Archaeological Internship with Oxford Students Underway

Second-year students on the History BA programme at HSE Perm have gone on an archaeological expedition as part of their internship. This year, HSE students have joined geology students from Oxford University on an excavation at Mokinski burial grounds.

The expedition is led by Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Vitaliy Mingalev. The students will spend several weeks excavating the Mokinski burial grounds – a very important site from the early Iron Age in the Perm region. The students have already removed the top layer at the excavation site, got to the bedrock and soon will start to uncover the ancient burials. They could find beads, pendants, Perm zoomorphic ornaments, or even make an archeological discovery.

This year geology students from the University of Oxford also joined the expedition. This is a great opportunity for Perm students to improve their English language skills, and the geologists and historians will definitely find a lot of common topics to discuss.

It is worth noting that the Mokinski burial ground was discovered in 1924, but serious research only started in the late 1980s – early 1990s. Today over 200 burials have been studied. Local residents and settlers from the southern districts of Kama region were buried there. The peculiarities of the burial reflect a complicated ethno-political situation in the region in the first centuries AD.