211 Elena Efmovna Kuz’mina (Kuzmina) (1930 – 2013) Katheryn M. linduFF and Karen s. rubinson The renowned Russian archeologist and cultural researcher Elena Efimovna Kuz’mina (Kuzmina), died on October 17, 2013 at home in Moscow. Prof. Kuz’mina graduated from the History Faculty of the Moscow State University and continued in postgraduate studies directed by the prominent Indo-Iranian culture historian Mikhail M. Diakonoff, and the eminent archaeologist Mikhail P. Gryaznov. She conducted feldwork in the Eurasian Steppe and directed site excavations in the Southern Urals, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. She is credited with the discovery of approximately 100 sites and the excavation of more than 40 settlements and burial grounds of the Bronze Age of the Eurasian Steppe. BioGraPhy From 1949 to 1954 Elena Kuz’mina was an undergraduate in the Department of Archaeology, Moscow State University, and between 1954 and 1957 did her graduate study in the Institute of the History of Material Culture, Academy of Sciences, USSR (Leningrad). In 1964, she received a PhD (kandidatskaya) from Moscow State University, and defended her second doctoral dissertation (doktorskaya) in history on Indo-Iranian migrations in 1988. Between 1957 and 1986 she was a member of the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow and Principal Investigator on sites in the South Urals, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia. From 1986 and to her death, she conducted research and directed students at the Russian Institute for Cultural Research in Moscow. During that period she led UNESCO expeditions to India and Sri Lanka and gave scores of public lectures at universities across the world (in Paris, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Berlin, Frankfurt-am-Main, Harvard, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Pittsburgh and elsewhere). Elena Kuz’mina published more than 300 articles and 15 books on the archaeology of the Eurasian Steppe, as well as on Indo-Iranian topics: origin and migration, and mythology and arts; she also produced essays on the development of museum policy and research projects. Her pioneering contributions to the scholarship on Eurasia built on her training in cultural history and included text- based inquiries along with extensive archival research in libraries and museum collections. To that she added meticulously executed archaeological feldwork and analyses of recovered artifacts that provided the basis for her proposed chain of migratory patterns for the Indo- Iranians, manifested in the remains of the Andronovo archaeological culture. She followed this model of exploration throughout her long and productive career and it shaped a part of the vast literature that adds to that of her Russian teachers and students. In 2007, Brill published a monograph, her magnum opus, The Origin of the Indo-Iranians, in English, which was the fruit of her life-long quest to explain the origins and correspondences between the Andronovo archaeological culture and the Indo-Iranians. This work was a newer, signifcantly expanded edition of her second dissertation, which had already been published in Russian in Moscow in 1994. In this new edition she gave an encyclopedic account and comprehensive analysis of the Andronovo, a second-millennium BCE cultural phenomenon that spanned much of the Eurasian Steppe. Reviewing a vast data set of archaeological materials together with linguistic data, she discussed the relationships between Andronovo and neighboring peoples and the role of that interaction in the foundation of Indo-Iranian peoples. For this text, in 2009 she won the World Prize for the Book of the Year from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Another English-language book, The Prehistory of the Silk Road, was frst published in English in 2008 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and more recently in Russian (2010). This text looks at the crucial role of the Eurasian Steppe in the emergence of the formal establishment of trade and diplomacy across Eurasia. Covering the period from the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age, Kuz’mina traced the evolution of material culture of the Steppe and contact areas, and showed the critical role of Eurasian pastoral groups in developing the widespread cultural exchange, the domestication and use of the horse and the camel, and the