The Polyarny Museum of History and Local Lore presents a special exhibit — a hat that belonged to the anthropologist Valery Ivanovich Khartanovich.

The hat is made of felted wool. It has a uniquely low thermal conductivity and good air permeability. This is a cloche-style hat. It is a lightweight hat with a small brim. Such a hat conserves heat and protects its wearer from both sun and rain. This is why such hats were popular among participants of various expeditions. Valery Khartanovich wore this hat on expeditions in different parts of the country from the 1970s to the early 2010s. If a hole appeared on the hat, Khartanovich, being a rather frugal person, would just carefully seal it and continue wearing the hat. It was in this hat that Khartanovich took part in archaeological excavations at the Kola Oleneostrovsky grave field on the coast of the Barents Sea in 2001–2004. An anthropologist on site of an archaeological excavation of a burial helps to determine the sex of the buried, their approximate age, some bone injuries and diseases on the spot. During his expedition on the Kola Oleneostrovsky grave field, the anthropologist promised that when the hat was unsuitable for further use, he would transfer it to the museum for storage. He fulfilled this promise in 2012.

Valery Khartanovich was born on June 10, 1952. In 1969, he entered the Faculty of History at the Department of Ethnography and Anthropology of Leningrad State University. In 1974, he was assigned to the department of anthropology of theMiklukho-Maklay Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences, now the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera Museum), where he currently works as the head of the Anthropology Department. In 1988, he defended his PhD thesis on the topic “Anthropology and Questions of the Origin of the Sami and Karelians”. Areas of scientific activity — craniology, paleoanthropology, anthropological composition and origin of the ancient and modern population of the north of Eastern Europe and Western Siberia. Valery Khartanovich is one of the leading anthropologists of the country.