page_title: Baikal Archaeology Project
section_title: Project history
hierarchical_section_title: Baikal Archaeology Project / Project history
caption_attribution_description: English: Photographs of excavation profiles
context_page_description: The Baikal Archaeology Project is an international team of scholars investigating Middle Holocene hunter-gatherers of the Lake Baikal region of Siberia, Russia. The Project focuses on long-term patterns of culture change in the context of dynamic interactions with the environment. The Baikal Archaeology Project is based at the University of Alberta with Irkutsk State University being its main research partner on the Russian side. Other institutional collaborators of the project have included the University of Calgary, University of Saskatchewan, Grant MacEwan University, British Columbia Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, University of California-Davis, Cambridge University, Oxford University, University College London, University of Aberdeen, and Institutes of Geochemistry and Earth’s Crust, Russian Academy of Sciences in Irkutsk and Irkutsk State Technical University in Russia. The Baikal Archaeology Project has been extensively funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
context_section_description: Archaeological research of the Lake Baikal region’s Middle Holocene hunter-gatherers began during the second half of the 19th century and was followed by a long period of intensive research conducted during the Soviet period by researchers such as Alexei Pavlovich Okladnikov. The Baikal Archaeology Project was formed in the mid-1990s during the time of profound political, social, and economic changes in Russia. Since then, the Baikal Archaeology Project launched an extensive multidisciplinary investigation of Middle Holocene hunter-gatherers of the Baikal region. The research model involves both original fieldwork and the application of modern laboratory techniques to previously as well as recently excavated collections of archaeological materials. Much of this work is facilitated by the presence of prehistoric cemeteries with well-preserved human remains – an unusual hunter-gatherer characteristic from a global perspective. Employing many advanced research methods and the integration of diverse lines of evidence generated by mortuary archaeology, zooarchaeology, radiocarbon dating, human osteology, isotope geochemistry, ancient and modern DNA research, ethnoarchaeology, and paleoclimatic and environmental studies, the project aims to achieve an improved understanding of the cultural complexity, variability, and dynamics of the long-term culture change among past boreal foragers in the Baikal region.
caption: Excavation stratigraphic profiles
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