Global InformationKurumchi culture information
| Preceded by the Pleistocene |
| Holocene Epoch |
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ICS stages/ages (official)
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Blytt–Sernander stages/ages
*Relative to year 2000 (b2k). †Relative to year 1950 (BP/Before "Present"). |
The Kurumchi culture or the "Kurumchi blacksmiths" (Russian: Курумчинские кузнецы) was the earliest Iron Age archaeological culture of Baikalia as proposed by Bernhard Petri.[1][2] He also speculated that they were the progenitors of the Sakha people, a claim that didn't go unchallenged by his contemporaries. Petri assumed that the Kurumchi left Baikalia for the Middle Lena due to pressure from the ancestors of the Buryats.[3]
Alexey Okladnikov was a student of Petri who expanded scholarship on the Kurumchi. He connected them to the Kurykans, a people mentioned in Chinese historical sources. Kurumchi society was conceived as analogous to the Yenisei Kyrgyz,[4] being composed of "simple people and the aristocrats."[5]
Starting in the 1990s scholars have begun to challenge the claims made by Petri and Okladnikov. Bair Dashibalov concluded that Petri's findings come from a wide chronological period ranging from the 9th-14th centuries C.E.[6]
- ^ Petri 1923a.
- ^ Petri 1928a, pp. 57–59.
- ^ Petri 1923a, pp. 62–64.
- ^ Okladnikov 1976, p. 33.
- ^ Okladnikov 1970, pp. 313–317.
- ^ Dashibalov 1994, pp. 20–25.