Dr David Anderson, University of Aberdeen
2005 award - major research project
£
42,075 for 18 months.
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The objective is to archive, digitize, and distribute a collection of approximately two thousand late 19th and early 20th century glass-plate negatives depicting indigenous peoples of the Siberian Arctic and Subarctic. This project builds upon previous pilot work in the region, and benefits from parallel funding from other international research foundations and councils.
The collections document the lives of several non-European nations at a date before their lives were transformed by Soviet collectivization. These early images are becoming increasingly important for Siberian indigenous peoples as they revitalise their cultures and defend their land rights in the face of post-Soviet oil development. The images also represent one of the best international collections representing circumpolar hunting peoples and are of great value to the international scholarly community.
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The negatives are housed in several public and local collections in Southern Siberia, but primarily the Krasnoiarsk Regional Museum. The collections face an imminent threat of degradation due to the poor storage conditions in the recent past. These materials are historically important, are in a fragile state, but can now be safely stored and copied if attention is directed to them quickly.
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The Krasnoiarsk Regional Museum has recently been provided with a new climate controlled store room and this project will enable local workers to move the material to the new store and for the material to be catalogued and digitised. Additional funding has also been secured from the Norwegian and Canadian Research Councils.
Find out more information on the project's website Picturing Central Siberia.
