14: Message from Siberia

On his arrival in Glasgow, he was like one that had dropped from the clouds into a new world, whose language, habit, &, were in all respects new to him. Martin Martin c.1695, of an inhabitant of St Kilda.

Ethnography, an uncertain but intriguing study, offers a way of supplementing and interpreting the archaeological record by comparing known with unknown. The information about the archaic hunting culture of Scotland, brought together in the preceding pages, provides us with the sketchy outline of an ethnographic study of the Gaels. It can be compared with the information assembled by Leonid Zaliznyak (1997) relating to the forest hunters of the taiga region of Siberia: the Saams of the Kola peninsula, the Evenkians in the taiga of eastern Siberia, the Selkupians and Ketians of the Yenisei basin, and the Hantians and Mansians on the Ob river.1 Several of these names can be explained in terms of archaic G. seilg ‘hunt’, cath ‘hunt’, or *sam ‘to gather together, round up’.

Zaliznyak recognises, almost without discussion, that these tribes represent the survival of a Mesolithic way of life. In Siberia the natives all have a very similar way of life which ‘makes it possible to suppose that the main character of the traditional way of life of the taiga ethnographic hunters and fishermen was specific for the way of life of the Mesolithic forest hunters in Europe’.2 This is equally true of the Gaels. The only confusion in Scotland comes after the end of tribal life, with the piecemeal adoption of agriculture, but until the native culture of the Highlands collapsed it was focussed, as in the Mesolithic, on hunting. This study of the forest hunters of Siberia provides an independent source by which we can identify and assess the survival of Mesolithic features among the forest-hunters of Scotland. They both came from a comparable recently post-glacial Europe and settled at about the same time in lands with a similar pine-birch tree cover and a similar range of wild animals including red deer, elk, wild pig, aurochs, beaver, wolf, and bear.3 [What about Graham Clark? in Scandinavia] The comparison is strengthened by the fact that both societies pursued their traditional way of life without outside interference until recently and this allows us to recognise and ignore imported features.

There are evident differences in climate and cold adaptation between the taiga and the Scottish Highlands but cold adaptation is an archaic, even Palaeolithic trait. Scotland does not have an extreme continental climate which forces hunters to hunt for many months in deep snow but the weather in the uplands can nevertheless be ferocious in winter compared with the temperate maritime climate at sea-level. The Highlanders' adaptations to snow included a primitive snow-shoe out of deer hide and leggings bound around the legs, but deep snow lying for months in settled areas and sub-zero temperatures are not a regular problem in Scotland. On the West Coast snow is rare and in some favoured spots like Islay the grass may grow all through the winter.

In comparing two related cultures, the general rule of convergence and divergence applies. Any shared article or trait must either belong to their shared ancestral culture or it must have been invented or acquired independently in both places more recently. It appears that what made it possible for the forest hunters to penetrate the taiga was their invention of skis. Skis, were a specific local adaptation to winter hunting in deep snow and are not found in Scotland. They can therefore be removed from the comparison. However snow-shoes are a common feature and so were arguably used across Europe in the Palaeolithic. Oil lamps and trousers are found both in Siberia and Highland Scotland. The oil lamp in the form of a hollow stone equipped with a wick is a widespread and basic necessity which is found in many parts of northern Europe. It is a resistant object and we know from archaeological finds that it was already in use in the Palaeolithic but we can also deduce this from its later distribution. The history of trousers or snow-boots is more subject to fashion. It seems possible that various types of leg protection evolved independently in several places, since there is evidence among the taiga people for a proto-trouser phase when people improvised cold-weather protection in the form of separate shoes, leggings and drawers. The gaps between these separate garments were undesirable in sub-zero temperatures, and when they were sewn together in various combinations they gave rise to a variety of boots, shoes, leggings, trousers and drawers. In English a one-piece vest attached to drawers is still known as combinations.4 The trews of the Gael, like the breeches of the Gauls and the Germans, are perhaps a more recent fashion, but for their ultimate ancestry we may well have to look to Eurasia. This point could be argued, since there was evidently a need for similar garments in the sub-zero temperatures of Ice Age Europe but, as currently understood, trousers are a recent divergent invention.

An interesting point of comparison between Scotland and Siberia concerns hunting. Both the Gaels and the taiga tribes had a dual strategy which relied on deer-hunting and fishing. Cereals were added to both diets only recently, when cash became available, from kelp-burning and whisky-distilling in the case of the Gaels and from fur-trapping in the case of the taiga tribes. Both groups relied on bows and arrows, darts and spears. Both groups used similar and sometimes identical techniques when hunting deer. In Siberia they included surrounding, driving towards a line of hunters, penning by fire, driving over an escarpment or into water, catching in pits, netting, running down with dogs, and the use of snares.5 All of these are known in Scotland or can be deduced from Gaelic. The similarity of their attitude to fish is even more striking. All the recent hunting tribes in the taiga fished but, exactly as in Scotland, fishing was a low-status activity which only became acceptable when stocks of deer and elk declined or when people were unable to hunt for some other reason. The Evenkians, like the Gaels, turned to fishing ‘unwillingly and only in case of need’. Fishing played no part in their calendar or their older traditions.6 We can therefore trace this taste or prejudice, almost amounting to a taboo, to the meat-eaters of the Upper Palaeolithic.

The similarities continue. Both cultures used wrap-over outer garments made of skins, if we admit the woven plaid as a substitute for an earlier skin garment. They both used skin shoes, sledges, light boats sewn with tendons or roots, dug-out canoes, and back-packs or purses. Both occupied a communally-owned territory but did not settle at a single location within it. Both lived in temporary homes, putting up light conical frame-tents in summer and more substantial huts in winter. They returned in a seasonal cycle to the same locations. In the taiga meat was cooked in wooden vessels filled with water which was heated by adding hot stones. The Gaels had an even more archaic method of seething meat in the skin of the animal, using red-hot stones, which is not reported from Siberia. In the taiga meat was cooked only for a short time, with no added salt or seasoning and the broth was also consumed. Blood was saved and added to the soup.7 Boiled meat, broth and blood were also consumed in Scotland, and still are in the form of Scots broth and black pudding. A taiga hunter benighted far from home would wrap himself up in the flayed hide of the deer or elk he had killed and sleep directly on the snow.8 To sleep wrapped in the freshly-flayed hide of a bull is reported from Gaelic Scotland but is said to be an aid to divination. Since the arrival of sheep, the woven plaid, soaked in water to make it impermeable, replaced the hide still warm from the animal. Gathering produces insignificant quantities of food in both Scotland and Siberia, since both areas are too far north, R.B. Lee, ‘What hunters do for a living, or how to make out on scarce resources’, in Man the Hunter, Chicago 1968, 30-49. He fixes the significant latitude at 50°. but both the Gaels and the taiga hunters ate quantities of berries and nuts in their season. Both were unreasonably suspicious of mushrooms.9

Zaliznyak has traced many of these features into the forest zone of North America and believes they are also compatible with the Mesolithic archaeology of the Polessye region of the Ukraine and neighbouring parts of Europe. The shared features must be older than the Mesolithic, since they are common to several peoples who are now very widely separated and whose last contact with each other was in the Palaeolithic, before migration into their present territories. We may assume that shared features survived in Gaelic Scotland and in the eastern forests because both were settled by Palaeolithic hunters at the end of the last glaciation.

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