Melheim et al./Comparative Perspectives, 4. Yakut Food Producers Colonising Areas Occupied by Evenk Hunter-gatherers

Compared to the previous chapter, Ole Grøn addresses a much more recent and quite well-documented example of colonisation from Sakha/Yakutia in Russia, which can be conceived as expansion by a food-producing culture into an area already inhabited by hunter-gatherers, beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing until the present. Grøn argues that this process has involved cultural, ideological and linguistic aspects as well as changes in the relations between the ethnic groups and sub-groups in the different zones, and is not, therefore—as is often argued in prehistoric cases of ‘neolithisation’—first and foremost a question of ecological adaptation.