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Case file s1146 · Prehistory · 400
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400
Siberian Ice Maiden inside her wooden sarcophagus (reconstruction, Anokhin Museum): Siberian Ice Maiden inside her wooden sarcophagus (reconstruction, Anokhin Museum)
Siberian Ice Maiden inside her wooden sarcophagus (reconstruction, Anokhin Museum). Ludvig14. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Died
c. 400s BC (about 2,400 to 2,500 years ago)
Place
Ukok Plateau, Altai Republic, Russia
Field
Pazyryk noblewoman; repatriation · Royalty and nobility on the timeline
Legal tradition
Pazyryk elite burial custom; Russian Academy of Sciences ownership versus Altai Republic custody · Civil law
Historical event
1993 excavation on the Ukok Plateau
PrehistoryBodies, bones and burialsAncient worldEuropeRussia

Archaeologists flew the Ukok princess to Novosibirsk in 1993, the Altai people blamed her removal for an earthquake, and she came home to a museum mausoleum in 2012

In summer 1993 a team from the Novosibirsk branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences opened a frozen burial mound on the Ukok Plateau near the Mongolian border. Inside lay a young Pazyryk woman with tattoos, buried with six saddled and bridled horses. She was flown to Novosibirsk. The Altai people call her Kadyn, a protective ancestor, and some regard her as the ancestress of humankind. Locals linked her removal to the archaeologists' nightmares, a helicopter that nearly crashed carrying her coffin, and the 2003 earthquake that levelled a village. Shaman Maria Amanchina spent six years trying to bring her home. Russian authorities said no genetic link to modern Altai people had been shown. In September 2012 she was moved to a special mausoleum in the new Anokhin National Museum in Gorno-Altaisk. The research institute remains her legal owner†. In December 2014 Altai Kine of the Kin Altai spiritual centre presented designs for a burial mound on Ukok; no government resolution approved it. In April 2020 regional deputy Yerzhanat Begenov credited her with keeping the Altai Republic free of coronavirus. She can be viewed only during certain phases of the moon. As of 2020 she remained in the museum.

What the law took from it

Legal title and local custody can sit with different parties for years when the heirs' claim is spiritual and not genetic.

Sources
  1. culturalsurvival.orgPress
  2. themoscowtimes.comPress
  3. tass.comPress

Cite as: celebrity.estate, “Archaeologists flew the Ukok princess to Novosibirsk in 1993, the Altai people blamed her removal for an earthquake, and she came home to a museum mausoleum in 2012,” story s1146, https://www.celebrity.estate/ukok-princess-400, updated 30 October 2026.

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Where this case sits

PrehistoryBodies, bones and burialsAncient worldEuropeCivil lawRussia