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In general, females were buried with a wider variety and larger quantity of artifacts than males, and seven female graves contained iron swords or daggers, bronze arrowheads, and whetstones to sharpen the weapons. Some scholars have argued that weapons found in female burials served a purely ritual purpose, but the bones tell a different story. The bowed leg bones of one 13- or 14-year-old girl attest a life on horseback, and a bent arrowhead found in the body cavity of another woman suggested that she had been killed in battle. The Pokrovka women cannot have been the Amazons of Greek myth- who were said to have lived far to the west- but they may have been one of many similar nomadic tribes who occupied the Eurasian steppes in the Early Iron Age.
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Description of the Sarmatian burial mounds at Pokrovka, excavated by Russian and American archaeologists in 1992-95 (via coolchicksfromhistory
)
(Source: archaeology.org, via coolchicksfromhistory)
