The Mammoth’s Shore and Moving Earth

From the upper terrace, a cascading descent leads down toward the Tom River; the steps around it appeared during the reinforcement of the bank and the drainage of water from the soil. A sandy layer lies within the slope, and underground waters soak it, so the earth above it gradually creeps toward the river. A row of concrete-filled boreholes, made during one attempt to stabilize the bank, according to geologists’ assessment, marked out a rupture along which a large mass of soil later slid down. After a water-pipe failure, thirty families were resettled and the university lecture-hall building was demolished; workers then made the present terraces and underground drains.

The viewing platform stands above an archaeological site that no longer exists. In mid-April eighteen ninety-six, a Tomsk potter went down into a ravine for clay—the raw material for his craft. Spring streams had washed out the slope, and enormous bones appeared from the earth.

Nikolai Kashchenko, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Tomsk University and curator of its zoological museum, learned of the find that same day. Animal bones were his everyday work. Russian museums then held only two mammoth skeletons, but Kashchenko understood the value of one more thing: it was important to preserve exactly how the remains lay. The exposed layer could have been washed away by streams or carried off by curious onlookers.

Kashchenko hired workers and began the excavation. At a depth of three and a half meters, they carefully freed each bone from the clay, leaving it in place until they had uncovered the entire area. The excavation was divided into squares, and the finds were marked on a plan. On April seventeenth, Kashchenko photographed a worker among the bones; a crowd of townspeople at the edge of the ravine appeared in the frame.

The remains belonged to a young mammoth. Nearby lay the coals of a hearth and one hundred sixty-one stone objects: flakes, scrapers, burins, and a core—a piece of stone from which blanks for tools were struck. Some bones had been split, burned, or worn by human working. Kashchenko concluded that people butchered the carcass here and ate part of the animal. The popular scene in which hunters drive a herd over a cliff remains a reconstruction: the excavation confirmed that the mammoth was worked, but did not preserve the method by which it was obtained.

That same year, Kashchenko presented the find at an archaeological congress, and five years later published a detailed study of the skeleton and the traces of human work. Thus the Tomsk Palaeolithic Site became the first discovered Palaeolithic site in Western Siberia. For more than sixty years, it remained the only known site of that period on the West Siberian Plain.

The bones appeared precisely here because of the movement of the bank. Groundwater saturates a sandy layer within the high slope, and the mass lying above it shifts toward the Tom River. The ravine exposed the mammoth, while subsequent landslides and erosion destroyed the excavation itself.

In the nineteen seventies, builders tried to stop the slope: they drilled a row of boreholes and filled them with concrete. In the assessment of Tomsk geologists, this row created a line of detachment and helped a large mass of soil shift. In the following decade, after damage to a water main, thirty families were resettled from here and a university lecture-hall building with twelve hundred seats was dismantled. Later, workers cut the slope into terraces, made a cascading descent, and laid drainage tunnels underground to carry away water.

These terraces remain on the bank. Of Kashchenko’s excavation, the photograph he took and the removed finds have survived; the place where the mammoth lay went away with the moving earth.