ARCTIC The Discovery of the Koryaks and Their Perception of the World

• Main Author: Anne-victoire Charrin
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anadyr; Anadyr’; Arctic; Okhotsk; Anadyr'; Kamchatka; Koryaks
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.559.6027; http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/arctic37-4-441.pdf

The first information that we have about the Koryaks was reported in 1669 by Sosnovskij, the administrator of the small fortified town of Okhotsk, who had heard of them from the Tunguzian people. The first true ethnographic data were gathered only in 1700, when Atlasov (1935 [ 1891)], who had left the fortified town of Anadyr in 1697 to explore new ter-ritory, discovered Kamchatka and collected interesting infor-mation about the population of that peninsula, in particular the Koryaks. This was the beginning of a long period of exposure. Without doubt, it was the “second Kamchatka expedition” (1733-1746) that supplied the most useful elements for the study of this region and its population. Valuable ethnographic material was assembled by one of the expedition members, Kraieninnikov, who was at the time still a student but later became the remarkable scholar of whom we know today. He