An archeological expedition of the Pustozyorsk open air museum to the Yugorskaya Sopka settlement (from the 6^th-10^th centuries) has been completed, the Arctic-Info news agency reports.

Field studies were carried out under the supervision of Alexander Murygin, PhD in History, an archeologist at the Komi Scientific Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The expedition also involved two specialists from the Nenets Local History Museum.

The expedition members found fragments of pottery with various ornamentations and items made of non-ferrous material: a pronizka, or bronze ornament, and a plaque depicting a bird-woman with folded arms.

The Yugorskaya Sopka settlement dates back to the third quarter of the first millennium AD and is one of the few monuments of the early Middle Ages in the Bolshezemelskaya tundra with a preserved cultural layer. The archeologists hope that research conducted this year and in the years to come will be able to shed some light on the history of the ancient population of Pustozyorsk and the entire Arctic region.