Abstract

The Bolshoi or Big Tundra is bordered west by the White Sea, north by the Kara Sea, east by the northern Urals and south by the east-west flowing lower Pechora River. Here, biologists have mapped four reindeer migration routes leading to one calving ground on the White and three on the Kara Sea. The Kara Sea calving grounds are on the Ugor Peninsula, a low Ural extension leading to Novaya Zemlya. Its two eastern calving grounds and migration routes are of archaeological interest because of dozens of archaeological sites and their proximity to the Vorkuta airport and railhead. Both routes run north from the Pechora, the western route following the Rogobaya River upstream where it crosses to the headwaters of the Korotaika. Partly descending the Korotaika it crosses to a tributary of the Kara River which enters Baidaratskaya Bay of the Kara Sea. The eastern route parallels the Usa Valley and crosses to another Kara tributary. The archaeological sites have many Neolithic, Mesolithic and Bronze Age tools, plus artifacts of the current Nentsy Samoyed reindeer herders who have lived here for a thousand years. In the summer of 1994 the tool and art styles and trade goods of the Nensty and their predecessors will be compared to quantify the type and amount of past human contact between the western and eastern routes.