News in the Moravian Regional Museum: they reconstructed a well-known shaman
/PHOTO/ Anthropologists from the Moravian Regional Museum have managed to reconstruct the probable form of a man whose remains were found by workers during the construction of a sewer in 1891 between Brno’s Francouzská and Přádlacká streets. At the same time, they discovered that the man buried twenty-six thousand years ago in a well-known Paleolithic grave was apparently a shaman.
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The shaman’s puppet is one of the rarest exhibits of the Moravian Regional Museum.
| Photo: Deník/Jiří Sláma
In the early 1980s of the previous century, the Brno town hall decided to improve the state of the city’s sewers. At the time, none of the councils had any idea that this decision would go down in the history of archeology more than in the history of city sewers. In September 1891, workers came across a cluster of large animal bones accompanied by several unusual objects at the location of today’s Francouzská and Předlácká streets.
The archaeologists announced the find to Alexander Makowský, a professor of German technology in Brno, who had been engaged in paleontological research of the Brno loess for many years. “We know relatively little about the actual placement of the skeleton and the smaller grave goods, as a significant portion of the inventory was salvaged by the excavation workers: rhinoceros bones and teeth, long mammoth tusks, and red-colored bones, among which lay several bone and stone plates. Most of these items found temporary shelter in a building,” said Martin Oliva from the Archaeological Institute of the Moravian Regional Museum.
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In the red-colored loess, at a depth of four and a half meters, archaeologists found a meter-long tusk, under which lay a whole mammoth shoulder blade and a human skull right next to it. It was originally whole, but one of the workers inadvertently stepped on the facial part even then. Next to the skull lay other human bones, also colored red. Furthermore, a large number of rhinoceros ribs, small fragile plates and a disintegrated piece of mammoth were found at the site, which managed to be glued into the form of a male sculpture. “Anthropomorphic figurines, when possessed by a shaman, can represent ancestral spirits. At other times, shamans trap the spirits of diseases or the souls of people and animals in them, so that they become props for various ceremonies. Of the basic shaman’s needs, only a drum is missing from the grave from Francouzská street,” added Oliva.
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The man from grave Brno 2, as the archaeological find of the shaman was named, was robust and strong. “The latest genetic studies show that people in the Gravettian period have a dark skin color, scientific knowledge thus changes long-held stereotypes about the appearance of our ancient ancestors. And they are also a strong argument against the announcers of the white race,” said anthropologist Eva Vaníčková.
The shaman’s puppet is one of the rarest exhibits of the Moravian Regional Museum. “The face, the skeleton of which was almost not preserved, we shot strings with decorations from the Tertiary dentals. Headdresses are typical for Siberian shamans, they probably help induce a trance state, as well as drumming, alcohol, mushrooms, or smoke. Of course, the individual from today’s Francouzská Street may not have looked exactly like this, but it certainly looked something like this,” remarked Vaníčková.