Chukotko-Kamchatkan

The Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples are the Chukchi, Koryak, Alyutor, Kerek and Itelmen of extreme northeastern Siberia and Kamchatka. They were hunter-gatherers and reindeer herders. The Chukchi were divided into Maritime Chukchi, who lived in settled coastal homes and hunted sea mammals, and Reindeer Chukchi, who followed their herds across the inland tundra. They had few formal rulers.

The Itelmen lived mainly along the Kamchatka River in villages of a few hundred people, each built around a single patriarchal household. After Russian Cossacks arrived in the seventeenth century, their villages shrank, and by the time Georg Steller described them in 1744 many held only forty or fifty people.