Archive Note
She is one of two canonical specimens of the Pazyryk tattooed mummies, the Iron Age steppe culture that produced the most elaborate prehistoric tattoos yet documented. The Russian archaeologist Natalia Polosmak excavated her in 1993 from a permafrost barrow that preserved the body in detail; she was buried with horses and ornaments, and her shoulder and arm carry a finely drawn deer whose antlers terminate in bird and griffin heads. The animal-style motifs match Pazyryk metalwork and textiles, pointing to an integrated visual culture, and the broader corpus was first documented by Sergei Rudenko, who excavated the Pazyryk Chieftain in 1947 to 1949. A 2014 popular-science claim that MRI showed she had breast cancer is non-peer-reviewed and should be treated as preliminary.