vikentii Khvoika, and Mykola Makarenko. The archaeological centers of Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kherson, and Kerch were growing stronger. But the Bolshevik coup and the failed Ukrainian War of Independence brought this process to a rapid decline.

4. Scythian Archaeology in the Soviet Period

Privileged archaeologists, such as Aleksei Bobrinskii and Michael Rostovtzeff, emigrated to the West soon after the Bolshevik coup. Other Russian scholars, including Vasilij Gorodcov and Aleksandr Spitsyn, remained loyal to the newly established government and continued their academic work. Still, from the 1920s, they showed almost no interest in Scythian archaeology.

At the same time, many Ukrainian researchers who had previously explored Iron Age monuments were unable to flee and lost their careers as “politically untrustworthy persons.” For example, an archaeologist from Dnipro, Dmytro Yavornytskyi, lived in poverty after losing his position as the Director of the Museum and Head of the rescue expedition following accusations of “bourgeois nationalism” (Lebedev 1992, p. 256; Abrosymova and Paramonov 2009, pp. 45–47). Mykola Makarenko, an archaeologist from Sumy Oblast, who, among other work, excavated Scythian kurgans, faced years of allegations of “counterrevolutionary fascism” and was repeatedly arrested before being finally deported to Russia in the 1930s, where the NKVD executed him (Klejn 2014, p. 537).

The Soviet Union, especially in its early years, was a highly bureaucratic, totalitarian state in which the administrative apparatus controlled all aspects of life. No aspect of research in the humanities and sciences remained untouched. After all, it was vital for the newly established and aggressive state to instill Marxist doctrine in all its citizens and to claim that Bolshevik rule was historically predetermined. According to this belief, all nations go through certain pre-established social stages or, in their terminology, formations. There were four of these stages—prehistory, slavery, feudalism and capitalism—which were believed to lead humanity inevitably to the fifth and last stage, called communism. In the Soviet disciplinary structure, archaeology was presented as a subordinate sub-discipline of history, aimed solely at illustrating the socioeconomic development of past societies and reinforcing the model of successive social formations. One of the leading promoters of Marxism in Soviet humanities was the linguist Nikolai Marr, head of the Institute of History of Material Culture based in Moscow. He speculated that all languages of the world originated from a single protolanguage and passed through the same stages of social development. Therefore, archaeology increasingly came to be viewed as the study of the history of material culture.

The revival of Scythian archaeology came only after the Second World War, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, alongside another shift in the political paradigm. A decisive moment was Joseph Stalin’s 1950 paper, in which he rejected Marr’s theory and denounced it as heretical, that is, as a false interpretation of Marxist doctrine (Stalin 1950). This authoritarian intervention, followed by Stalin’s death in 1953, created the conditions for the emergence of several major studies of Scythian material culture and, more broadly, reconstructions of Scythian history.

It is important to note that researchers from Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) were the first to return to Scythian archaeology. They were able to resume scholarship while maintaining at least some degree of scientific continuity: Boris Grakov as a pupil of Vasilij Gorodcov, and Mikhail Artamonov as a pupil of Aleksandr Spitsyn. Russian scholars were, in most cases, more privileged than archaeologists from other parts of the USSR. For example, Boris Grakov was of noble birth, whereas such a background was unthinkable for a Ukrainian scholar. At the same time, Ukraine, where most Scythian and ancient monuments were located, had been ravaged by repression and crossed by the front lines of the Second World War.

All these circumstances led to the emergence of two schools of Scythology in Russia: Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). The Kyiv center developed only in the 1960s, as a result of the liberalization of political life during the so-called Khrushchev Thaw. Even then, however, scholars of Russian origin were often preferred by the Party as more reliable than Ukrainians. For example, the Ukrainian archaeologist Borys Mozolevskyi was placed under KGB surveillance in the late 1960s and 1970s because of his “nationalist views” and nearly lost his career prospects in archaeology (Sayenko 2016, p. 42). Oleksii Terenozhkin, who spent almost half of his life working in Ukraine after earlier research in Khorezm, had previously lost his career in Moscow and Tashkent to another Russian scholar (Sayenko and Shestakova 2018, p. 57). Sadly, he partly repeated this pattern himself: as head of the Department of Scythian and Sarmatian Archaeology, he pushed several Ukrainian scholars into other fields of research or even out of the Institute. Thus, a Russian archaeologist became the forefather of the Kyiv school of Scythian archaeology.

The Thaw made it possible to analyze the large body of material gathered by “bourgeois” archaeologists before the First World War. As a result, scholars produced dozens of catalogs and monographs with comprehensive analyses of specific regions and artifact categories. Some of the most notable works appeared in the Moscow series Corpus of Archaeological Sources (Свoд археoлoгических истoчникoв) (Klejn 2014, p. 83), alongside several major regional monographs published throughout the second half of the twentieth century, many of them in Kyiv (for example, Mozolevskyi 1979).

The period from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s in Soviet Ukrainian archaeology is often described as the era of extensive rescue excavations (Mylian and Diachenko 2014, pp. 419–20). It was shaped by the Soviet Union’s massive irrigation projects, which allowed Ukrainian archaeologists to excavate large Scythian kurgans. Such work was highly labor-intensive and expensive and was therefore usually carried out during emergency excavations. Several new generations of Ukrainian Scythologists were trained through this experience. The most famous among them was Borys Mozolevskyi, who excavated, among other major kurgans, the Tovsta Mohyla mound (Mozolevskyi 1979; Polidovych 2023), which contained an undisturbed side grave and a looted main grave in which the now world-famous gold pectoral was found. From the 1960s through the 1980s, many scholars considered it necessary to present their own view of the ethnic map of Eastern Europe. Mozolevskyi was one of them and even devoted his doctoral thesis to this subject (Mozolevskyi 2005). The basis for such reconstructions was Herodotus’ Histories, especially Book 4 (Melpomene), in which, when introducing the events of the Scythian–Persian war, he also described the peoples of the region. In broad terms, Herodotus presents Scythia as the land north of the Black Sea, between the Dniester and the Don, placing the Sauromatians in Asia, east of the Don. Within Scythia, he mentions Royal Scythians, Scythian nomads, and Scythian farmers, alongside other nomadic peoples such as the Sauromatians and Massagetae, and neighboring tribes such as the Neuri, the werewolves, an unnamed people described as bold and peaceful, goat-legged peoples, the one-eyed Arimaspians, and many others. He also describes the major rivers of Scythia and locates these groups by calculating the number of days of travel inland from the Black Sea (Herod IV, 17–27).

With these reference points, archaeologists working within the cultural–ethnic paradigm sought to connect the ethnic groups identified in written sources to known archaeological monuments. Unlike the Royal Scythians, who were confidently associated with the Lower Dnipro basin, nearly all other neighboring tribes were repeatedly rearranged across the map of steppe and forest-steppe Eastern Europe in every possible variation.

So, after decades of tempestuous debate, the dispute gradually subsided without producing any decisive results. Interestingly, attempts to reconstruct an ethnic map based on Herodotus’ narrative were largely abandoned by scholars working on core Scythian archaeological material. By contrast, researchers dealing with more peripheral archaeological groups, such as the Milograd or Vysock cultures, continued to pursue these questions for decades longer.

5. Scythian–Siberian Concept and Eurasianism

When discussing Soviet-era Scythology, one cannot overlook the invention of a term that continues to shape interpretative problems to this day. It began at a conference in the 1950s, where the renowned Russian Scythologists Borys Grakov and Anna Melyukova introduced the idea of the so-called Scythian triad (Grakov and Melyukova 1954). By this, they meant that the Scythian monuments of the forest-steppe and steppe zones of Ukraine, despite their differences, shared several defining features: the Animal Style, weapons, and horse bridles. In their view, this set of traits defined Scythian culture and came to be known as the Scythian triad.

However, this idea was severely distorted at the Second Scythologists’ Conference in 1967. One of the main proponents of the view that Scythian culture had fully formed in Central Asia and only later spread to the northern Black Sea region was the Russian archaeologist based in Kyiv, Terenozhkin (1978). His theory relied on pre-revolutionary museum collections, as well as on chance finds and unprovenanced material. As an example, we can mention bronze Minusinsk artifacts from the collection of Karl Bolsunovskyi, stored in the Kyiv Historical Museum (now the National Museum of the History of Ukraine), that were mistakenly described as finds from the Middle Dnieper (see Shelekhan 2020, pp. 47–49). Oleksii Terenozhkin used them to justify the Asian origin of Scythian weaponry (Terenozhkin 1961, p. 138, figure 90).

Many scholars have long regarded the emergence of the Animal Style as a decisive factor in the origins of Scythian culture. In the 1970s, Mikhail Gryaznov and Mongush Mannai-ool excavated the looted burial mound of Arzhan 1 in Tyva4. There, a bronze ornament in the shape of a crouching panther was found. This single find reinforced the already existing idea of Scythian–Siberian unity and of the Asian origin of Scythian culture. Terenozhkin even argued that these excavations put an end to disputes over the true origin of Scythian culture (Terenozhkin 1978, p. 48).

The wood used to construct this burial mound was initially dated to the 9th century BCE based on radiocarbon analyses (Alekseev et al. 2002, pp. 145, 148, table 1); however, the date has now been refined to the early 8th century BCE using the ‘wiggle matching’ method (Zaitseva et al. 2007, p. 648). The characteristics of this panther image can point even to a later time of the late 8th or even the early 7th century BCE (Kuklina 1985, p. 190). The recently discovered Tyva burial mounds Arzhan 5 (Rukavishnikova and Gladchenkov 2016) and Tunnug 1 (Caspari 2022) kurgan contain what seem to be the earliest samples of the Animal Style decor for now; hence, they are dated by wood radiocarbon to the late 9th century BCE. Based on that, it seems plausible that mobile pastoralism accompanied by animal-style art appeared in South Siberia prior to the emergence of equestrian elites in the western Eurasian steppe. Yet such chronological precedence should not be taken as proof of an east-to-west movement of the Scythian population.

Returning to the 1980s. The ‘Animal Style factor’ was voiced especially strongly during and after the First All-Union Archaeological Conference on “Scythian-Siberian Cultural and Historical Unity” in 1987. The Scythian triad was subsequently applied to many Iron Age monuments east of the Don and even the Volga rivers, thereby altering the very definition of Scythian culture. At the same time, the new term “Scythian-Siberian unity” or “Scythian-Siberian world” emerged. On the one hand, some scholars argued that it should be applied to many Asian Iron Age cultures that shared at least some features of the Scythian triad (Martynov 1980; Martynov and Alekseev 1986). In the 2000s, as scholars increasingly recognized the limited influence of Asian material cultures on Scythian culture in the northern Black Sea region (Alekseev 2003; Bruyako 2005, 2005–2009), some even coined the term “European Scythians” to emphasize their exceptional position (Alekseev 2003). Thus, alongside the artificial terms “Eastern Scythians” or even “Siberian Scythians” (Subbotin 2020), a new label was introduced: “European Scythians.” None of these terms appears in relevant Classical or Hellenistic sources; they are modern constructions, largely based on the much later evidence of Roman-era authors such as Quintus Curtius Rufus and Lucius Flavius Arrianus.

On the other hand, the “Scythian-Siberian unity” or “Scythian-Siberian world” approach led to extremes, with scholars referring to all these different nomadic peoples of Eurasia simply as Scythians (Cunliffe 2019), and even to the construction of an illusory Scythian Empire stretching as far as China (Beckwith 2023).

Anna Melyukova attempted to halt this wave of misinterpretation of her original idea in the 1990s, but largely without success. She wrote, for instance, that “the very existence of diverse archaeological cultures in Eurasia—each with its own origins, territory, and affiliation with a specific ethnic group—speaks against the notion of Scythian-Siberian unity. The bearers of these cultures never formed a unified whole; they followed their own historical paths and maintained distinct networks of connections… Overall, the differences between the cultures of the Scythians, Sarmatians, Meotians, Saka, and other Eurasian peoples… significantly outweigh the similarities that unite them.” However, in the same paragraph, she added: “The most appropriate—though not entirely accurate—term for describing the phenomenon in question is the ‘Scythian world,’ proposed by I. V. Yatsenko and D. S. Raevsky, or the ‘Scythian-Siberian world,’ a term more frequently used by various researchers” (Melyukova 1993). Thus, while objecting to the term “Scythian-Siberian unity,” she remained willing to use the practically equivalent term “Scythian-Siberian world”.

Thus, naming the Scythian archaeological culture on ethnic grounds created considerable difficulties for future generations of scholars. Anyone working with Iron Age sites must first clarify what is meant by the term “Scythian” in each specific case: whether it is used in an ethnic, cultural, political, or geographical sense (Jacobson 1995, p. 29; Yablonsky 2000, 2015; Shelekhan and Lifantii 2022, pp. 39–40, note 1; Lifantii 2023, 2025). Had this group of monuments been named differently, the interpretation would be far less complicated.

However, we should stress that such terminological confusion was mostly created by colonial policies imposed on Ukrainian land and its cultural heritage. Despite formally admitting the problem of the definition of Scythian, or in some cases Early-Scythian culture (Pogrebova and Raevskij 1992, pp. 51–52; Ivanchik 2001, p. 17 and note 11), most Russian Scythologists did not, and still do not, look at the main cause of the problem—the colonial bias.

The only Russian scholar who systematically raised the problem and underscored the striking number of consequences of using the term “Scythian-Siberian world,” or of the broad use of the name “Scythians,” was Leonid Yablonsky. Being a specialist in Sarmatians, Yablonsky viewed Scythian archaeology from a different perspective. He pointed to significant discrepancies in the naming of a wide range of archaeological groups from the lower courses of the Ural and Volga, which are generally accepted as associated with the Sauromatians and Sarmatians. He noted that, from the perspective of those who agree to call all steppe peoples Scythians, the Sarmatians are Scythians too, which makes further outlining certain steppe groups meaningless. So, to avoid this juggling of terms, he appealed to his colleagues, asking them to reserve the name “Scythians” for the Scythian culture in its strict sense (Yablonsky 2000, 2015).

Nevertheless, the questions he raised mostly remain unanswered in Russian-language literature. However, he did not view the problem from a postcolonial perspective, thereby representing a slightly liberal segment of the privileged Russian academic community.

Building on nineteenth-century Russian historical, literary, and artistic works, the idea of a “Scythian” essence of the Russian people gained particular popularity among Russian artists and cultural figures of the so-called Russian Silver Age, such as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely, Vasilij Rozanov, Konstantin Balmont, Yevgenij Zamyatin, Nikolaj Berdyaev, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Shmelyov and others. Sergei Yesenin, who was fascinated by Herodotus, called himself a Scythian (Solnceva 2010, pp. 149–50). On this foundation, the socialist ideology of “Scythianism” took shape. Its proponents were published, in particular, in the two issues of the anthology Scythians (1917–1918), edited by Ivanov-Razumnik, whose other nickname was Scythian. It was in this context that Alexander Blok’s poem The Scythians appeared, invoking “Scythian-Asians with slanted and lustful eyes” in contrast to “decrepit and treacherous” old Europe. Quotations from the poem continue to appear in Western literature and scholarship, contributing to perceptions of the Scythians among Western scholars (Meyer 2026, p. 207). Supporters of “Scythianism” regarded the Scythian as the ideal human being, free from the conventions and prohibitions of contemporary Russia (Solnceva 2010, pp. 149–50). Most important for our purposes, however, is that these works helped shape the widespread belief in the actual descent of Russians from the Scythians.

And what about Eurasianism? This philosophical–political movement emerged in the 1920s among the Russian emigres and transformed throughout the twentieth century. On the one hand, the first ideologists of Eurasianism did not take Scythianism seriously; however, classical Eurasianism was based on the idea that Russian culture is a synthesis of sedentary (Slavic) and nomadic (Turanian/Asian) elements, and the Scythian period became the first historical example of such a successful fusion (Toll 1928; Beisswenger 2007, 2013; Zhumagulov and Sadykova 2019; Bystryukov 2025). The movement’s ideologist, Petr Savitskii, noted that the Scythians taught future Russians to “feel the space” and not to fear the boundless steppe expanses (Savickii 1928). In his work “The Scythians and the Huns”, another Eurasianist, Nikolai Toll, argued that the famous Scythian animal style and elements of clothing (trousers, caftans, pointed hats) were deeply rooted in the material culture of the ancient Slavs and later manifested themselves in the folk clothing and ornamentation of the era of Muscovy (Toll 1928; Bystryukov 2025, pp. 167–68). Finally, the “last Eurasianist” (for a different opinion, see Beisswenger 2013, p. 86) or the founder of NeoEurasianism (Zhumagulov and Sadykova 2019, pp. 27, 30), Lev Gumilev, mentioned the role of Scythians in the history of the Great Steppe (from the Carpathians to Mongolia). He believed it shaped a common pattern of human behavior, and the Scythians were the first to adapt to this landscape, creating a unique culture (Gumilev 1989, 1992).

Later, these ideas were reformulated into the political movement of NeoEurasianism, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century, an essentially neo-fascist ideology, “Neo-Scythianism,” had emerged from it. Particularly striking in this paradigm is the insistence that the most ancient “roots” of the Russians are located precisely in the lands of Ukraine (Beisswenger 2007; Bystryukov 2025, pp. 169–70; Meyer, 2026, pp. 202–3).

These views did not remain purely political or purely artistic; they also influenced scholarly literature. Furthermore, this influence can be found in the innocent, at first glance, comparisons; for example, while explaining the romantic naming of the collective monograph dedicated to Michael Rostovtzeff (Scythian Novel), published at the very end of the 20th century, in the foreword, Russian historian and Oriental studies specialist, Grigorij Bongard-Levin, compared the image of Rostovtzeff, which “fits naturally with the image of the resolute Scythian as portrayed in early 20th-century Russian poetry… the Scythian of A. Blok, V. Bryusov, K. Balmont, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov.” (Bongard-Levin 1997, p. 8).

On the other side of Eurasianist views in culture lie appropriation politics, which were revived in the 2000s in neocolonial Russian politics (Beisswenger 2007).

6. Other Russian Colonial Policies and the Neocolonial Approach in Scythology

Ukrainian historians began to openly question these colonial policies during the first attempt at independence in 1917–1921 and again after the restoration of independence in 1991. For instance, the first director of the Kyiv Historical Museum, Mykola Biliashivskyi, openly criticized the practice of sending all gold and silver artifacts to imperial centers, leaving local Ukrainian museums only with “crumbs” (Biliashivskyi 1918, pp. 7–8). Yet louder voices in academia began to be heard only during the modern Russian–Ukrainian war (Kot 2020).

At the same time, scholars of Russian origin did not regard this as a problem. In the so-called Parity Commission, the Russian side argued for what it considered a “fair” exchange. By “fair,” they meant returning to Ukraine only some of the previously exported artifacts, mostly from kurgans, while transferring other collections from museums of the Ukrainian SSR—also excavated in Ukraine—to Russian museums. The Commission operated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Thanks to the efforts of the Ukrainian members, in 1932, artifacts from six excavated burial mounds—Lyta, Chmyreva, and Luhova Mohylas, as well as the Illintsi, Shulhivka, and First Mordvinivskyi kurgans—were returned from the Hermitage to Ukraine, specifically to Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. However, most of the valuable items never reached the Kharkiv Museum and were instead stored in the State Bank. During the Second World War, a highly negligent evacuation led to the loss of most of these artifacts (Babenko 2022).

Since only one transfer of collections from six barrows ultimately took place, many Hermitage archaeologists regarded the Parity Commission as a mistake. This position remained dominant among many Russian scholars during the Soviet era and even in the 1990s and 2000s. For example, in his article on the fate of the Lyta Mohyla collection, Andrei Alekseev wrote that “no ‘reciprocal’ transfer of any Ukrainian archaeological collections to the Hermitage took place. Of the three planned sessions of the Parity Commission—in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkiv—only the first two were held, during which transfers from Russian museums were discussed. The Kharkiv session, at which applications from Russian museums were to be discussed, never took place. The loss of many items from the Hermitage’s collection—including the majority of its collections from Scythian ‘tsarsky’ burial mounds—was an irreparable loss that has remained unfilled, even partially” (Alekseev 2014). It is noteworthy that most of the Ukrainian representatives on the Parity Commission were later killed or persecuted during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s.

Many Hermitage scholars have remained relatively neutral on the question of colonial exploitation of Ukrainian land and the export of archaeological heritage to ‘metropolises’ in the Russian Empire. The same applies to the so-called “Museum Sales” organized by the Soviet authorities in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Klejn 2014, p. 58). In a book specifically devoted to the years 1930–1931 of this process, these sales are described neutrally as “the export of works of art abroad” (Solomakha 2016, p. 11). At the same time, the return of collections from six kurgans excavated on Ukrainian land in the nineteenth century to the Ukrainian SSR was described as barbaric and unscientific. Unlike paintings and art collections, the story of Soviets’ sales of archaeological artifacts has not yet been fully studied, but some information has been published. For example, in 1931, at Sotheby’s, they sold 166 ancient pieces of jewelry from the so-called Aleksandr Nelidov collection and from Scythian kurgans, excavated in “South Russia” (Saverkina et al. 1996, pp. 138–40; Solomakha 2013, pp. 136–37), meaning the modern territory of Ukraine. Then, at least 28 (or 31 according to Leskov 2019, p. 500) gold scythian items were bought by the National Museum of Antiquities at Leiden for 285 pounds, and “a few pieces were acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum (the museum of art and history associated with Cambridge University) and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology of Oxford University” (Solomakha 2013, p. 137, footnote 28).

Another feature of Russian-language scholarship lies in its linguistic nuances. For example, because Herodotus referred to Scythian rulers as βασιλεύς, early Russian adaptations translated this as tsar, the same term used for the rulers of the Tsardom of Muscovy. As a result, most Russian-language works still use expressions such as “Tsar Barrows” or “Tsar Scythians.” Interestingly, in the eighteenth-century work published under the name of Catherine II, one can already detect an awareness of the distinction in naming Scythian rulers; nevertheless, the author still preferred the term tsar (Ekaterina II 1801, p. 20), as did most earlier writers (Nartov 1763; Dilthey 1763; Lyzlov 1776). This naming practice has also strongly influenced Ukrainian scholarship and has changed little to this day.

Another distinctly colonial feature of Russian scholarship is the designation of the North Pontic region simply as “South Russia” or the “South Russian steppes.” Typical examples include Rostovtzeff’s monograph Hellenism and Iranism in the South of Russia (Rostovtzeff 1918), its English version Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (Rostovtzeff 1922), and Samokvasov’s catalog Tombs of the Russian Lands (Samokvasov 1908). Despite the many decades since the collapse of the Romanov Empire, this chauvinistic terminology has often been retained in Russian scholarship (e.g., Tunkina 2003; Medvedeva et al. 2009). In his book devoted to Russian archaeological history, renowned Russian scholar Leo Klejn wrote: “In the eyes of the educated public, Classical Russian archaeology is associated with the glitter of the Scythian gold of the Hermitage and the majestic ruins of the Greek cities of the Northern Black Sea region.” (Klejn 2014, p. 180). The only problem is that he talked about the territory of Ukraine with its Crimean and Dnieper monuments.

In Rostovtzeff’s book, translated by the Ukrainian scholar Levko Chykalenko (Rostovtzeff 1916), we see the opposite. Instead of “South Russia,” we see the phrase “Our South,” which, in Ukrainian in 1916, clearly meant “Ukrainian South”5. However, it is the only work by Rostovtzeff published in Ukrainian.

Another feature of some Russian 19th-century works on history is an aggressive opposition to German scholars (namely Gottlieb Bayer, Gerhard Müller and August von Schlözer, just overall “German scholars”, as apologetics of Norman Theory) who “purposely distorted” Russian and Slavic history (Zabelin 1876, pp. 4–9, 214–15; Prohorov 1881, pp. 4–5). For example, according to Zabelin, Müller selectively used Rus chronicles (such as the Primary Chronicle) only when they confirmed a Germanic presence, while completely disregarding passages that praised Slavic autonomy, trade, or independent military achievements (Zabelin 1876, pp. 440–48). This idea of ill-intentioned Western academia was adopted in the USSR, especially after World War II, and is now in use again in modern Russia. Western scholars are often presented as less competent or as those who “borrowed” the research conclusions from Russian (see, e.g., Subbotin 2020, p. 178).

Typically, studies of this kind conclude with an overview of the current state of research and optimistic perspectives for future developments, highlighting the expanding use of scientific methods, increasing international collaboration, and the reassessment of outdated concepts. However, such expectations are not entirely warranted. As Caspar Meyer aptly noted: “Russian archaeologists of the post-Perestroika period have shown considerable interest in the history of their discipline… but thus far the main focus has been less on critical synthesis than on data retrieval for documenting specific discoveries, collections, and institutions” (Meyer 2017, p. 494). We can add that colonial interpretations of prehistory continue to persist and, in some cases, serve as instruments of state propaganda. A clear example can be seen in Russia’s international policy, particularly in its strategic use of cultural heritage as a form of soft power. This soft power in education was based on Slavic studies at many European and American Universities, which, in reality, were Russian studies (Thompson 2000). In culture, it was provided through the Hermitage centers in Europe, different Russian culture programs, exhibitions and even expeditions funded and led by Russians.

A striking example of such Russian policy was the exhibition titled The Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia (Simpson and Pankova 2017), which opened in September 2017 at the British Museum in London and was based on a collection from the Hermitage Museum. It should be noted that this took place three years after the occupation of Crimea and the beginning of Russia’s hybrid aggression against Ukraine. The exhibition banner and the cover of its catalog featured a gold plaque from the Kul-Oba burial mound in Crimea, excavated in the nineteenth century, and the exhibition itself included many artifacts from the Hermitage’s Ukrainian collections. However, Ukraine was mentioned only twice in the catalogue; instead of specifying the precise findspots of the objects—as museum ethics would require—phrases such as “the Dnieper region” or “the Northern Black Sea region” were generally used (Simpson and Pankova 2017, pp. 20, 23, 26, 133, 150, 187–91, 222, 229, 265, 278, 280, 294, 298). Another notable feature was the exhibition’s title, which echoed the twentieth-century concepts of “Scythian-Siberian unity” and “Siberian Scythians.” Despite appeals from scholars and even the Ukrainian Embassy in the UK, the British Museum’s official response was that it saw no problem with either the presentation or the provenance of the material on display.

Finally, the director of the Hermitage openly admitted in 2022 that their recent exhibitions abroad were a powerful cultural offensive: “If you like, a kind of ‘special operation’, which many people dislike. But we are advancing—and no one must be allowed to stand in the way of our offensive” (The Art Newspaper 2022). He chose to use those words in the first months of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which gives more context to it.

In the same interview, he also indirectly confirmed his commitment to the ideas of Eurasianism while comparing Russian aggression with tactics used by Scythians in war with Persians: “The first period of the Scythian war has come to an end. We retreated and retreated; now, we are no longer retreating. A turn has been made. And it’s already clear that this is the final turn. It all began in 2014 in Crimea” (The Art Newspaper 2022).

As Valentyn Krysachenko pointed out: “For Ukraine, this phenomenon [of modern Russian historical narrative] turns into a constant aggressive encroachment on the seizure and appropriation of its specific historical and modern values: spiritual, territorial, and material ones. The incorporation of certain components of the Russian narrative into the mass consciousness of the Ukrainian society leads to the intensification of destructive processes in it” (Krysachenko 2020). In today’s world, saturated with information flows, propaganda narratives, based in part on neocolonial discourse and the manipulation of historical material, have become an effective tool for shaping public opinion and beliefs to one’s advantage (Lifantii 2024a, 2024b). Many experts are now speaking specifically of a “war of narratives,” which is becoming the primary form of conflict in the information age (Lukianov 2025).

7. Scythian Archaeology in (Post)Colonial Discourse

Improvements in chronological models over the last several decades have revealed a significant gap between Scythian culture and later forest-steppe groups. At the same time, research in adjacent fields has shown clearly that even the La Tène-type cultures that succeeded the forest-steppe after Scythian dominance, as well as the Sarmatians who occupied the steppe, cannot easily be identified as Slavs. As a result, discussions of the Scythians as the ancestors of present-day nations gradually lost their scholarly relevance and shifted largely to internet forums. In doctrinal Soviet archaeology, however, autochthonism was the official position (e.g., Rybakov 1979), and researchers who held opposing views were treated as heretics and unpatriotic. Ironically, this same perspective now often prevails among modern amateur Ukrainian historians who present themselves as anti-Soviet. It illustrates how common beliefs can show greater inertia than scientific knowledge.

A positive trend toward the decolonization of Scythology is evident in current discussions about whether it is appropriate to refer to other ancient peoples, such as the Saka and Massagetae, as Scythians. There is increasing recognition that quotation marks around the word “Scythian,” together with explicit distinctions between “ethnic” Scythians and “archaeological” Scythians, do not prevent confusion for both authors and readers. It is also becoming clearer that archaeological cultures named after peoples known from written sources inevitably carry a corresponding ethnic coloring, whether intended or not. Some specialists working on the eastern Eurasian steppe have increasingly adopted the term “Scythian-Saka period,” though even this more neutral formulation has not gained wide popularity. This is especially noticeable in STEM-based research. In the obligatory historical background sections of such studies, authors may note—though not always—that they recognize the ethnic heterogeneity of the cultures under discussion, yet still use the term “Scythians” for all Iron Age nomads of Eurasia “for simplicity” (e.g., Unterländer et al. 2017, p. 2). The titles and conclusions of such articles are often presented in striking terms, although they frequently reiterate relatively unsurprising results: for example, that Scythians from the North Pontic region did not travel as far as the Altai Mountains or even the Volga River, that their diet reflects local Dnieper-basin plants, and that their genomes show only a limited eastern component (Unterländer et al. 2017; Juras et al. 2017; Järve et al. 2019; Saag et al. 2024). Much of this apparent novelty, therefore, results from terminological simplification rather than from fundamentally new knowledge.

For the last quarter of a century, the question of Russian colonialism has been discussed primarily in literature and art (Thompson 2000; Shkandrij 2001; Chernetsky 2007), in everyday life (Annus 2012, 2018; Lukianov 2025), and in academia (Riabczuk 2013; Filevska and Blyzinsky 2023). However, Russian colonial politics in archaeology have received less research (Dolukhanov 1993, 2012). Here, we sought to examine Scythology through the same lens used to examine the heritage of Russian writers and poets.

For Western museums addressing decolonization, the primary focus has usually been the legacy of Western empires. Increasingly, however, institutions are beginning to recognize their responsibility to acknowledge Russian colonial legacies as well, and to describe them with greater sensitivity through accurate terminology and spelling. In the case of Ukraine and many other Eastern European states, this includes the transliteration of names from Cyrillic into the Roman alphabet. It also means transliterating from Ukrainian rather than from Russian; although the two languages and alphabets are similar, they differ in significant ways (Filevska and Blyzinsky 2023). Why does such a seemingly small distinction matter for people who were colonized? In the case of Ukraine, one telling example is the Eleventh Archaeological Congress in Kyiv in 1899, attended by scholars from many Slavic countries. The Ukrainian professor Mykhailo Hrushevskyi requested that scholars from Galicia6 be allowed to present papers in Ukrainian. The Kyiv organizing committee even secured permission for this from the Imperial Archaeological Society in Moscow. However, the Russian press mocked the decision, and participants complained that they were being forced to listen to this “jargon.” As a result of the controversy, the Galician scholars were ultimately not permitted to speak (Shkandrij 2001, p. 158). This is only one example; if one will dwell into history of the numerous official bans on teaching, studying, writing, publishing, making plays or performances in theaters or even speaking in Ukrainian language, as a part of Russian colonial policies, then it will become clearer why it is so important now to be more sensitive in the question of transliteration or correct translation of Ukrainian site names, toponims, and even surnames and names of Ukrainian historic figures, and recognizing them as Ukrainian and not Russian.

8. Conclusions

The decolonization of Scythian archaeology and development of postcolonial narrative is evident in the growing discussion of colonial policies affecting both people and cultural heritage in the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the modern Russian borderlands (Dolukhanov 1993, 2012). These voices remain relatively weak, are often dismissed as insufficiently “postcolonial” by critics who assume that colonies can only be overseas, and have mostly emerged outside archaeology itself (Thompson 2000; Sunderland 2004; Riabczuk 2013; Annus 2012, 2018). Research into the tragic fates of many Ukrainian archaeologists who were killed or silenced under different regimes of Russian colonial oppression offers one important path within this broader process of decolonization. The discussion of the unfair and unlawful export of cultural heritage from Ukraine to the imperial center had already begun (Kot 2020), but it became much louder after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Babenko 2022; Lifantii 2024c, 2024a, 2025). Ukrainian museums have also begun to change the way they present Ukraine’s heritage abroad, a shift that is especially important in the exhibition of archaeological material (Albrecht 2026).

The shift away from using the term “Scythians” for the ancient peoples of eastern Eurasia, where historical Scythians are not attested in sources, remains relatively weak. In our firm belief, naming the bearers of these eastern Eurasian archaeological cultures as Saka or Masagetae, while conducting historical reconstruction, simply aligns the understanding of historical processes with archaeological evidence and moves away from previous confusion.

However, the use of a postcolonial lens is also visible in smaller but important changes, such as discussions of proper transliteration (from the Ukrainian language) into the Roman alphabet, revisions of “traditional” (that is, imperial) terms such as “tsars” for Scythian rulers, and a return to the local naming of monuments. One less obvious but significant step in decolonization is the renaming of monuments previously labeled in accordance with imperial principles. This concerns, for example, the Melgunov kurgan, named after an official who used excavated artifacts as bribes, or the Aleksandropol kurgan, named by archaeologists in honor of the emperor himself, perhaps as a demonstration of loyalty. In modern scholarship, however, one increasingly encounters the local names Lyta Mohyla and Luhova Mohyla. At the same time, it is striking that such names are often absent from Russian scholarship or even mocked (see, for example, Alekseev 2024, p. 20 on the Solokha kurgan), while Ukraine is omitted as the place of origin of finds from Scythian burial mounds (Simpson and Pankova 2017; Alekseev 2024). This divergence in approach becomes more evident each year. It offers hope for shifting the narrative away from Russian imperial dominance in Scythian Studies and toward a critical rethinking of Russia’s appropriation of Scythian heritage.