Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 49 (4) 2021   doi:10.17746/1563-0110.2021.49.4.100-108

Annotation:  The Early Paleolithic Go Da Site and the Bifacial Lithic Industries of Southeast Asia Paleolithic Personal Ornaments from Xiaogushan Cave: The Formation of Early Symbolism and Its Region A Multidisciplinary Study of Burnt Deposits at Surungur, Fergana Valley, Southern Kyrgyzstan Handles of Early Iron Age Cauldrons from Southwestern Siberia The Pazyryk Style Burial of a Hunnic Period Noblewoman at Karakabak, Mangystau, Kazakhstan Integrative Geophysical Studies at the Novaya Kurya-1 Cemetery in the Kulunda Steppe Reconstructed Paleodiets and Subsistence Strategies of the Central Ciscaucasian Population (1000 BC Archaeological Evidence of Migration from the Southern Taiga of Western Siberia to the Urals in the Hephthalite Coin from an Early Medieval Burial at Gorny-10, Northern Altai Kainar: A Late 18th to Early 20th Century Ritual and Housing Complex in the Northern Ustyurt Tungus-Manchu Traditional Beliefs. Part 2: Zoomorphic Complex Urbanization of Indigenous Peoples of Siberia and the Far East (20th to Early 21st Centuries) Patterns in the Population History of Northern Eurasia from the Mesolithic to the Early Bronze Age,   

Hephthalite Coin from an Early Medieval Burial at Gorny-10,
Northern Altai

N.N. Seregin¹, V.V. Tishin^{1, 2}, and N.F. Stepanova³

¹Altai State University, Pr. Lenina 61, Barnaul, 656049, Russia

²Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Sakhyanovoy 6, Ulan-Ude, 670047, Russia

³Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Pr. Akademika Lavrentieva 17, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia

We describe a silver coin found in one of the burials at Gorny-10 cemetery in northern Altai, excavated by expeditions from the Altai State University in 2000-2003. The coin was discovered in a destroyed burial of children (No. 46) along with other informative artifacts, which are rather uncommon in such burials. Judging by horse harness and ornaments, the assemblage falls in the interval from the late 6th to early 8th century AD. The coin is an imitation of the drachm of the Sasanian shah Peroz I to classify as type or emission 287, according to R. Gobl, that is one of the most common types of Hephthalite coins. The elemental concentration of the specimen has a high content of silver and no gold. The specimen has no analogs in North or Central Asia. It could have been brought to the forest-steppe Altai by Turks, who conquered the Hephthalite Empire in the first decades of the late 6th century AD.

Keywords: Coins, imitation, Hephthalites, northern Altai, Early Middle Ages, chronology