The SUSU’s People and Technologies of the Urals Museum now exhibits new items – plasticine compositions that have been stored at the Humanitarian Pedagogical University for more than thirty years. The first of their kind, they were plasticine-sculpted by a History student Iliia Bannikov back in the early 1990s. These figurines symbolize shamans, ancient metal workers, and warriors in chariots. Recently, following a request from the museum head Iuliia Vasina, the collection has been donated to SUSU and restored – so the museum visitors can enjoy it now.
The story of these show-pieces began in the early 1990s, when the famous Professor Nikolay Vinogradov taught the History of the Ural Region to History students of Chelyabinsk Pedagogical University (now South Ural State Humanitarian Pedagogical University, SUSHPU). There were no illustrations to that course back then, but there was a demand for the demonstration aids. So, the lecturer offered his students to make those with their own hands.
One of those students, Iliia Bannikov, majoring in History, was not an artist or a sculptor. He used plain plasticine and glazing putty and then coloured his works with simple gouache paints. Thus, small but surprisingly animated figurines of shamans, hunters, metal workers of the Bronze Age and warriors in chariots were born. Basically, these were the first physical archaeological reconstructions in our region.
“Iliia died prematurely, in 1994,” shares Iuliia Vasina, Head of the SUSU’s People and Technologies of the Urals Teaching Museum and Exhibitions Complex. “But he left us a book of verses and these figurines.”
For more than thirty years, the plasticine museum has functioned at the Pedagogical University. Of course, the plasticine eventually became old, so the figurines were loosing their shape and details, and the shaman “was constantly falling face down”. But when the issue of the collection’s fate was raised, Iuliia Vasina (also a student of Nikolay Vinogradov, who had even acted as her advisor for her graduation thesis) asked for a permission to relocate these figurines to the SUSU museum. The Professor’s reply was concise and fatherly: “I give my blessing”.
This summer, students have joined the work being managed by the Head of the SUSU Department of Technology and Design Tatiana Vekovtseva. Over the period of their one-month internship in June, they have reconstructed two compositions. They have worked in pairs: Anastasiia Gurkina, Olga Efimova, Regina Sismatullina, and Alena Shuliaeva. The students have glued up the parts that fell off, corrected the shape, and then coloured with acrylic paints anew.
Today, the museum features three compositions. The first one is called “Praying”: a shaman with a rod is surrounded by kneeling hunters with stone axes. This is what a pre-hunting ritual could have looked like. The second one is called “Metal Workers of the Bronze Age”: a horse is carrying bags with ore, one man pestles it, and masters with casting moulds are standing in front of the furnace. And the third and most impressive one is the “Chariot Drivers of the Land of Towns”: a Sintashta chariot with a warrior and a driver clad in leather armour and holding a club and a spear. Doctor of Sciences (History) Andrey Epimakhov has consulted the work on this composition: the model has been updated, the chariot’s structure has been corrected, and the drive reins’ position has been adjusted.
The clothes that the figurines wear are also not random ones. According to the museum head, people of the Stone Age had not been wearing animal hides, as pictures in text books show. They had had normal clothes: pants, parkas, and moccasins-like leather shoes. All of that has been reconstructed based on archaeological data.
“When I look at these figurines, I see not the plasticine,” confesses Iuliia Vasina. “I see the people who lived here. And my wish is that our museum visitors could also see this, feel it through their eyes, and pause to think about it.”
The museum creators are planning on restoring several more compositions: scenes from the life of the ancient Magyars and Cumans, and battle episodes. But what we already have now is a true manmade miracle that preserves the memory of a talented student, who died prematurely, and of the teaching staff who have handed his work over to good people.