2,300 year old wooden house is rebuilt, and it fits together down to the last centimetre

The attractive log cabin was a prefabricated construction by the prehistoric Pazyryk culture to house an elite tomb - in which was buried a mummified curly-haired potentate and his younger wife or concubine.

The mound in the Altai Mountains was originally 42 metres in diameter, and this tattooed couple went to the next life alongside nine geldings, saddled and harnessed.

The house itself, recently reconstructed, was not built as a dwelling but nevertheless is seen by archeologists as showing the style of domestic architecture more than two millennia ago. 

This structure was the outer of two wooden houses in the large burial mound in the valley of the River Bolshoy Ulagan at an altitude of around 1,600 metres above sea level. 

The core of the mound including the ice-preserved bodies of the elite couple had been excavated by Soviet archeologists in 1949, and many of the  finds are on on display in the world famous State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. 

As we have previously written, the pair - who owned perhaps the world’s oldest carpets - are currently undergoing an ultra modern medical scan to establish the cause of death, and reconstruct the appearance of the ancient pair, and to study the techniques of mummification in more detail.

More details are here.

Yet in 1949 this fascinating house was left in the permafrost ground - and only retrieved now from the so-called Fifth Pazyryk Barrow, to the excitement of archeologists. 

Head of the excavation Dr Nikita Konstantinov from Gorno-Altaisk State University, was full of admiration about the skills of the ancient craftsmen. 

‘We took out the log house and reassembled it right next to the mound,’ he said.

‘We made kind of express reconstruction, which made it possible to study the log house in detail. 

‘Notches were made on each of its logs - building marks…’.

This was like IKEA instructions today for building their products, telling modern day excavation volunteers how to correctly construct the prehistoric building kit. 

The result is seen in the pictures shown here. 

‘This log house was first built somewhere away from the mound, then it was dismantled, brought and reassembled in the pit,’ said Dr Konstantinov.

‘Today we build in similar way, using Roman numerals, as a rule.

‘In those times they simply made different numbers of notches.’

The archeological team followed the code left by the ancient craftsmen and reassembled the house without problems.

‘The Pazyryks knitted the corners of the building in a masterly way  and chopped the attachment points of these logs.

‘They fitted very cleanly…. 

‘When we built the log house and began to measure the height, it turned out that the height difference in the angles is only one centimetre.’

In modern constructions, a difference of 7 cm is allowed which showed how skilful were the ancient craftsmen. 

He said: ‘This is a funerary structure, but we can say with a high degree of probability that the log cabin was created in the image and likeness of the houses in which the Pazyryks lived. 

‘Of course, the shape or size would have been different, but in general, the same building methods were used here.’

The house - excavated this summer - has been moved to the National Museum of the Altai Republic in Gorno-Altaisk.

Here the logs are being slowly dried. They had become waterlogged in the thawing permafrost.

After the grave was excavated in the late 1940s, the site was not closed again and this exposed the permafrost.

Nevertheless the level of preservation is high. 

In the mound, archeologists also found remnants of an ancient chariot - the rest of which is in the State Hermitage Museum. 

Remnants of an ancient felt carpet with the image of a sphinx which decorated the walls of the inner house protecting the tomb were also discovered, as were other artefacts. 

The inner house itself was removed by the Soviet scientists and is also in the Hermitage.