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Reference:
Jordan, P. (in press / 2010). Landscape and culture in Northern Eurasia: an
introduction. In: P. Jordan (ed), Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia. London:
University College London Institute of Archaeology Publications
(see: http://www.lcoastpress.com/book.php?id=297)

H1 Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia: An Introduction

H2 Peter Jordan
H3 Introduction
This volume examines the life-ways and beliefs of the indigenous peoples of northern
Eurasia. Chapters contribute ethnographic, ethnohistoric and archaeological case-studies
stretching from Fennoscandia, through Siberia, and into Chukotka and the Russian Far
East. One overarching aim of the book is to break down the lingering linguistic
boundaries that continue to divide up the circumpolar world -- there is an immense
Russian-language ethnographic literature on the groups covered by these chapters, though
much of this work remains largely unknown to Western academics.
A second aim of the volume is to move beyond ethnographic thick description to
integrate the study of northern Eurasian hunting and herding societies more effectively
into ongoing international debate. For example, during different periods in the history of
anthropology, certain regions of the world have been associated with major theoretical
developments: Africa with the development of kinship theory, Melanesia with theories of
sociality and personhood, Europe with theories of ethnicity, nationalism and the State
(Ingold 2003, 25). With the re-opening of Siberia to international scholarship might it
now be the turn of the North to set a new theoretical agenda, with a renewed and truly
circumpolar focus on human-animal relations, systems of spirituality, and human
perceptions of the environment (Ingold 2002, 245)?
This volume takes this broader agenda forwards by employing the analytical
concept of landscape to examine how northern communities engage practically and
symbolically with their taiga and tundra environments. The flexibility of the landscape

18

approach enables several under-researched aspects of circumpolar subsistence,

knowledge and practice to be examined in different ways: several chapters investigate the
immediacy and complexity of human-animal-spirit relations; others situate their analysis
of northern life-ways in a deeper historical context, emphasising long-term
transformation, but also flexibility and resilience inherent in local perceptions and
practices. Many chapters also touch on the complex ways in which northern societies
were brought under increasing economic and political control, but often in ways that left
conceptual and physical spaces where local identities, rituals and beliefs could endure, in
some cases, right through to the present day.
The third -- and broadly archaeological -- aim of the volume is to generate a
range of ethnographic parallels which direct attention to the relationship between social
activity, material culture and landscape. In exploring the spatial organisation of higherlatitude routine and ritual practices, and the social and symbolic roles played by objects
and vernacular architecture, all chapters raise important questions about the extent to
which the materiality of northern spirituality might survive into the archaeological
record. When read from an ethnoarchaeological perspective (David and Kramer 2001),
these case-studies will serve as useful sources of ethnographic analogy for archaeologists
seeking to move analysis and interpretation of earlier hunting and herding societies
beyond the current focus on ecology and adaptation (Jordan 2006). In particular, many
chapters hint at new ways of understanding how and why northern worldviews might
have been expressed through the gifting and sacrifice rituals that are central to
circumpolar subsistence practices, thereby providing an integrated range of ethnographic
analogies for the further development of an archaeology of natural places (Bradley
2000).
In sum, this volume aims to demonstrate how cultural landscape research can
provide foundations for a new phase in circumpolar studies, encouraging increased
international collaboration between archaeologists, ethnographers and historians, and
opening out new directions for archaeological investigation of spirituality and northern
landscape traditions.
H3 Traditions of Landscape Research
Landscape research has continued to expand and diversify, and now occupies a central
position in the humanities, spanning archaeology, social anthropology, geography, history
and related disciplines, and embracing the study of economics, politics, social relations
and cultural perceptions (Hirsch and OHanlon 1995; Ucko and Layton 1999; Carmichael
et al. 1994; Tilley 1994, 2006; David and Thomas 2008; Ingold 2000; Zvelebil 2003).
Recent years have witnessed several salient topics emerge into the forefront of
landscape research, including the social and symbolic construction of space through
routine practice, and the idea that landscapes reflect long-term historical process, with
meanings, values and power structures embedded within their materiality and traditions
of use (e.g. Bender 1993, 2006; Tilley 2006, for recent overviews of the field). More
generally, the key strength of the landscape approach appears to lie in its useful
ambiguity (Gosden and Head 1994, 113) and in its capacity to connect rather than divide
divergent themes and theoretical perspectives (Layton and Ucko 1999).

19

One might argue that the concept of landscape is most useful as a medium of a
reflection -- an entry point into the exploration of wider connections -- rather than a
precise research methodology (Tilley 2006). At the same time, a central heuristic unites
landscape research: people make landscapes, and are in turn, are made by them;
landscapes, route-ways and built places shape, and in turn are shaped by, the day-to-day
and longer-term unfolding of social practice; landscapes are most essentially works in
progress, under going cumulative change through time, rather than emerging as a finished
product (Bourdieu 1977; Tilley 1994; Ingold 1993, 2000; Giddens 1984, 35).
This recursive relationship between people and landscape has been explored from
a number of different perspectives, and a useful distinction can be drawn can be drawn
between micro-scale studies emphasising the direct human experience of landscape,
where meanings are practised, negotiated or read through an embodied engagement
with the world. Alternative macro-scale studies have focused on the structured nature of
landscape as a reflection of group or national identities, or as an expression of the longue
dure of social, economic and political institutions that directly impact and shape the
human actions and experiences that make up more localised life-worlds.
Generally, these differences tend to reflect shades of emphasis, rather than any
categorical distinctions between distinct lines of enquiry. As a result, landscape
approaches are a useful means of facilitating a more embracing scholarship that seeks to
connect themes and explore chains of relationships. In particular, landscape studies can
unite the strengths of the experiential approach, which examines the immediacy of
human engagements, with analysis of the social and cultural understandings of
inhabitants caught up in landscape transformations. When combined with structural
analyses of landscape history, these experiential approaches also situate persons in a
historically-shaped environment, and illustrate how the cumulative actions, routines and
choices made by individuals and communities can actually shape processes of long-term
transformation.
H3 The Potentials of Circumpolar Landscape Research
Anthropological studies of cultural landscapes have been of crucial importance in
opening out a deeper appreciation of the immense range of diversity that characterizes
human engagements with the environment. In particular, landscape-based studies of
Australian hunter-gatherer communities have provided a fundamental challenge to
simplistic notions of a clear-cut division between natural environments and human
culture. For Aborigines, the physical landscape is understood at all times as being social,
symbolic, ritual and practical, serving on a conceptual level as both a moral code and
tribal encyclopedia (Myers 1986). In turn, the abundant literature on Aboriginal
Dreamtime landscapes has gone on to make a particularly significant contribution to
interpretive archaeology, occasionally providing explicit -- but more often implicit -inspiration for seeking out new and more humanised ways of exploring the form and
content of prehistoric social worlds (e.g. Tilley 1994; Edmonds 1999).
Further studies of indigenous engagements with landscape have been highlyinsightful (see: Carmichael et al. 1994; Hirsch and OHanlon 1995; Ucko and Layton
1999; Ingold 2000). However, the geographic coverage of this research has been highly

20

uneven. In contrast to a landscape literature dominated by Australia, Africa and the

Americas, indigenous peoples living across vast tracts of Northern Eurasia have been
conspicuously absent from recent international scholarship and debate (but see: Vitebsky
1992; Ovsiannikov and Terebikhin 1994; Kharyuchi and Lipatova 1999; Jordan 2001a,
2003; chapters in Kasten 2002; Krupnik et al. 2004), and yet the investigation of these
communities, and their relationships to the land, has so many fresh insights to offer.
The curious absence of landscape-orientated research in northern Eurasia
certainly highlights a potentially productive area for future research, and the chapters in
this volume illustrate some of the ways in which these opportunities might be realised. At
the same time, my underlying motivation for publishing this volume does not stem from a
desire to ensure that landscape research goes on to achieve some form of respectable
global coverage. Instead, I would like to use the next section of this introductory
chapter to examine how and why the dearth of northern landscape research reflects a
more general situation in which Siberias indigenous peoples -- when compared to almost
all other world regions -- remain poorly-represented in English-language discussion and
debate. If we can understand why Siberian ethnography has remained aloof from
international debate, then can start to outline justifications for using the landscape
approach to address this situation.
In this way, the real long-range goal of this volume is to rehabilitate and revitalize
an immense and largely-unknown body of distinguished Russian-language ethnographic,
ethno-historic and historical literature that embraces more than half the circumpolar
world. Adoption of a new and galvanising focus on northern landscape research provides
only an analytical vehicle for making these rich and under-researched materials
increasingly accessible -- and also more intellectually-relevant -- to some fundamentally
important debates that span current international anthropology and archaeology.
Before we start to focus on northern cultural landscapes it is crucial to understand
why Siberian ethnography was largely left out in the cold by Western researchers when
the region had so much to offer. When viewed from an outside perspective the
development of Siberian ethnographic research falls into a number of discrete stages (for
a detailed discussions, see: Schweitzer 2000, with references). Interestingly, the lack of
knowledge about Siberia is a rather recent phenomenon -- Schweitzer argues that pretwentieth-century scholarship outside of Russia was reasonably well-informed about
Siberian peoples (2000, 31). In particular, the early years of the twentieth century were
particularly productive in providing information about Siberia in languages other than
Russian. For example the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902), under the
direction of Franz Boas, led to an unprecedented degree of collaboration between Russian
and American anthropologists (see: Schweitzer 2000; Gray et al. 2003).
More widely, Western anthropologists were active across the North, publishing
their ethnographic descriptions and comparative analyses in a range of European
Languages other than Russian, frequently in English, but often also in German, which
was a major language of European scholarship until the late 1940s (see references in
Schweitzer 2000, 31). Many early English-language publications went on to form the
classic (and perhaps now over-cited) ethnographies of Siberian peoples (e.g. Bogoras
1904--09, 1925; Jochelson 1905-8, 1910-26, 1928; Shirokogoroff 1929, 1935; Czaplicka

21

1914; Hallowell 1926). In contrast, the extraordinarily rich Russian- and Germanlanguage scholarship of this era has seen very little attention (see e.g. Jordan 2003, for
Western Siberia).
In contrast to popular assumptions, Siberia did not close off to Western
researchers immediately after the 1917 Communist Revolution. Well into the 1920s
continued contacts with American colleagues helped foster the open and international
character of Russian/Soviet ethnography in the early decades of the twentieth century
(Gray et al. 2003, 96). The situation only began to change after Stalin came to power, and
in a new political climate, in which international connections were viewed with
increasing suspicion, opportunities for international field research in Siberia began to
decline. There was a sharp fall in international academic contacts, and by 1930, the door
had firmly closed (ibid. 2003, 96).
Inside the USSR ethnographic work on the northern peoples of Siberia continued
apace, for the closure of the international border affected communities of both local and
international scholars: Soviet researchers were now deprived of overseas fieldwork
opportunities, leaving Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia as the only remaining
exotic fieldwork locations (Gray et al. 2003, 31). Siberian ethnography emerged as a
dynamic research field within the closed worlds of the USSR, developing its own
theory, fieldwork methodologies and intellectual rationale. Unfortunately, the linguistic
and political barriers that had emerged also ensured that the rich and diverse work of
Russian scholars of the Soviet era was virtually unknown to Western anthropologists
(Ingold 2002, 245).
More recently, there have been several useful reviews of work undertaken during
this period (Shimkin 1990; Schweitzer 2000; Gray et al. 2003; Sirina 2004; Artemova
2004). In addition to the general descriptions of economic-cultural types and the tracing
of historical-ethnographic provinces the analysis of ethnogenesis emerged after the
1960s a central research theme (Gray et al. 2003, 198). The ethnic research agenda
resonated well with wider political processes (see: Gray 2005 for an excellent summary
of Soviet ethnicity policies), and equipped ethnographers and historians with the
politically-neutral task of tracing the emergence of the modern ethnic groups that made
up the rank and file of the Soviet Unions many Peoples (ibid. 2003, :198, and.
The overarching ethnogenesis question also provided the basic criteria for
publishing scores of monographs and synthetic surveys meticulously documenting and
cataloguing the cultural, social and spiritual traits of the various northern peoples. In
particular, the study of so-called traditional culture had a major role in Soviet
ethnographic research (Sirina 2004, 95). This provided a useful point of base-line contrast
with the triumphant descriptions of later Socialist achievements -- collectivisation, resettlement, boarding-school-education education, universal health-care provision, and so
on -- that concluded many ethnographic studies (e.g. Levin and Potapov 1964).
As a result, most studies focused on the key pre-Soviet bracket of the late
nineteenth/early twentieth century: ethnography was framed as the collection of facts
depicting traditional life-ways, including the fast-disappearing aspects of material and
spiritual culture still maintained by older generations born in pre-Socialist times (Gray et
al. 2003, 205). In addition to the formulaic documentation of traditional material culture

22

inventories (including ethnic typologies of housing, transport and subsistence

technologies, clothing, artefact styles and even shamans drums, see e.g. Levin and
Potapovs (1961) extraordinary Ethno-historical Atlas of Siberia) the description of
indigenous mirovozzrenie or world-view emerged as parallel avenue for
documentation of native spiritual culture. As Sirina notes, the religious beliefs of the
peoples of the north, especially Siberian shamanism and its specific features were of
paramount importance in studies of Soviet researchers while the application of
animism theory..laid the basis for studying the world-views of hunters, gatherers and
fishermen (2004, 95).
While the energetic research and publication efforts of Soviet ethnographers
continued apace, interest by Western anthropologists in the vast, Soviet-administered
tracts of the Circumpolar continued to be stifled by the absence of fieldwork
opportunities and the evaporation of earlier academic contacts -- the flow of Englishlanguage research out of the USSR literature was reduced to a trickle, and the region
gradually started to fall out of discussion, debate and the collective anthropological
consciousness, abandoned on the one hand by scholars less interested in pursuing
Circumpolar studies in a politically- and linguistically-fragmented world.
Strangely, Siberias numerous hunting, fishing and gathering peoples were also
ignored by a new generation of anthropologists enthused by Julian Stewards culture
ecology (Schweitzer 2000, 31). Instead, the remaining pure hunter-gatherer band
societies of Alaska, Africa and Australia, became the primary focus in a vibrant era of
international fieldwork and debate. In contrast, Siberias native hunting peoples were
assumed to have been tainted by long-term culture-contacts, and it was concluded that
they had been either been collectivised and assimilated, or else had long since taken up
either sedentary fishing along the coasts and/or fully-pastoral subsistence in the interior
(Murdock 1968, 16; and see: Schweitzer 2000, 33). In a growing atmosphere of silence
and other misunderstandings (Schweitzer 2000, 29), a limited number of Soviet-era
ethnographies did leak out to the West (e.g. Levin and Potapov 1964; translations by
Michael 1962, 1963, etc).
In probing some of the more complex reasons for Siberian ethnography being
ignored by Western Scholars, Schweitzer also highlights some of the lost opportunities
generated by this era of closed borders. Citing Ingolds (1986) classic paper on the
origins of reindeer sacrifice, which was based on analysis of the available Englishlanguage ethnographies of Bogoras, Schweitzer asks what more might have been
achieved through a fuller, more systematic analysis of the extensive Russian-language
Siberian ethnographies (ibid. 2000, 33)? In a similar vein, the very limited number of
archaeological studies that began deploying Siberian ethnographic parallels -- in
particular in rock art research -- also signaled productive directions for future
comparative scholarship (Tilley 1991; Helskog 1997; Zvelebil 1997; Zvelebil and Jordan
1999; Jordan 2004). In general, however, there was little in the way of fresh news about
the contemporary situation of Siberian indigenous groups until the very end of the
twentieth century.
Integrating this lost era of Siberian scholarship into international debate remains
a long-term challenge for both Western anthropologists and archaeologists. Sirina

23

emphasises this strategic goal in her recent evaluation of Soviet-era hunter-gatherer

studies:
[ext]taking an empirical look at the whole period of development of Siberian
research in Soviet times, one cannot be amazed by the tremendous amount of
materials collectedan urgent objective currently is to bring theoretical and
interpretive analysis to this material and to integrate it with worlddebates
(Sirina 2004: 100) [end ext]
Greater Western involvement in Siberian ethnography only began to emerge in the
later Soviet period (e.g. Balzer 1980, 1981, 1987), and by 1980s interest in Siberia was
undergoing a rapid revival thanks to the new political atmosphere of the Perestroika era,
which generated new glimpses into the real conditions of life in the USSRs northern
territories. Landmark publications included Forsyths (1992) History of the Indigenous
Peoples of Siberia, and there was further interest in analysis of the regions hunter-fishergatherer societies (e.g. Schweitzer et al. 2000; Barnard 2004). Increasing contacts with
Russian academics was complemented by a growing tide of international fieldwork in the
region, as new generation of Western scholars took up new research opportunities (see:
Gray et al. 2003 for a full review of these events, personalities and publications). By the
1990s, Western anthropologists are crowding the Siberian field (Schweitzer 2000, 41).
The key point I would like to make in this introductory chapter is that the flavor
of international research that followed the collapse of the USSR was very different to the
more descriptive Soviet ethnographic accounts of traditional northern communities. In
general, Western research was predominantly concerned with picking up what had
happened after collectivization, and focused less on the disappearing glimpses of
traditional culture. Entire international research programmes were directed at examining
how contemporary native peoples were re-orientating themselves to post-Socialist
material and political realities (Gray et al. 2003, 200; and for a broad selection of recent
work see Erich Kastens Pathways to Reform series of edited volumes (Kasten 2002,
2004, 2005a)). In some ways, the Western anthropological emphasis on analysis of
synchronic data made this shift in focus understandable; in contrast, ethnography in
Russia had always been more closely linked to history (Schweitzer 2000, 41, 43).
With revived nationalisms a powerful political force in the disintegrating USSR,
research into identity -- and especially ethnic identity -- emerged as the over-arching
international research agenda of the 1990s, to the extent that recent evaluations of the
field have observed that Siberia is so much about identity (Habeck 2005, 9). The shared
interest in ethnicity provided useful bridges between Russian and Western research
communities, despite some basic differences in theoretical orientation. More recently,
however, there have been growing signs of fatigue with the relentless analysis of
ethnicity politics, to the extent that some have declared that it is time to look beyond the
ethnic and examine other dimensions of human life and cultural diversity (ibid. 2005,
12). Many alternative research themes are now emerging, including the precarious
relations between humans and the supernatural powers of a place and the more intimate
experiences of landscapes as lived and inhabited (Kasten 2005a, 244).
More generally, one might argue that there is growing interest in understanding
culture as lived, which is bound up with the inhabitation and experience of local

24

settings, rather than the more overt identity politics of culture as declared (Schweitzer et
al. 2005, 148). Research into culture as lived might proceed on many fronts; this edited
collection highlights the cultural landscape framework as one means of looking beyond
politicized ethnic identities, and returns us to themes that were there at very beginning of
anthropology (Ingold 2002). Many of these questions remain the focus of intense
archaeological and anthropological debate today, and include: the nature of personhood,
human-animal relations and the links between environment, spirituality and belief. With
landscape research able to explore chains of relationships over diverse social, spatial and
chronological scales, the approach appears well-suited to exploring the complex webs of
connectivity that unite northern ecology, human subsistence and circumpolar cosmology.
It is worth noting here that Russia also developed traditions of cultural landscape
research, but these have tended to focus on the conceptual distinction between nature as
understood as pristine ecology (which can be plotted and protected via nature reserves),
and the built remains and significant places that make up the culture-historical landscape
(Shulgin 2004, 105-114). While this categorical approach has been useful for protecting
examples of unique ecosystems and objects or places of High Culture (for example,
urban architecture, Orthodox religious sites, battlefields and other demarcated
landscapes of historical significance), it has less utility when trying to understand how
the natural landscapes of the taiga and tundra are actually venerated, appropriated and
understood by local communities still living on the land, often in ways that generate few
of the more obvious kinds of cultural signature.
Mainly addressing this lacunae in current policy-related research, the few recent
landscape-studies of Siberian peoples have mainly concerned themselves with the
integration of new knowledge and practice in the field of heritage preservation, including
the legal and policy implications of defining, documenting and protecting traditional
land-use areas in terms of cultural or ethnographic landscapes (see, e.g. papers in
Krupnik et al. 2004; and see: Kasten 2002; CAFF). In contrast, chapters in the present
volume deliberately avoid a direct focus on the political and policy-related aspects of
human-landscape relations; their primary concern is to understand the practices and
perceptions that are central features of the ways in which northern people create and
inhabit cultural landscapes.
H3 The Structuring of Northern Landscapes
As noted above, cultural-landscape research enables us to investigate different aspects of
northern life-ways, from the immediacy of human experience in the taiga and tundra, to
the role of communities in long-term historical transformations. While insights into the
former can be obtained from ethnographic fieldwork, understandings of the latter demand
that we appreciate some of basic structures which have directly shaped and impacted
human actions and experiences over longer timeframes. This section provides a brief
contextual review of these enduring features of northern cultural landscapes: the shared
characteristics of higher-latitude ecology; the common political and economic trajectories
that unite the circumpolar world; the role of a distinctive circumpolar worldview in
guiding human perceptions and engagements with the northern environment.

25

Northern Environments: higher-latitude Eurasia is characterised by a strongly

seasonal climate, with bitterly cold winters and short dry summers. The region is drained
by several major rivers (Figure 1.1): the Pechora, Ob, Enisei, Lena, Kolyma and Amur.
Beyond the Urals, a broad contrast can be drawn between the slow moving rivers in the
wetlands and marshes of Western Siberia and the faster moving rivers draining Eastern
Siberias more numerous uplands. This environmental diversity is further reflected in a
mosaic of different ecological zones, each home to a diverse flora and fauna; broad bands
of vegetation also run across the continent: tundra in the north and along higher
elevations, grading into boreal (taiga) forest further to the south.
For early human populations, the distinctive characteristics of northern
ecosystems generated a number of challenges, including a profoundly uneven distribution
of resources over the landscape at different times of the year. From the early Holocene
hunter-gatherer populations across northern Eurasia found new and surprisingly similar
ways of adapting to these general opportunities and constraints (Gjessing 1944; and see:
Binford 1980), practising new forms of storage, a more complex range of settlement and
mobility strategies, and increasingly integrating the exploitation of fishing into their
hunting and gathering adaptations (Chard 1974; Zvelebil 1980, 1986; Chindina 2000, 778). The characteristic life-ways of these early post-glacial forager societies can be
usefully understood as a shared cultural foundation subject to later historical
transformations in settlement, subsistence and interaction.
Northern History: one defining feature of the long-term history of northern
Eurasia is the growing frequency and intensity of interactions with complex societies
located further to the South. This culminated in the increasing economic and political
integration of northern Eurasia into a shifting constellation of early states and empires,
including Denmark-Norway and Sweden in the West, Russia in the central reaches (see:
Forsyth 1992), and Chinese dynasties and the early Japanese State in the East (Sasaki,
this volume). With the northern forests home to numerous fur-bearing mammals, the
extraordinarily lucrative fur trade provided an early motivation for extending political
surveillance and fiscal control into northern hunting communities. In return for supplying
luxuriant pelts to state coffers, northern peoples gradually witnessed an increasing
government presence in their lands, initially by military garrisons and government tax
collectors, but later by missionaries and other officials (e.g. Forsyth 1992, for an
overview).
As a result of these contacts, native societies went through a series of complex
transformations, leading to cumulative ethnic, economic and commercial changes whose
detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this volume. For example, the older indigenous
hunter-fisher-gatherer economy of Northwest Siberia was subjected to increasing strains
and logistical in-balances after 1600 AD as it adjusted to meeting external demands for
fur and fish. This led in part to the rise of large-scale reindeer pastoralism in the north
(Krupnik 1993), possibly as a way of escaping state surveillance (Golovnev and
Osherenko 1999, 18-19). Along the major waterways of the Ob River the rise of
commercial fishing drew in Russian settlers and also triggered major population
movements among native societies, culminating in numerous conflicts over land rights
(Golovnev 1993; Jordan 2003; Perevalova 2004). The booming fur trade also encouraged

26

colonisation of new areas of forest that were ideal for fur hunting but poor for
subsistence, generating a long-term dependency on flour and other imported foodstuffs,
which local merchants were happy to supply, but often at prices and via contracts that
saddled hunters with enormous levels of debt. In addition, transport reindeer were widely
adopted to increase the mobility of hunters (Golovnev 1993; Perevalova 2004; Jordan, in
press). More generally, the growing specialisation that marked more local adaptations
could only proceed in tandem with increasingly complex patterns of regional intercommunity exchange. For example, in Northwest Siberia forest-hunters, tundrapastoralists and settled river- and coastal-fisher groups met at key points in the annual
round so that they could exchange materials, provisions and also partners (Golovnev
1993; Perevalova 2004; and see: Krupnik 1993, for Northeast Siberia).
In many regions, Russian State interest in the lucrative fur trade also led to
deliberate protection of native land rights in order to ensure that hunters stayed on the
land. The main aim of the tax system was to extract resources, and in most areas
indigenous spiritual bonds to the landscape remained largely unaffected (Jordan 2001a;
Anderson 2004). For example, contacts between native peoples and state officials were
often limited to a few days a year, and long absences in the bush or out on the tundra
provided the space for local communities to practice traditional beliefs, despite the
encroachment of Orthodox missionary activities (e.g. Forsyth 1992; Glavatskaia 2002,
2005 for Western Siberia).
If Imperial fur-tax collection and missionary activity didnt heavily impact
underlying native relations with the land, then the major transformations associated with
the arrival of Communism into rural Siberia certainly did. Culturally, major disruptions
followed forced relocations into multi-ethnic villages, concerted attacks on traditional
religion and sacred places, the imposition of military service on males, enforced reliance
on rearing crops and cattle, production targets for hunting, fishing and herding, and the
introduction of the Russian-language boarding school system (Forsyth 1992).
Environmentally, the brutal industrialization of the North wreaked immense destruction
on traditional subsistence territories and livelihoods (Forsyth 1992; Pika 1999). The
Soviet era generated tremendously localised patterns of variation in relative degrees of
Russification, assimilation and creolization. Some native groups -- especially those
forced into villages -- were heavily impacted to the extent that traditional language,
culture and belief have now virtually disappeared (Vajda, Filtchenko, this volume); other
communities were able to preserve much of their cultural heritage, especially where they
were able to remain as hunters and herders living out on the land.
In the years following the collapse of Communism we are witnessing the
emergence of what might be termed post-Socialist adaptations. These are best
understood as complex -- and often painful -- localised adjustments to the opportunities,
resources and constraints left by the wreckage of the USSR (see: Kasten 2002, 2004,
2005a). In some cases, these changes have encouraged fresh reliance on older branches of
the subsistence economy and its associated spirituality (e.g. Willerslev, Anderson, this
volume). Such is the pace of these changes that the current cultural geography of
Northern Eurasia is highly diverse, encouraging chapters in this volume to adopt a range
of interlocking perspectives on traditional life-ways and spiritual links to the land: some

27

document communities still living in the taiga and tundra, others adopt a more historical
perspective, discussing or reconstructing life-ways that are either fading rapidly or else
have disappeared.
The Northern Mind: a shared set of cognitive factors pervade indigenous
engagements with the landscape; this distinctive northern cosmology exhibits
remarkable continuity around the entire circumpolar zone: all northern hunting and
reindeer-herding peoples appear to have understood their place in the world according to
a distinctive set of principles that underpin the fundamental logic of existence (for useful
descriptive summaries see: Ingold 1986, 2000; Vitebsky 1995; Zvelebil and Jordan 1999;
Price 2001; Jordan 2001b, 2003; Krupnik et al. 2004, 3-5). As many chapters in this
volume document, this underlying cosmology consists of several inter-related beliefs,
including a universe inhabited by both human persons and a range of other animating
presences; conceptual models of the world that enable shamanic soul-flight to other
levels of existence, including a lower underworld of the dead and an upper world of
spirits; hunting as an act of seduction, rebirth and world renewal; and perhaps most
importantly for landscape research, powerful obligations to gift the animating forces of
the landscape with material offerings and the sacrifice of domestic animals.
While there have been many synthetic accounts of circumpolar religion in the
wider literature, often stressing its extraordinary coherence over large tracts of territory,
this volume aims to view this cognitive phenomenon from new angles, breaking open
neat cosmological models and grounding them back into the routines of life out on the
land. First, chapters explore underlying variability in circumpolar belief, examining how
ritual practices vary across landscapes and communities, but also exploring how ritual
logic can vary in the context of different subsistence strategies, including hunting and
fishing, reindeer herding, or combined hunter-herder economies. Second, the cultural
landscape framework also enables chapters to investigate how cosmology structures landuse and how economic and ritual dimensions to the use of space interact. Third, the
central focus on the materiality of northern spirituality raises intriguing questions about
the potential archaeological visibility of these beliefs and practices (see discussion
below); the explicit attention directed to the role of material culture in landscapes of
belief will provide archaeologists with important ethnographic parallels that are of major
utility in developing an archaeology of religion (Whitley and Hays-Gilpin 2008), most
notably in relation to rock art research, but also through hunter-gatherer landscape
archaeology more generally (e.g. Tilley 1991; 1994; Helskog 1997; Goldhahn 2002;
Zvelebil and Jordan 1999; Jordan 2004; Lahelma 2005; McCall 2007; Zvelebil 2003).
H3 Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia
This introduction has attempted to sketch out some of the basic ecological, historical and
ideological frameworks that structure human engagements with northern landscapes;
these insights set the scene for the following collection of papers, which explore northern
cultural landscapes from mutually-complimentary perspectives. Chapter authors were
invited to examine how northern communities perceived, inhabited and constructed
cultural landscapes, and how these interactions and practices were marked by built
structures and material remains. Authors drew on the inherent flexibility of the cultural

28

landscape approach (noted above) in order to develop local case-studies, which were
informed in different ways by authors gender, research interests and formal academic
training in either archaeology, ethnography, history or ethno-linguistics. This lively
intellectual diversity is reflected in an interesting way in the focus and content of the
individual papers, which are organised thematically rather than along the kind of
geographic transect used in more systematic or typological surveys (Figure 1.1).
[Figure 1.1 base map about here]
Opening chapters by Willerslev, Anderson, Plattett and Maloney place particular
emphasis on understanding landscape as a medium of communication; they focus in
particular on the kinds of obligatory interactions that characterise the dense social worlds
of a sentient northern ecology. Through hunting, sacrifice and gifting rituals human
persons intervene in a nexus of transformative relationships that maintain flows of life
and set the landscape in motion (Plattet). A second group of chapters by Vat,
Haakanson and Jordan, Filtchenko, Argounova-Low and Lavrillier, broadly employ a
dwelling perspective (Ingold 2000, 172-88) to investigate how northern landscapes are
culturally and materially constructed, spatially-ordered and socially-appropriated through
practices of subsistence, journeying and ritual. A third group of chapters by Glavatskaia,
Sasaki, Habeck, Vajda and Broadbent and Edvinger adopt a longer-term perspective and
explore how historical transformations are reflected in the landscape. In some contexts,
the features of older cultural landscapes must be excavated from ethnographic and
linguistic sources (Vajda), or through direct analysis of archaeological sites and placename traditions (Broadbent and Edvinger).
H4 Landscape, Communication and Obligation
Willerslev provides a powerful opening chapter with his evocative analysis of how
Iukagir hunters, when entering the northern forest, situate themselves in social world that
embraces humans, animals and spirits, all of whom participate in a social field that is
defined according to the logic of predator and prey. Undertaking subsistence activity is a
profoundly dangerous endeavour that demands soul seduction and inter-species
copulation and transformation. In every sense, hunting becomes a terrifying power
struggle to procure material resources from large game whilst retaining the very essence
of human identity and personhood. Anderson develops a sense of the ecology of respect
that endures in post-Socialist subsistence economies; an unexpected participant in a
Evenki reindeer sacrifice, he explores the significance of this complex event in terms of
an enduring concern with rebuilding good relations with the spirits of the local taiga. The
sentient topography of Kamchatka provides the background for Plattets comparative
analysis of how hunters and reindeer herders use contrasting ritual logics to fulfil
obligations to spirits, ancestors and the land. In a similar way, Maloney examines Selkup
interactions with the spirit world, emphasising how sacred places form openings to other
worlds, or passages to death. As with Plattet, she draws out the important conceptual
distinction between the ritual logic of blood sacrifice (pyly) and the gifting of food and
other substances (poory). In contrast to Plattets study, the Selkups of Western Siberia
practice a combined hunter-herder adaptation, enabling them to employ both rituals

29

within a general repertoire of communicative gestures that links the human collective
with spirits and ancestors.
H4 Landscape, Dwelling and Practice
Vat examines the symbolic centrality of the iaranga tent and its hearth rituals within the
broader routines of Chukchi seasonal migrations. Her study identifies the gendered
structuring of landscape -- on a practical level this is underwritten by a basic division of
labour which sees men constantly on the move with the domestic reindeer herd, while
women are mainly active around the hearth and tent. However, in tracing the complex
web of meanings associated with female ritual practice she illustrates how tending the
hearth symbolically protects and domesticates male herders, their reindeer and the wider
cultural landscape.
Haakanson and Jordan explore how Iamal Nenetses construct meaningful places
in the open tundra, contrasting the rich symbolism yet ephemeral remains associated with
conical tents with the more substantial material residues that mark sacred places and
cemeteries. Filtchenko examines how sacred places are embedded within the routine
practices of hunting, fishing and gathering that structure Vasiugan Khanty cultural
landscapes. Argounova-Low focuses on the role of narrative, memory and knowledge in
Lake Essei Sakha engagements with the land. She concludes that the notion of Aiylha
expresses an unfolding process in which all living things, spirits and ancestors are drawn
into an interlinked chain of endless transformation and regeneration.
Lavrillier presents a larger-scale analysis of Evenki hunter-herder cultural
landscapes the sustained presence of humans and their domestic animals drives away
forest spirits associated with wild games, and generates a humanised world of
encampments, reindeer pastures and migration roads. However, this human
enculturation is temporally unstable -- old camps are abandoned and avoided after
someone dies there, forcing new camps and stopping points to be established; at the same
time, former habitation sites revert to a wild status as material remains rot and the
ancestral spirits of the deceased intermingle with the forests wild animal spirit masters.
H4 Landscapes in Long-term Transformation
Glavatskaia focuses on tracing long-term continuity in Mansi engagements with the
colonial landscape. At the heart of these relations is the notion of yalpyng, best
understood as sacred. Sacred places -- yalpyng ma -- are zones of ritual exclusion marked
by built structures and the focus of special community gifting rituals. In a similar vein,
Sasaki examines Udehe traditional worldview in relation to sacred landscape geography,
and traces the persistence and shifting significance of ritual places in the post-Socialist
transformations currently affecting the Russian Far East.
Habeck presents an unusual example of Komi reindeer herders perceptions of
landscape, which he argues are entirely pragmatic, exhibiting few of the symbolic or
mythical dimensions widely documented in other chapters. He attributes this unusual
state-of-affairs to the unique historical trajectory of the Komi, who adopted reindeer
husbandry and colonised the northern tundra after Orthodox missionary activity had

30

impacted upon their native beliefs -- this earlier spirituality had focused on the veneration
of forest and water spirits in their original homeland.
The last two chapters focus on the challenges of recovering the character and
meaning of cultural landscapes long after the perceptions and practices that create and
shape them cease to be living cultural traditions. The Ket are now largely assimilated,
and Vajda aims to reconstruct a basic picture of Ket landscape conceptions by reviewing
the available ethnographic and linguistic information. Completing the collection,
Broadbent and Edvinger raise a fundamentally important question about the extent to
which material evidence for spirituality and belief might persist into the archaeological
record.
H3 Discussion: Understanding Northern Landscapes
The case-studies range broadly over Eurasia, examining how different communities
engage with local environments. Standing back from the ethnographic detail, what
general understandings of northern cultural landscapes start to emerge? How are
landscapes perceived, inhabited and appropriated, and what kinds of physical
transformations and material residues are generated by these activities?
All chapters document what might be termed practical interventions in the
northern environment, including maintenance of cabins, tent frames, caches, storage
structures, mass-capture facilities and seasonal migration routes, all bearing material
testament to a strategic harvesting of the local ecology, often in association with highlystructured patterns of seasonal mobility and temporary settlement. Many of these
practices reflect long-term solutions to northern seasonality, as well as external demands
for fish, fur and other forest products. Many procurement strategies are also reflected in
the practical and social appropriation of particular places and pathways and in physical
investment in equipment and facilities.
In some cases, these practical interventions extend to a more direct manipulation
of the local ecology. Anderson, for example, documents the intentional burning and
enrichment of klever meadows in order to ease management of domestic reindeer herds,
but this is just one strategy in a more general repertoire of northern reindeer-herding
techniques. Use of smudge fires is a far more widespread strategy for providing domestic
reindeer some relief from the swarms of summer insects, and also increases the herds
dependency on their human masters. But this bond is fragile; without the protection of
smoke, the animals tend to scatter to open breezy locations, and rounding them up again
becomes a formidable task, with many becoming lost and reverting to a wild state.
In deliberately creating smoke herders are able to manipulate the inherent
behavioural traits of reindeer, and then work with the characteristics of the local
environment to achieve denser concentrations of domestic animals during key stages of
the seasonal round. This packing can result in intense trampling, manuring and
enrichment of soils at certain sites, potentially generating significant changes in soil
chemistry and local plant populations. Where traditions of land-use result in the longterm use of the same sites for close herding, the practices may eventually leave
distinctive signatures in the palaeoenvironmental record (eg. Aronsson 1991; Anderson et
al., in press). Clearly, there is immense scope here for a concerted programme of

31

integrated programme of ethnographic, historical and environmental archaeology

research which could investigate how and when different forms of reindeer pastoralism
were able to disperse into the boreal hunting economy.
All chapters also highlight the centrality of symbolic engagements with northern
landscapes; many authors document the use of carved idols, built structures, sacrificial
frames, the creation of substantial caches and distinctive material deposits through
ritualised gifting and sacrifice (coins, gun shells, trinkets, feasting remains, the skulls and
horns from sacrificed animals) in the veneration of significant places in the cultural
landscape. Use of formal cemeteries, either close to base-camps or along primary
migration routes, also point to the symbolic structuring of northern landscapes; many
chapters describe the deliberate avoidance of the graves, and much more work could
focus on the landscape aspects of death ritual. Without doubt, these symbolic perceptions
of the landscape extend well beyond a cognitive overlay on the natural ecology, and
result in the creation of enduring places marked by substantial and distinctive complexes
of material remains.
But how do these practical and symbolic dimensions to cultural landscapes
interlock with one another? In the Western literature on circumpolar hunter-gatherer
populations ecological and adaptive perspectives have tended to dominate our
understandings of human-environment relations (Lee and DeVore 1968; David and
Kramer 2001; Binford 1978, 1980; 2001; Jordan 2003, 2008). In turn, recent counterarguments have asserted that foragers live in experiential worlds, whose symbolic
practices and ancestral rituals involve phenomenological encounters with meaningful
places imbued with myths and metaphors that are strangely detached from the more
obvious challenges of making a living in a challenging northern environment (Tilley
1994).
Chapters in this volume make a range of refreshing contributions to these debates.
They document how sacred places and burial complexes are often deliberately located
away from areas used for subsistence, and form locations that can be symbolically
closed to hunting and other forms of economic activity, for fear of jeopardising
relationships with the spirits who reside there. At the same time, these focal places are not
randomly located in the landscape, but interestingly, they often tend to be located close to
main base-settlements (Anderson, Plattet, Malloney, Glavatskaia, Sasaki) and subsistence
sites (Filtchenko, Argounova-Low), beside arterial pathways (Lavrillier, Sasaki), in
association with longer-range migration routes (Haakanson and Jordan), or at other
conceptual crossing points (Anderson, Sasaki).
These more holistic insights into the combined economic and symbolic
appropriation of topographic space indicate that subsistence and ritual form integrated
dimensions of the same conceptual process: cosmological understandings of hunting and
herding demand that offerings and sacrifices are made, and these gifting rituals in turn
ensure that the dynamic human-environment relationships continue to unfold through
further acts of hunting and herding. Importantly, it is the focal nature of sacred places that
brings the cosmological and economic dimensions of existence together: acts of gifting
and sacrifice form a key axis of reciprocal communication that extends outwards into the
wider subsistence economy of hunting and herding, and express some of the complex

32

ways in which human persons must act and move in a landscape dominated by relational
responsibilities to both people, spirits and ancestors.
Interestingly, these conclusions also suggest that many current understandings of,
and assumptions about, indigenous cultural landscapes as consisting mainly of named and
storied topographic features that act as reservoirs of folklore, ancestral significance and
other accumulated wisdom (so common in the literature on Australian Aborigines) may
not be capturing the kinds of profoundly active, physical and long-term, interventions in
the materiality of northern hunting and herding landscapes that these rich case-studies
document.
In addition to explicitly sacred places another fundamentally important set of core
relationships with the landscape is expressed via tending and feeding the fire. Across
the North, the central significance of the hearth appears to be reflected in a more general
cognitive organisation of the landscape into different zones of activity. Around the hearth
and areas immediately close to the camp or settlement is a kind of home range or outer
tent-space, where people work and herd their domestic animals; beyond this is a wider
zone, rarely visited and generally inhabited by wild animals, their spirit masters, and
other powerful beings. Smoke from the hearth also plays a crucial role in redefining
domestic space and performing ritual purifications (Anderson, Haakanson and Jordan,
Jordan 2003, 159); the embrace of acrid wood-smoke also reaffirms human personhood
on hunters returning from the terrifying eyes of a forest world that looks back
(Willerslev), but also reconnects the inter-twined fates of herders, landscapes and their
domestic reindeer (Anderson, Vat, Lavrillier).
However, as chapters by Lavriller and Vat explore, this conceptual zonation of
the landscape around a central hearth is far from a fixed and timeless cognitive overlay
running across the topography. First, the fire requires active tending to remain at the
social and symbolic centre of human life, a task which often falls to women, who
perform the centrality of the fire (see below). Second, the zone shifts with the relocation
of the hearth, either through the regular re-locations that make up the seasonal round
(Vat, Haakanson and Jordan, and see: Golovnev and Osherenko 1999: 31-42) or through
a more complex long-term process in which ancestral sites are abandoned and avoided
after their contamination by the souls of the dead, in some case triggering long-range
relocations to symbolically pristine areas (Lavrillier).
Alongside smoke and fire, gendered identities also serve as central themes in the
perception and inhabitation of circumpolar cultural landscapes. As both male and female
chapter authors document, genders significance in structuring landscape is largely caught
up in the performance of routine and ritual practices, which tend to associate males with
the outer, more distant worlds of hunting (Willerslev) and reindeer herding (Vat), and
females with the activity areas surrounding the hearth and tent (Haakansen and Jordan,
Vat, Lavrillier). As Vat explores, the spiritual and symbolic dimensions to this
relationship is actually more complex than the simplistic binary logic of a male:female
symbolic opposition, for womens obligations to tend the hearth may form essential
practices in a wider and more general conceptual appropriation of the wider reindeer
herding landscape. In some cases, gender may also structure participation in gifting and
sacrifice rituals at larger sacred sites, with men performing the sacrifices or more direct

33

ritual activity, while women play active and important roles in the wider conduct of the
visit (e.g. Haakanson and Jordan, for the Nenetses; and see: Balzer 1981, 856, Jordan
2003, 135-81 for the Khants). Clearly, more work could proceed on researching the
gendered aspects of northern sacred landscape geography.
The landscape approach also forces us to move beyond simplistic notions of
distinct routine or ritual landscapes, and instead encourages us to explore the underlying
ritual logics (Plattet) that structure and inform the communicative relationships that
define northern human-environment engagements. Ingolds (1986, 243-76) essay on the
origins of reindeer sacrifice is a useful point of departure in exploring the close
conceptual parallels between hunting as an act of world renewal, and reindeer sacrifice as
a gesture to secure future prosperity for the herd and human collective. However, the
insights presented in these chapters encourage us to explore how these conceptual models
are played out in specific landscape settings, and involve the inter-generational use of
sacred places and the creation and structured deposition of material culture.
At times, the divergent logic in hunting versus herder rituals can usefully be
contrasted in order to understand how specialist communities practising different
subsistence strategies must also find different symbolic practices to uphold their
obligations to the sentient landscape (Willerslev, Plattet, Haakanson and Jordan). In
combined hunter-herder economies hunting rituals and animal sacrifice actually serve
alongside one another in a common repertoire of gestures that expresses a more
embracing and intuitive ecology of respect (Anderson). The obligations inherent in this
respectful relationship structure the ritualised dialogue between the human collective,
spirit masters, ancestors and deities (Glavatskaia, Maloney, Fitchenko, Vajda, Sasaki),
though understandings of the richness, diversity and variability of these engagements are
poorly captured by the simplistic and time-worn notions of animism or hunting luck.
Looking over these higher-latitude case-studies, one might go so far as to argue
that basic cognitive model of northern human-environment relations does not readily
equate to a giving environment where natures bounty is bestowed unconditionally on
the human collective, as convincingly documented in some South Asian forager societies
(Bird-David 1990, 191; 1992). Instead, these northern case-studies suggest that the
fundamental relationship to the land might better be described as immersion in a complex
web of interaction that extends, at times, to participation in a terrifying sociability in
which the forest looks back (Willerslev).
Spirits, deities and ancestors form a dense social world that can span different
planes of existence, but all these beings demand constant acknowledgement if the
constituents of personhood that bestow a human individual a distinct identity are not to
fall apart (Willerslev). In this sense, continued interaction and ritualised communication
with the spirit world through gifting and sacrifice enables life to proceed, but this
arrangement is profoundly reciprocal and conditional, and interestingly, a relationship
that Bird-David equates with agricultural rather than foraging communities (Bird-David
1990, 190). While Bird-Davids giving environment model has been widely adopted as
a defining feature of all hunter-gatherer societies, these northern insights suggest that we
need to develop a much deeper appreciation of the inherent variability in forager
engagements with the land.

34

In bringing this introduction to a close, it is worth returning to Broadbent and

Edvingers quest to seek out the archaeology of Saami landscapes beyond Lapland. Their
endeavour highlights the third core theme of the volume -- to what extent might the range
of practical and ideological engagements with northern landscapes that is documented in
the case-studies generate distinctive archaeological remains?
These points raises two important questions: first, could we further develop our
attempts (as Broadbent and Edvinger) to excavate cultural perceptions or seek only to
understand the economic remains of northern hunter-gatherer or hunter-herder
subsistence activities? Second, could we use this collection of ethnographic insights in a
more heuristic sense, to profoundly rethink some of the more symbolic ways in which
prehistoric populations might have interacted with northern landscapes?
In response to the first question it is clear from many chapters that ritual activities
have the capacity to generate distinctive and enduring physical signatures (Anderson,
Maloney, Haakanson and Jordan, Lavrillier, Filtchenko, Argounova Low, Vajda, Maj,
Glavatskaia, Sasaki). While the spatial organisation of hunter-gatherer settlement,
procurement and storage systems has been a central theme in the study of how forager
and other mobile populations have adapted to northern environments (Binford 1978,
1980; David and Kramer 2001), there has been much less attention directed to the
locations of sacred places and ritualised deposits in relation to settlement and
procurement sites, which almost all these chapters document as being absolutely central
expressions of the spirituality that permeates northern life-ways. In some cases, enduring
ritual sites may eventually become more archaeologically visible than ephemeral
habitation sites, inverting earlier assumptions that the more symbolic landscape
perceptions of hunters and mobile herders are merely projected onto the natural
topography, but leave few material remains (Haakanson and Jordan).
In answer to the second question, a broadly ethnoarchaeological reading of the
case-studies indicates that hunter-gatherer and hunter-herder worldviews do appear to be
expressed via several forms of readily available archaeological evidence, more
commonly the subject of subsistence and technological interpretations. These casestudies suggests that with the right kinds of ethnographic models we might start to gain
greater understandings of the inter-generational social reproduction of symbolic
landscapes through re-examination of several commonly-occurring lines of
archaeological evidence, including artefacts, animal bones, distinctive topographic
features, and sacred settlement patterns (Jordan 2008). In deploying these ethnographic
parallels to further develop landscape archaeology we need not force ourselves into
replacing cultural ecology with a competing emphasis on phenomenology and perception,
but we can expand our understanding of the richness and variability of human
engagements with northern ecology to develop more resolutely social and symbolic
perspectives on the dynamics of high-latitude adaptations. It would satisfying if some of
the case-studies presented in this volume eventually went on to serve as ethnographic
inspiration for the further develop this more holistic kind of archaeological research
agenda.

35

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