University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada 18 April 1997

Anthropologists to dig Siberian soil

By Lee Elliott

It'll be summer in Siberia for half a dozen U of A students, thanks to an agreement between the University of Alberta and Irkutsk State University, Russia.

Two representatives of the Russian university were on campus last week to sign an agreement allowing the U of A to set up an anthropology field station at Lake Baikal, about 300 km east of Irkutsk. The area contains a Neolithic site containing about 60 graves dated to between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago.

"We are hoping the material will help to answer a question about the so-called bio-discontinuity in the area," says Dr. Andrzej Weber, director of the dig. "This type of break in human presence lasted about 800 to 1,000 years. . . at approximately 5 BC."

"We're hoping to find who these people were, where they came from, their culture and how they differed from the culture before," he says. He suspects the people they will be studying were physically different from the previous inhabitants of the region. They seem to be of a Europoid genetic mixture, he says. "But we don't know exactly what kind and where they came from."

There's no likelihood of finding living relatives in the region, he says. People who live there today arrived substantially later during the huge displacement of people in the Mongolian rule of Genghis Khan.

Only small samples of material will be shipped to Canada for analysis and then returned to Russia. The Canadians will have full access to the material, however.

The advantage for Irkutsk State University is that they get to run a large scale excavation. "There is very little funding there for archeology," says Weber. "They will also have better access to the materials than we will."

Weber travelled extensively through the Lake Baikal area last summer to assess several important sites. He received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in the spring. It was only half of what he had applied for, so he chose a site where the graves were visible on the surface and more accessible.

The group leaves June 16 and includes Dr. David Link of the U of A and Dr. Anne Katzenberg of the U of C, four U of A undergraduates and two graduate students. Two U of C students, two from the University of Northern British Columbia and one from the University of Victoria will also participate.

After a flight to Novosibirsk, Russia through Frankfurt, Germany, the group will travel 36 hours on Trans-Siberian Rail, take a seven-hour ferry trip and "a one-hour bumpy ride in a truck to the site."

They will be joined in the six-week dig by Dr. Olga Goriunova of Irkutsk State University and 10 to 15 Russian students.

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