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Landscape Agency and Evenki-Iakut Reindeer Husbandry Along the Zhuia River, Eastern Siberia

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Abstract

This interdisciplinary study applies a series of environmental tests developed in Fennoscandia to elaborate the patterns created by contemporary and past reindeer husbandry along the Zhuia River, Bodaibo district, Irkutsk oblast’, Russian Federation. We successfully used pollen and fungal spore analysis to document the long-term use of one site by ungulates–although it remains unclear if these animals were ‘domestic’ reindeer or not. The date of occupation could go as far back as the fourteenth century. The on-site phosphate analysis, attempted for the first time in Eastern Siberia, proved a useful tool for locating the sites of animal action although failed to specify the boundaries of that action. It did emphasise the importance of accounting for the agency of wind in ordering reindeer behaviour. Finally, the combined phosphate, botanical, and pollen work documented a history of succession of types of land-use from the hunting of Rangifer, to holding Rangifer, to the maintenance of meadows for horses or cattle, to the formation of cereal crops and vegetable patches. The combined use of these methods and a discussion of the ambiguities they produced suggests that they are best employed to find distinctive sites in the landscape which attract both people and animals and are less effective in documenting a Euro-American vision of trust or domination in human-animal relations.

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Notes

  1. It is difficult to interpret the ‘island’ at Lake Tolondo. One possible interpretation is that in the spring and autumn the river flooded the area around the 5 m moraine/terrace making the existing meadow an island (rejoining the ‘mainland’ in summer). A more likely explanation is that the name was a form of shorthand for the small island that sits at the inlet between the river and the lake (Fig. 4)

  2. The aerial photographs were special ordered from the archives Eastern Siberian Aerogeodizicheskoe Predpriatie www.vsagp.ru (no classmark). The VSAGP used the photographs to construct topographical maps. The photographs were used for site surveys and to map the contours of vegetation incorporated into our site maps. The detail on these photographs far surpasses that available on satellite photographs.

  3. It remained a little unclear in his account if the site was ‘virgin’ forest or had become overgrown. He used the term otchistit’ [cleansing, clearing] which suggests removing shrubs rather than felling trees. The term otchistit’ can sometimes refer to burning and Pavel Nikolaevich described what we would call ‘burning’ the meadow every spring.

  4. Pavel Nikolaevich did not have a continuous overview of the site. He arrived at the site in 1958 with his parents when he was 12. He then served in the army roughly from 1962 to 1965. He lived at the site again until 1968 when he chose to spend 2 years in the village returning roughly in 1972. When he returned he began using the still-standing shaded marshalling area.

  5. His kinship relation to the site is a beautiful yet tragic illustration of bilateral kinship solidarity. Pavel Nikolaevich, a Iakut, took Tat’iana Nikolaevna, an Evenkiika, as his wife following the tragic death of her first husband who came from the Orkanov family. The Orkanov name is one of the oldest Zhuia river Tungus surnames well documented in the archives. Vasilii married Nina Orkanova, Tat’iana’s daughter, after Nina’s first husband (who was Vasilii’s older brother) died tragically. Vasilii’s father was also Pavel Nikolaevich’s maternal uncle making the two herders cousins (FZS) with different nationalities. Tamara Nikolaevna’s maiden surname is Maksinova related also in a distant and unspecified way to Vasilii. The ‘claim’ to the meadow at Ust’-Nechera of both male herders is thus founded on a history of very old Evenki occupation through both women at the site.

  6. Following a tradition dating from Imperial times when agronomists would study the traditional agricultural techniques of rural peoples, Russian geobotanists and vegetation historians document local techniques of creating pastures and other economically useful glades out of forests (Borinevich et al. 1963; Il’minskikh 1993; Korobeĭnikova 2002). One interesting technique used by both Iakuts and Buriats was the deliberate tying of domestic animals in certain places over the winter in order to create fertilised meadows (Iokhel’son 1895)

  7. There are two main explanations for the lack of a strong signature here. First this corral sits very close to the damp and permanantly frozen periphery of the site which may prevent phosphates from binding. Second, the four or five cows held here for a few hours a day, 3 to 4 weeks a year, perhaps have not contributed enough manure to make a strong signature.

  8. In addition to the monolith tins we took four sediment samples from the north arm of Lake Tolondo, which are not analysed here (Anderson et al. 2007). Aside from confirming the regional pollen signature the cores document occasional turbulence and one large flood event in the lake over the past 360 years.

  9. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this term. That reviewer also understood the meadows to be a “platform” for semi-domestication of both Rangifer to people and people to Rangifer.

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Acknowledgments

This article is dedicated to the memory of Vasilii Nikolaeich Maksimov who drowned with his son while crossing the Zhuia River in 2012.

The field research and laboratory analysis for this article was sponsored mainly by a grant from the Research Council of Norway (NFR 179316) within the multinational research framework “BOREAS: Histories from the North” organized by the European Science Foundation EUROCORES programme. A portion of the laboratory work, and the time for writing an analysis was made possible by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC AdG 295458). The research could not have been carried out without the in-kind support, equipment and expertise of the Irkutsk State Technological University and the logistical support of the mining enterprise ‘Svetlyi’ based in Bodaibo. We are grateful to Iurii Vasil’evich Zharkov of the goldmining company Vitim and his uncle Iurii Alekseevich Zharkov of Svetlyi Ltd for professionally and reliably arranging ground transport for us and our equipment to and from the banks of the Zhuia River. We are also grateful to Iurii Konstantinovich Polititsyn, a lifetime resident of Svetlyi, who gave advice on sites of previous Evenki occupation and whose family helped us to navigate the river and organise the fieldwork.

For this article, DGA was the principal investigator of the two grants, participated in most of the fieldwork, and composed this English text consulting Russian-language drafts prepared by EMI and OPV. EMI organized the fieldwork, conducted the trench digging, and prepared preliminary versions of the maps. OPV participated in the fieldwork, collected botanical samples, and participated in the interpretation of the pollen diagrams. ML participated in the fieldwork and conducted the phosphate analysis. The arduous work of identifying and counting the pollen grains, fungal spores and charcoal fragments was done by NVK in her laboratory in Irkutsk.

We are indebted to our colleagues Drs. Ed Schofield and Dmitryi Mauquoy of the School of Geosciences at the University of Aberdeen for drafting the pollen diagrams and constructing the age-depth model and to Paul Ledger and Ilse Kamerling, also of the University of Aberdeen, for helping draft the final versions of the maps and figures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, AB24 4QY, Scotland, UK

    David G. Anderson

  2. Laboratory of Archeology, Paleoecology and the Livelihoods of the Peoples of Northern Asia, Irkutsk State Technical University, Irkutsk, 664074, Russia

    Evgenii M. Ineshin

  3. Institute of the Earth’s Crust, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Irkutsk, 664033, Russia

    Natalia V. Kulagina

  4. Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Arts/Archaeology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Mika Lavento

  5. Irkutsk State Agricultural Academy, Irkutsk, 664036, Russia

    Oksana P. Vinkovskaya

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  1. David G. Anderson
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  2. Evgenii M. Ineshin
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  3. Natalia V. Kulagina
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Correspondence to David G. Anderson.

Electronic supplementary material

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Table S1

% of area occupied by specific plant species by phytozone (PDF 304 KB)

Figure S1a

Complete Nechera Pollen Chart–Part 1 [Trees, Shrubs, Herbs] (by Dr. Edward Schofield) (PDF 61.8 KB)

Figure S1b

Complete Nechera Pollen Chart–Part 2 [cryptogram and spores] (by Dr. Edward Schofield) (PDF 57.2 KB)

Figure S2a

Complete Tolondo Pollen Chart–Part 1 [Trees, Shrubs, Herbs] (by Dr. Edward Schofield) (PDF 73.6 KB)

Figure S2b

Complete Tolondo Pollen Chart–Part 2 [cryptogram and spores] (by Dr. Edward Schofield) (PDF 63.5 KB)

Figure S3

Complete Age-Depth Model for Lake Tolondo (by Dr. Dmitri Maquoy). The model presents a graphic representation of the most likely ages for the four AMS dates given the minimum, maximum and error spread given by the INTECAL09 calibration and the most like permutations as calculated by the statistical package ‘Bacon’ at a 95% confidence level. The curve is calibrated with a standard algorithm for sediments (PDF 3.87 MB)

Figure S4

Soil characteristics at Lake Tolondo (PDF 57.4 MB)

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Anderson, D.G., Ineshin, E.M., Kulagina, N.V. et al. Landscape Agency and Evenki-Iakut Reindeer Husbandry Along the Zhuia River, Eastern Siberia. Hum Ecol 42, 249–266 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-013-9632-6

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