ARCHAEOLOGICAL FORMS OF 'TURCIZATION' OF WESTERN SIBERIA'S POPULATION IN A HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Turcization is one of the key issues in the ethno-cultural history of Western Siberia's population in the early Middle Ages. A rather extensive body of literature is devoted to various aspects of it; however, no single universally accepted concept has been formed so far. Drawing upon written sources and archaeological materials, the article proposes a well-reasoned way of solving this issue. Southern components of culture presented in the 'North' are considered based on the specificities of development and possibility of (or a need for) such a retranslation on the part of state formations themselves, i.e. historical contexts of the 'South'. Turning to specific archaeological material, it should be said that very few archaeological sites are known which date back to the First Turkic Khanate, and this makes it even harder (except for some findings) to 'identify' them in Western Siberia. This is in line with the general vector of expansion by First Turkic Khanate rulers directed primarily at the West (to the Bosphorus) who apparently paid little attention to the population of areas further in the north. The Second Turkic Khanate period is marked by a much more intensive interaction with the south of Western Siberia: suffice it to recall the famous campaign of ancient Turks that went to Yenisei in 709-711 and then on to Northern Altai reaching the Irtysh River. However, this was a military campaign not explicitly related to either ethnic resettlement or exploration of new territories. About the same time, in Western Siberia burial sites with horses (although they were very rare) started to emerge along with quite a significant number of metal items of Turkic character which formally date back to the Katandinskiy stage in the culture of Altai-Tele Turkic people (VII to VIII centuries), according to the Altaic periodization. However, there are grounds to assume that they entered the territory of Western Siberia not at the time the Second Turkic Khanate flourished but after it had fallen, and Turks ousted toward Altai were forced to move further north. In all probability, this had to result in the formation in southern areas of Western Siberia of a specific 'bilingua', both linguistic and cultural, with local components prevailing, especially in traditional everyday culture. Apparently, processes of turcization started to the full only in the mid IX century when, after the fall of the Uyghur Khanate, on adjacent territories to the north of it there emerged one of the latest and most northern ancient Turkic ethno-social formations, i.e. a state of Kimak-Kypchaks with the centre on the Irtysh River. Within the Kimak-Kypchak Confederation (the Srostkinskaya culture, mid IX to the early XI centuries), a series of local variants of culture (these of northern Altai, Kemerovo, Novosibirsk) formed which were situated exactly on the territory of southern regions of Western Siberia. After the dissolution of the Kimak-Kypchak formation (in the 1030s), 'centrifugal' vectors of its constituent ethnic groups' resettlement took these southern elements further to the North. And the Basandai culture that followed (in the IX to the XIII centuries) adopted them genetically.