The Kursk Museum of Archaeology houses an “umbo-shaped” pendant. It is a flat circular item with a hemispherical protrusion in the center, made of a copper plate about half a centimeter thick. The item has an eyelet made from a folded rectangular plate, decorated with three lines of vertical deep notches that create a corrugated surface in the center, and attached to the pendant with a pin.

The object is part of a composition in a woman’s necklace, dated to the second half of the 7th century, and belongs to the Kolochin archaeological culture, whose bearers are considered by scholars to be early Slavs. According to archaeologists Andrey Mikhailovich Oblonsky and Igor Olegovich Gavritukhin, such pendants were connected by a chain or cord, on which copper tubes or spirals were threaded. The pendant was discovered as part of the Gaponovo hoard, found by local residents in 1994 near the northeastern outskirts of the village of Gaponovo (Krasnooktyabrskoye) in the Korenevsky district of the Kursk region.

In 1996, the hoard was transferred to the collections of the Kursk Museum of Archaeology by the Left-Bank Early Slavic Expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Like most finds of ancient item complexes, this treasure was found by chance. The area where it was discovered housed a pioneer camp affiliated with the “Rubilnik” low-voltage devices factory. The hoard was discovered by local workers during the laying of a pipeline to the bathhouse of the pioneer camp. At that time, Elena Arkhipova, head of a laboratory of the Left-Bank Early Slavic Expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was on-site and documented the location of the find, collecting most of the items.

An archaeological trench was dug at the site, and research began. The hoard was located in the cultural layer, and according to the finders, the items formed a dense, spindle-shaped cluster. A total of 488 items were recovered. The Gaponovo hoard is a complex that includes items from both female and male sets of jewelry. For this reason, the umbo-shaped pendant is not unique.