One of the founding members of IMAO, Filimonov enjoyed the leisure of his noble background to educate himself in many aspects of archeology. In 1867 he was sent to Paris to manage the display of Russian antiquities at the International Exposition, and he also worked on the Ethnographic Exhibition in Moscow in 1879. A curator at both Moscow’s Armoury and the Rumiantsev Museum, the Imperial Society of Lovers of Natural Sciences, Anthropology,and Ethnography dispatched him to both Crimea and then the Caucasus to oversee excavations.