---
title: "Archaeologists Find 900-Year-Old Cemetery and a Woman With Rings in Her Hair"
description: "The burial ground in Staraya Russa, Russia, also holds graves that blend Christian rites with older funerary customs."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-10-02T22:22:00Z
modified: 2026-10-03T00:40:55Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/archaeologists-find-900-year-old-cemetery-and-a-woman-with-r-b0cfd1
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "russia", "burial", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Archaeologists Find 900-Year-Old Cemetery and a Woman With Rings in Her Hair

*The burial ground in Staraya Russa, Russia, also holds graves that blend Christian rites with older funerary customs.*

By rews desk · October 2, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/archaeologists-find-900-year-old-cemetery-and-a-woman-with-r-b0cfd1

## In brief

- Archaeologists in Staraya Russa, Russia, found the town’s oldest known cemetery, with burials dating back about 900 years
- One woman was buried with rings woven into her hair, along with four bracelets, pendants and pins
- The jewelry resembles Finno-Ugric or Baltic work rather than local Slavic styles, a researcher said
- Graves blend Christian orientation with older customs; grave goods largely vanished by the late 12th century
- The remains, lifted out with their soil as one block, are expected to undergo genetic study

Archaeologists working in the historic Russian town of Staraya Russa have uncovered its earliest known urban cemetery, with burials dating back roughly 900 years, including a woman laid to rest with rings woven directly into her hair.

The cemetery came to light over two seasons of rescue excavations at the Ilyinsky II site in the Novgorod region, where a team from Novgorod State University has documented more than a dozen burials. The university places the earliest phase of the burial ground in the 11th and 12th centuries.

The location surprised the researchers. Christian cemeteries in medieval Rus were usually tied to a church, but the known site of the medieval Church of St. Elijah lies some distance from the newfound graves. An old route known as Ilyina Street ran through this part of town, and similar early urban cemeteries have been found beside roads in Novgorod and Pskov. The team now suspects Staraya Russa followed the same pattern, with the cemetery growing up along a main route through the early settlement.

Traces of a circular ditch and surviving ground features suggest that some of the first graves may have sat beneath low burial mounds or semi-mound structures, their outlines erased by later construction and plowing.

One grave has offered a far more personal view. The university reported that the woman was buried with four bracelets, crescent-shaped pendants, pins and part of a chain. One pin was found near the back of her head and appears to have been fastened into her hair, while other pins and pendants may once have been joined by a chain worn across the chest.

Elena Toropova, the head of the Department of Russian History and Archaeology at Novgorod State University, told the newspaper Novgorodskie Vedomosti that the woman had been buried with a complex hairstyle, beads, a particularly fine pin and rings woven into her hair. Because at least some of the ornaments were part of that arrangement, they may preserve how the woman looked, or how those who buried her chose to present her.

The jewelry is not typical of the Slavic population that formed the majority in medieval Novgorod and Staraya Russa, Ms. Toropova said. She believes it is more closely connected to Finno-Ugric or Baltic traditions, and she offered one possible explanation: the woman may have come to Staraya Russa through marriage and kept wearing the ornaments of her home community. That remains a hypothesis, not a settled biography.

The wider cemetery records a period of shifting practice. Some of the dead were buried in wooden coffins with their heads to the west and feet to the east, an orientation consistent with Christian custom. Birch bark turned up everywhere, wrapped around coffins and, in some graves, apparently around the bodies themselves. It was an ordinary material in medieval northern Rus, used for everything from household objects to written documents.

Some graves also held personal objects, which archaeologists read as older, pre-Christian habits persisting inside a largely Christian ritual. By the late 12th century, according to the university team, the rite had grown more standardized: grave goods mostly disappeared, and the dead were laid out in orderly rows.

The cemetery itself went out of use around the turn of the 12th to the 13th century, and medieval plow furrows cut straight across the graves. By the 14th century the expanding town had spread back over the ground, leaving houses, wooden street surfaces, seals, jewelry and a silver grivna in the layers above the forgotten dead.

More answers may come from the woman’s remains, which are expected to undergo genetic study. First, though, specialists must clean and stabilize the burial, which was lifted from the ground together with the surrounding soil as a single block.