Foreword: Elena A. Okladnikova, Herzen University, St. Petersburg (Russia), Deputy Director for Museum Work at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) Translators: Richard L. Bland, Archeologist (retired), U.S. National Park Service, Heritage Research Associates, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History; Yaroslav V. Kuzmin, Institute of Geology & Mineralogy, Russian Academy of Sciences; and Laboratory of Mesozoic and Cenozoic Continental Ecosystems, Tomsk State University (Russia) The distinguished Russian archeologist Aleksei P. Okladnikov's study reveals how a field archeologist goes about determining and writing prehistory. Over the course of his career, Okladnikov and his wife Vera Zaporozhskaya travelled across Siberia from the Lena River in the north to the Amur River in the south excavating archaeological sites. During that time Aleksei and Vera found and interpreted the rock art of the vast region from the Paleolithic Era to the present day. Relying on petroglyphs and pictographs left on cliffs and boulders, Okladnikov lays out in detail and straightforward language the prehistory of Siberia by "reading" these artifacts. This book permits the past to be told in its own words: the art portrayed on the cliffs of Siberia

This is the first ethnohistory of Siberia to appear in English, tracing the history of the native peoples from the Russian conquest onwards. James Forsyth compares the Siberian experience with that of the Indians and Eskimos in North America and the book as a whole will provide readers with a vast corpus of ethnographic information previously inaccessible to Western scholars.

Geschiedenis van de bevolking van Siberië.

Central to this study is the image of the deer within the iconography of the Early Nomads of South Siberia. By examining the symbolic structures revealed in the art and archaeology of the Early Nomads, the author challenges existing theories regarding Early Nomadic cosmology. The reconstruction of meanings embedded in the deer image carries the investigation back to rock carvings, paintings, and monolithic stelae of South Siberia and northern Central Asia, from the Neolithic period down through the early Iron Age. The succession of images dominating that artistic tradition is considered against the background of cultures — including the Baykal Neolithic Afanasevo, Okunev, Andronovo, and Karasuk — evolving from a hunting-fishing dependency to a dependency on livestock. The archaic mythic traditions of specific Siberian groups are also found to lend critical detail to the changing symbolic systems of South Siberia.

The Kets of Central Siberia are perhaps the most enigmatic of Siberia's aboriginal tribes. Today numbering barely 1,100 souls living in several small villages on the middle reaches of the Yenisei, the Kets have retained much of their ancient culture, as well as their unique language. Genetic studies of the Ket hint at an ancient affinity with Tibetans, Burmese, and other peoples of peoples of South East Asia not shared by any other Siberian people. The Ket language, which is unrelated to any other living Siberian tongue, also appears to be a relic of a bygone linguistic landscape of Inner Asia. Because language isolates such as Ket are of special value to scholars of the original peopling of the continents, linguists have recently attempted to link Ket with North Caucasian, Sino- Tibetan, Burushaski, Basque and Na Dene. None of these links have been proved to the satisfaction of all linguists, and the research continues both in Russia and abroad.

Before Russians crossed the Urals Mountains in the sixteenth century to settle their ‘colony' in North Asia, they heard rumours about bountiful fur, of bizarre people without eyes who ate by shrugging their shoulders and of a land where trees exploded from cold. This region of frozen tundra, endless forest and humming steppe between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean was a vast, strange and frightening paradise. It was Siberia. Siberia is a cradle of civilizations, the birthplace of ancient Turkic empires and home to the cultures of indigenes, including peoples whose ancestors migrated to the Americas. It was a promised land to which bonded peasants could flee their cruel masters, yet also a ‘white hell' across which exiles shuffled in felt shoes and chains. If in Stalin’s era Siberia became synonymous with the gulag, today it is a vast region of bustling metropolises and magnificent landscapes, a place where the humdrum, the beautiful and the bizarre ignite the imagination. Tracing the historical contours of Siberia, A. J. Haywood offers a detailed account of the architectural and cultural landmarks of cities such as Irkutsk, Tobolsk, Barnaul and Novosibirsk.

Cambridge anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, the first westerner to live with the Eveny of Siberia since the Russian revolution, brings readers an extraordinary case of survival in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. of photos.

This study provides a concrete example of how foraging societies enculturate and transform the natural environment and, through the use of material objects, create sacred spaces and sites. Using ethnographic and ethnohistorical information about the Khanty of Siberia, Jordan shows the shortcomings of both interpretive and materialist anthropological theorizing about hunters and gatherers. He focuses on the rich and complex relationship between the symbolism of the Khanty, their material culture, and the bringing of meaning to physical places. His examination looks at the topic in both historical and contemporary contexts, and in scales from the core-periphery model of Russian colonialism to the portrait of a single yurt community. Jordan's work will be of importance to those studying cultural anthropology, archaeology, and comparative religion.

The art of Siberia is a fascinating subject, and the artifacts discovered in the hidden archives of the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg are nothing less than extraordinary. Artwork, day-to-day subjects and photos dating from the turn of the century all represent the testimonies of the Siberian people who refused to yield to the hegemony of a modern world.

Olonkho, the epic narrative and song tradition of Siberia’s Sakha people, declined to the brink of extinction during the Soviet era. In 2005, UNESCO’s Masterpiece Proclamation sparked a resurgence of interest in olonkho by recognizing its important role in humanity’s oral and intangible heritage. Drawing on her ten years of living in the Russian North, Robin P. Harris documents how the Sakha have used the Masterpiece program to revive olonkho and strengthen their cultural identity. Harris’s personal relationships with and primary research among Sakha people provide vivid insights into understanding olonkho and the attenuation, revitalization, transformation, and sustainability of the Sakha’s cultural reemergence. Interdisciplinary in scope, Storytelling in Siberia considers the nature of folklore alongside ethnomusicology, anthropology, comparative literature, and cultural studies to shed light on how marginalized peoples are revitalizing their own intangible cultural heritage.