Research - "Living Yamal" Lives On!

"Living Yamal" Lives On!
- by William Fitzhugh

During the past year the "Living Yamal" project continued to develop despite the termination of our grant from Amoco Eurasia Corporation (1994-96), coordinated by Igor Krupnik with our partners in Yekaterinburg and Salekhard (see Bonn Exhibit, this issue). Much to everyone's surprise, I returned to Yamal for the 1997 season to continue fieldwork. Some thought this was just bravado to demonstrate re-birth after a 1996 bout with Siberian tularemia, but in truth the offer to join Natalia Fedorova and her team on a chartered river boat was just too good to pass up.

In the weeks that followed, we explored the forested Lower Ob and Poluy Rivers and the small fishing and hunting communities that dot their shores. Here we were met with scenes of horses and cattle grazing river grasses in the phosphorescent midnight light; of Khanty boatmen purse-seining; and of Khanty artists working on embossed birchbark crafts. The finds were as exciting as previous years but led us in entirely new directions - away from circumpolar predilections and more toward Al Spaulding's ideas about boreal forest contacts. We found Iron Age settlements and cemeteries (bronze castings; iron "swords"), tragic gulag camps, fortified villages, medieval hill forts; and "old-time" Russian and Native villages, arts, and technologies.

We reached Yamal a few weeks later and found new surprises. Ceramic finds near Yar Sale turned out to be huge Neolithic house floors whose storage pits and middens were bathed in red ocher. (No, not exactly 'Maritime Archaic' - but LOTS of ocher.) These were serious guys with ash-barrel-sized storage pits (fish?), and glossy, beautifully decorated pottery (no pitted ware for once!). The pottery had a neat surprise: lugs molded into spirit bears, frogs, and beasts that peered out over the rim at you. We even found a touch of bronze and some fine ground slate points. C-14 date: 4200 BP. Hypsithermal "ice-men"? A 15cm thick podsol capped the site, indicating that once there was forest where today there is forest-tundra transition.

In early August, Sven Haakanson left our camp to join his Nenets friend Edick Hudi for a foot survey of south Yuribei, which produced lots of great ethnography and some good archeological sites. The departing Sven looked like an Afghan camel loaded for the silk route! Polaroids are now as common as snicker wrappers along the Yuribei, and the word "Sven" is like saying "tobasco" to Yamal Nenets. Sven's trading skills provided an opportunity for the ASC to receive some wonderful Nenets ethnographic materials, and in return the Nenets now sport Minnesota fleece!

But fieldwork eventually ends. Natalia, Pavel Kosintsev and I have completed a monograph on the Tiutey Sale site from central Yamal this year, and other works are planned. My "virtual archeology" paper on Yamal circumpolar connections appeared in Jorgen Meldgaard's festschrift, and a paper with Andrei Golovnev describing a shaman's cache we found at Drovyanoy in 1994 will appear in Jim VanStone's issue of Arctic Anthropology. We were pleased to see the February 1998 issue of National Geographic appear with the article we stimulated through Sven Haakanson's work with the Nenets. The conflict over traditional culture and development in Yamal continues to inspire international interest and was the focus of a special reindeer herders' conference held in Nadym in 1997, attended by Bruce Forbes, Sven, and many Nenets as well as Saami and other northern Natives.

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