Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 24, 1994 TAG: 9411290027
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A20 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL SPECTER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: SALEKHARD, RUSSIA LENGTH: Long
The Nenets, who wander across the northernmost reaches of the Siberian Arctic, eat raw fish, drink reindeer blood and live in reindeer-skin tepees called chums.
Last summer, archaeologists came upon a group of about 1,000 who have had almost no contact with Western culture. Archaeologists long eager to connect the ancient peoples of Scandinavia to the Eskimos of the New World thousands of miles away say that this group may help provide the essential missing clues.
They may do more than that. The Siberian Arctic is one of the last places on Earth unknown to archaeology. Archaeologists and anthropologists had assumed that northern peoples lived in the Arctic out of necessity and eventually migrated south. The Nenets, who have preserved and extended a cultural heritage that may be 10,000 years old, could provide the best proof yet that humans not only can adapt to the harshest possible conditions, but also may choose them.
``I could hardly believe my eyes when we stumbled across them,'' said Dr. William W. Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, describing his encounter with the Vanuyto-Serotto clan of the Nenet people. Fitzhugh spent much of last summer on the Yamal peninsula, where he and a group of Russian ethnographers and anthropologists came upon the Nenets.
The scientists were attempting to survey a huge area of the archaeologically unexplored Siberian Arctic coast. What they found, to their surprise, was the living equivalent of an important archaeological treasure.
``It was if we were on the Great Plains in the 1830s,'' Fitzhugh said, recalling his astonishment. ``They live with no connection to the modern world. They drive their herds nearly 1,000 miles every year and they will forgo any convenience to preserve their way of life.''
Migrating across the Yamal peninsula, where the Ob River and the Ural Mountains meet the Arctic coast, the Nenets have flourished in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. At least 5,000 Nenets still follow the traditional nomadic ways; thousands of others have opted for a slightly more conventional life in fishing settlements.
Despite temperatures that dip to minus 60 in the winter and soar to 95 in the summer, despite 70 years of Soviet power and despite their migratory habit of wintering near Salekhard and traveling with their herds to summer pastures in the central and northern Yamal, thousands of Nenets live as they would have in the fifth century. Some appear never even to have known there was a Soviet Union.
``They are fanatically motivated to preserve their traditions, their language and their rituals,'' said Igor Krupnik, a leading ethnographer with the Russian Academy of Sciences who, working with the Smithsonian group, has focused on the Nenets' cultural heritage. ``No Arctic people that we know of have persisted for so long and so defiantly.''
The Nenets nomads rarely depend upon outside sources for their food. Other than ceramic teacups, most of what they use is made by hand.
They believe in shamans, who have tremendous power over their clans, which are essentially large extended families. The people believe that certain stones with unusual shapes are remnants of the gods who have guarded them for millennia. They live by proverbs as simple as ``If you don't eat warm blood and fresh meat, you are doomed to die on the tundra.''
While many of these people speak Russian, their daily conversations are carried out in Nenets, one of the Finno-Ugric languages.
When they sacrifice a reindeer, they eat half and leave the rest as an offering to the gods. The Nenets have an extensive oral tradition, practice elaborate religious rituals and have covered the Yamal peninsula with devotional displays.
The history of Arctic peoples has been one of the most enduring and perplexing questions in the world of archaeology. Scholars have searched for 300 years to find out whether the Eskimos of Greenland and Canada are related to other northern peoples, and they have tried to discover whether their origins were the same.
There have been dramatic finds and tantalizing clues. On Zhokov Island, in the New Siberian Islands north of Russia, archaeologists have found an 8,000-year-old Mesolithic encampment, the earliest and most northern settlement known in the Russian Arctic. Among the relics found there was a perfectly preserved wooden sled that bears an uncanny similarity to the wooden sleds Nenets tribesmen use today.
``Linking these people or their development is the Holy Grail of northern archaeology,'' said Fitzhugh. ``The question for us is, are these people related - did they come from a common source - or does the harsh environment on which they have settled explain the remarkable similarities among them?''
Fitzhugh, who may spend the rest of his career trying to resolve that question, leans toward the view that similarities among many such groups have more to do with the common conditions in which they live than their prehistoric origins.
But much remains unknown about the north and the Nenets.
``I think we can learn more from them about their origins and that could tell us a great deal about the origins of northern culture in general,'' said Andrei Golovnev, an ethnologist and filmmaker specializing in Yamal culture. ``As the climate warmed at the end of the Ice Age, people moved to the south and discovered resources they didn't know existed. And the question is, why did some of them, like the Nenets, develop permanent northern cultures? Why didn't they just keep moving south?''
who is director of the ethnology section of the Ural Institute of History and Archeology
When the Smithsonian team came upon the summer camp in July all the able-bodied men were off with the herd. Women, children and elders lived without a radio or any other modern device. There were no modes of transportation other than the sleds, which are of little use in summer. Almost all the clothes were tailored by hand from reindeer skin.
Reindeer provide some of the answers. The Smithsonian team found no evidence of large, permanent year-round Nenet settlements in the northern Yamal. The northern Yamal peninsula has long been a perfect grazing site for reindeer and the Nenets have clearly followed their path for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
After possibly thousands of years of existence, the Nenets now face perhaps their greatest challenge: development of the enormous gas and oil fields on the Yamal peninsula has already done serious damage to reindeer grazing sites. Pollution in the Ob River has made fishing nearly impossible, even in its tributaries. Amoco says it can do its work without further disturbances of ritual sites or grazing grounds, but the development would fundamentally alter the peninsula.
``They'll survive,'' said Krupnik. ``In this region local fishermen have been saying the Nenets are doomed for at least a hundred years. But their nomadic life has made them be flexible. They're not going to disappear now.''
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SALEKHARD, Russia: the region.|
Fitzhugh, who is 51 and has spent the better part of his adult life studying the native people of Northeastern North America and Labrador, seemed like the perfect person for the job. His interest in how these people lived and migrated over thousands of years had led him to become increasingly curious about the connections between Arctic peoples.
But the group hopes to learn more next summer, when Sven Haakanson Jr., a native of Kodiak Island and a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard University will join the tribe as it begins its annual migration across the peninsula.
This month Fitzhugh and a small team returned here, 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, to finish reporting on their findings.
By discovering how the Nenets survived when so many other indigenous groups have succumbed to the rapid pace of modern life, and by seeking their origins and understanding their traditions, the researchers hope to understand the complicated cultural landscape of northern Siberia and how this culture maintains its traditions in the midst of industrialization.
That is what brought Fitzhugh and his group to Yamal in the first place. The Yamal peninsula sits atop one of the largest undeveloped troves of oil and gas in the world. In the 1920s, before Stalin banned all such research, the Russian anthropologist Valery Chernetsov found and excavated a 1,000-year-old site not far from here on the shores of the Ob. It contained thousands of walrus, polar bear and whale bones, but its significance has remained obscure.
It was clear, however, that the region had deep historical relevance when in 1989 the Amoco Eurasia Petroleum Co. began investigating the possibility of developing the fields with Nadym Gazprom, the Russian gas enterprise here. It would be a huge project and before entering into it Amoco decided to seek the advice of an expert on the anthropology of arctic life to find out more about the culture of the region.
by CNB