Until the mid-1990s the overwhelming majority of publications about the Palaeolithic of north-east Asia were available only in Russian. Now, thanks to Richard Bland's and Yaroslav Kuzmin's selfless translation and editing of four decades of work by Vitaly Kashin, the anglophone world has available a significant repository of major Upper Palaeolithic sites representative of the vastness of the area. Kashin (1946–2010), a Yakutia-based academic, contributed over four decades of research into the stratigraphy and prehistory of Siberia. This monograph summarises not only his significant contribution to this north-eastern connector between Old and New Worlds but of four other scholars who have made the most significant contributions to the development of archaeology in north-east Asia. The background to over half a century of development is colourful and beset with professional rivalries (as with the west): according to Kuzmin's personal observations, one of the great four researchers—Kashin's boss Yuri Mochanov—“had only two kinds of relationships with other scholars: love and hate, nothing much inbetween” (p. vi). Despite this, Kashin's book joins all of the other important books on the Palaeolithic of the region that are now available in English, completing a full anglophone set, brought up to date by the translators’ provision of a useful set of references which bring the book's research focus (1940–1980) up to date.
This is important, as the region is vast: some 3000km from the Yenisei River in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, and nearly 2000km from Lake Baikal and the Amur River to the south up to the Arctic Ocean. In fact, until even as late as the mid-twentieth century, it was widely held that the first human occupation of the region occurred during the Neolithic. Enough Palaeolithic sites were known from Siberia by the early 1980s (Kashin map 67) to allow a tentative sequence of cultural complexes to be described and explanations for their appearance and nature produced, which have by and large survived the test of time. The historical development of this record covered in the first chapter is fascinating, commencing in the 1870s and 1880s with the recognition of stone tools in association with mammoth remains at the famous sites of Kostenki and Gontsy (now Ukraine). From these came the still-current ‘mammoth question’—whether mammoths were the prey of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. This was followed by a widely held notion that Siberia was the ‘cradle of humanity’ and source of a western-diffusing Palaeolithic culture that ultimately moved into Europe. Despite this, northeast Asian Palaeolithic sites failed to materialise until after the Russian revolution, when developing capitalist interest in the region brought scientific expeditions that were not hindered by the Siberian archaeological authorities, leading to an explosion of archaeological and palaeontological discoveries. After the Second World War, Palaeolithic research in northeast Asia began in earnest, alongside geochronology, and out of this a Quaternary framework emerged. Institutions began to appear from the 1940s, taking us into the chronological realm of Kashin's book.
The Palaeolithic emerged initially along the terraces of the Lena River, and later those of the Yenisei and Angara rivers. Regional cultural schemes were developed during the 1960s when research expanded to the Aldan River in the region's centre and to the Kamchatka Peninsula to its east. At this time the question as to whether the Palaeolithic records of north-east Asia and the Americas were linked or distinct emerged; of course, we now know that the former provided the major source of human population for the latter. Much of the book details regional cultural sequences based on lithics, which came together during the 1970s as a result of the application of radiocarbon dating, palynology, terrace formation studies and other approaches to the region's Quaternary. Several sites established human presence by 30 000 BP and records running down to the end of the Pleistocene. Out of this the famous Dyuktai culture emerged among others such as the Sumnagin and Ushki, even if the problem of the origin of the Dyuktai is complex and unresolved. The fate of the Sumnagin and Late Ushki cultures is equally debated, with some researchers seeing them as ancestral to proto-Eskimos and proto-Aleuts. Their importance to modern investigations into the genetic and behavioural origins of American populations is obvious.
The book The Palaeolithic of Northeast Asia is a welcome diffusion of knowledge; in part a very useful survey of the Upper Palaeolithic of the northeastern vastness of Eurasia, as well as a detailed survey of its regional Palaeolithic cultural record. Its focus on lithics is a product of its time, but amidst the line drawings of lithics lies much weighty, useful and still current information vital to the understanding of human dispersals across—and beyond—the entire continent. Drawing from Kashin's meticulous research, Bland and Kuzmin have done us a great service.
